Friday 3rd October, 2014

Not feeling very well today sorry to say.  I am a bit of a hypochondriac truth be told, but I have dragged myself out of my pit to scribble this round up of a fairly non eventful week for you.  So if I havn’t already lost you, how about this for a double dose of ridiculousness.  

 

A couple of weeks ago I bumped into a friend who has received these hapless Friday missives of mine for over 10 years now poor thing.  “At last” he told me, with a degree of smugness whilst at the same time managing to flatter me with faint praise,  “I have an even more ludicrous story about one of my children than you normally come up with about yours”.  I was all ears.  It was indeed an excellent one involving his son rowing down a river with an air-rifle using a water melon floating ahead of him for target practice and suddenly finding himself the target of various police marksmen dangling from a helicopter which appeared above him.  It has a happy ending.  They missed.  No I made that bit up.  Police arrived on the bank of the river, took temporary custody of the rifle and had a gentle word in the ear for my friend’s son before returning said rifle into the hands of his 13 year old sister back at their home.  Even allowing for the slightly lame conclusion I have to say I was pretty impressed and ( I was talking about my competitive streak just last week wasn’t I) I thought to myself this would indeed take some beating.

 

But then I caught up with Hen earlier this week.  As ever with Hen, you may recall the story about the stray ferret which appeared on her bedroom floor in the middle of the night, her insouciance is almost as remarkable as the events that happen to her. I hadn’t had much communication with her for a while partially because she had lost her phone for a week.

 

“Oh yes…forgot to tell you…..a slightly whacky story Dadda” she said.  I grimaced and braced myself.  

 

She is currently living in New Cross which is apparently a district in South-East London.  She has discovered a special feature of the otherwise mundane house in which she rents a room.  She found a way up onto the roof where for several weeks now, in between photography jobs and working in a café, she has been able to while away the hours enjoying our Indian Summer doodling and doing art work and with a terrific and relatively tranquil view across the roofs of the city.  See attached photo.  So there she sat, the other day, thus engaged when she was irritated to be disturbed by a police helicopter that appeared and hovered directly above her.  She would have stayed and watched developments, but at about the same time it started raining so she quickly packed her things up and went back down to her room.  Aware that the helicopter was still in situ she out the window to see at least four police patrol cars and an ambulance gathered on the A2 in front of the house, lights flashing and the traffic at a grinding halt.  Just another day in  New Cross she thought until, to her surprise, she realised one of the policeman was pointing directly at her; “locked on” was how she described it.  Moments later there was a pounding at her front door and five “enormous” policemen barged in demanding to know why she had been on the roof and, somewhat bizarrely, why she had come down.  Er…it started to rain.  Enough already.  You’ve got it.  Someone had phoned emergency services assuming that being on the roof could only mean she was going to jump off.  Nice of them to care but what is it with all these helicopters?? And why can’t I have a normal daughter?!

 

Talking of normal, Bob was home last weekend.  Tally – 6 grey squirrels.  Prince Charles would be proud of him.

 

Friday 26th September, 2014

On Tuesday, armed with a copy of a Scottish classic, “Whisky Galore”, along with some research on Samsung Electro-Mechanics, to read on the flight, I made my first trip to Edinburgh since the Referendum and I don’t mind telling you I got quite misty eyed and patriotic flying in, looking down at the sun shining on Leith and thinking thank goodness for that.  That evening I was treated to dinner by a friend in the New Club.  Not many Yes banners left fluttering around in that fine institution.  It was the most terrific treat, though I’m not sure I will be invited back.  Perhaps it was my heightened emotional state, but more likely two quick stiff gin and tonics on an empty stomach, that persuaded me to sing a song from Gilbert & Sullivan opera in the main drawing room before dinner.  You what, you might well ask.  Moderately long story. 

 

Whilst my host had popped away, getting the second of the aforementioned gins, an old gentleman befriended me.  He had wandered into the room, spotted me on my own; commented on the wonderful view of the Castle and then sat down beside me for a bit of a natter.   Shortly afterwards we were re-joined by my friend who,  I couldn’t help noticing, left me to do most of the talking, which was possibly because he handles his drink better than me.  Mind you, we had a surprising amount in common, the old gentleman and I.  He had certainly voted No which I would have done if I’d had one.  He had played rugby against Clifton Hall, my old prep school.  He had gone to Glenalmond, albeit Wardens, rather than my house, Skrines.  He knew how to pronounce Kilconquhar.  He loved St Andrews.  His hearing wasn’t great, and at one point it became obvious he had forgotten we had left the 1990’s.  You could certainly say he and I hit it off. 

 

He did bang on a bit about on about his war time experiences which lost me for a while.  No soldier me.  I managed even to avoid the CCF at school.  But then he told us that he had been stationed on the border of India and Afghanistan where, 75 years ago, in between active and varied service which included helping an Afghan lady to give birth, he had learnt how to write a particular word ( shame on me, I can’t recall which word it was, but that shouldn’t wreck a decent story ) in Pashto.  Unsolicited, because I had no cause to question him, he whipped a notepad from his pocket and demonstrated his skill with a dextrous and complicated series of strokes.  Now I may not strike you as a competitive sort, but there occasions when I find myself not wanting to be outdone.  “Well” said I, “ Forty years ago I played the part of Captain Corcoran in a school production of HMS Pinafore and to this day I can remember practically every word of it.”  Perhaps I have an untrustworthy face, I don’t know, but he barely allowed me to pause for breath.  “Sing us a song then” said my new best friend.  And even in my slightly inebriated state I could immediately tell he was earnest. 

 

It wasn’t the finest rendition of “I am the Captain of the Pinafore” I have ever given, but I wouldn’t mind betting it was the best yet heard in the New Club drawing room.  And once order had been restored we said goodbye to the elderly man - it only dawned on me afterwards that he must have been about 95 years old and I never got his name, but I hope I will see him again – and adjourned to the dining room for some smoked salmon, grouse and an excellent bottle of Chateau Franc Mayne 2001.  May the Socialist Republic of Scotland never see the light of day.

 

Friday 19th September, 2014

It was never in doubt was it?…..if you strip out the Socialist Republics of Glasgow and Dundee then the vote was a compelling 57% against independence.  And I am pretty sure that still only 30% of the population seriously wants independence.  In other words 15% of the Yes block was really a protest against Westminster.  Fair enough really.  I must admit though I had a moment of doubt last week when listening to the World Service on the radio.  So intense was the debate about the impending breakup of the Union that the BBC, or at least the hapless team of the Newsday programme, felt the need to interview a gentleman in Pakistan who was very worried about the possible impact of Scottish independence and ensuing uncertainty over the currency on his kilt and bagpipe business.  Gods honest truth.   I heard at 5.15am on the car radio as I drove to the station.  At that point I decided to try and do my bit in support of the Union and Pakistani industry especially given I did not even have a vote to cast.  Hence the following email exchange with a lady in charge of advertising at Scottish TV.

 

 

From: David Sandison [mailto:david@bovills.com]

Sent: 12 September 2014 18:04

To: Pamela Richardson

Subject: Enquiry

Dear Pamela,

Slightly strange enquiry this but I hope you can help me. If I wanted to buy a 30 second one off slot on STV to air a personal advertisement how much would it cost and is there an available slot before the vote next week. 

I am a Scot living in England who feels strongly that he wants to be involved albeit at this late stage in the referendum discussion. I want to get people in England so many of whom, whether Scottish by ancestry or not, strongly hope that Scotland will remain part of the United Kingdom to club together and by attracting sufficient numbers raise the money to pay for this slot which will feature a simple but heartfelt message and show people in Scotland how much we care about this issue. 

I hope you will accept the sincerity of this request and look forward to hearing back from you.

Kind regards,

David Sandison.

 

 

On 16 Sep 2014, at 11:24, "Pamela Richardson" <Pamela.Richardson@stv.tv> wrote:

 

Hi David

 

Thanks for your email.

 

Unfortunately we are not permitted to carry political advertising messages.

 

Regards

 

Pam

 

From: David Sandison [mailto:david@bovills.com] 
Sent: 16 September 2014 11:58
To: Pamela Richardson
Subject: Re: Enquiry

Ah. Oh well. That puts pay to that idea!  Thank you very much indeed for getting back to me though Pam and all the best.

From: "Pamela Richardson" <Pamela.Richardson@stv.tv>
Date: 16 September 2014 12:07:42 BST
To: "David Sandison" <david@bovills.com>
Subject: RE: Enquiry

David

I love your passion and it’s a shame we can’t do it.

Thanks for your good wishes and we all wait with anticipation to see what Thursday brings us.

Pam  

 

I forwarded the conversation to my mother in Fife, by way of a show of moral support.  She had got quite down by the whole Referendum affair, but hadn’t lost her sense of humour clearly.

 

From: Isabel Sandison <isabelsandison@talktalk.net>
Date: 16 September 2014 15:43:46 BST
To: David Sandison <david@bovills.com>
Subject: Re: Enquiry

I'm a little concerned by her first sentence !!!!!

Isabel Sandison

from my iPad

 

Talking about Union, I mean the Union, Bob rang the other day with the exciting news – can’t actually describe how exciting this was for his parents - that he had met a really nice girl in his Photography class at school.  She was “nice” apparently, because “she’s got a gorgeous Irish accent”.  Whatever works.  I managed to resist the temptation for several days to ask him how things were progressing with his new friend but in the end succumbed.  “Ah, disappointing” he said, “it turns out she’s actually Scottish”.

 

Enough about Scotland.  Time to move on to more important matters.  The R&A has voted overwhelmingly to allow women members and in anticipation of that I asked Lottie to nip over to Royal Worlington with me last weekend.  Actually I needed her to walk the dog, but anyway the real point of the story is she looked on bewildered as I furiously celebrated a succession of stunning drives, crisp irons and razor like putts finishing one under par after a 5 hole loop which conveniently brought us back to the clubhouse where we adjourned for a celebratory J2O and a pint of IPA.  I’m back!

 

Friday 12th September, 2014

Too much cruddy stuff going on around the world to be anywhere close to inspired.  Transfixed by the Pistorious trial I seem to be the only person around here who thinks the judge did the right thing whilst still fully expecting Oscar to get 15 years.   Meantime the big event next week is up North and a vote on the 19^th….the R&A deciding on whether to allow female members.  Oh and that other thing that’s going on.  Just as I’ve avoided mention of the iPhone 6 all week so I have managed to keep UK politics out of this for the longest time but I can resist no more.  I thought I would repeat an old story I relayed in November 2004. I wrote:

 

An investment opportunity for you. The Socialist Republic of Vietnam . I heard a great story from an old friend of mine who went along to a presentation for the Vietnam Enterprise Investments Limited fund. Funnily enough I was an initial investor in this very vehicle waaaaay back in 1995 so the story has had a long gestation period. Launched at £1 it seemed a very good story at the time, but slumped to 70p during the Asian crisis, only saved from even harsher treatment by the problem the managers had had in finding ways to invest the issue proceeds. Anyway, the Finance Minister of Vietnam was at this presentation and made a very convincing and articulate speech about vibrant economic growth prospects, the dynamism of the Vietnamese people, the development of the Stock Market and free market enterprise in general. Afterwards the floor was opened up to questions and my friend complimented the Minister on a wonderfully convincing presentation, but asked him if he ever felt saddled by the legacy of his country's name. Would they not find their story easier to sell if they changed the country’s name from The Socialist Republic of Vietnam to something a little more market orientated? 
Quick as a flash came the response. " Thank you for your question. Earlier this week I was in Scotland...Edinburgh...and I visited the fine investment institutions in that beautiful city ( Pause for a moment....I'm not making this up by the way ). Many people I met there, though, were not very complimentary about the English, actually it seems to me they do not like England very much at all. And yet you insist in calling your country the United Kingdom. "

 

How he must be laughing now.   This Referendum is a sorry affair and reflects poorly on us all.  I’m Scottish, and would vote No if I had a vote, but I’m embarrassed to be British.

 

Friday 5th September, 2014

“Find a penny; pick it up and all day long you’ll have good luck”.  This is a maxim which, remarkably, worked once when I was walking through Edinburgh, a place where a stray penny on the street is a rare sight indeed.  I was just musing on whether I would be fortunate enough in the St. Andrews Old Course Ballot to be allocated a tee time for the following day when I spotted a little bronze coin and managed to swoop down to collect it just before an old lady got there.  Kerching.   Moments later I struck gold in the shape of a 9.00am tee off.  Perfect.  So this morning when I boarded the 5.36amtrain from Whittlesford Parkway and saw not just one, but two penny pieces on the carriage floor I pocketed them gleefully.  I decided I would head off and buy a lottery ticket.  Within seconds however my euphoric state was doused.  Throbbing out from my Blackberry screen was an email from a disgruntled client in HK for whom I had arranged a visit to a Chinese company involved in the agri-sector.

 

Morning David

I turned up nice and promptly on the 18th floor of the Harbour Centre at 0910 this morning. I could see I was at the right office as the reception desk had a little ornament of a cow on it. However the office was locked and in darkness. I rang the bell at 0915 but no one seemed to be in at all. After several more attempts I called the contact phone number and could hear it ringing out inside, but still no sign of life. At 0930 I gave up.

 

So that was a great start to my day as well as his.  

 

I have had a run of bad luck actually.  Many many years ago I went on a very expensive and logistically unbelievably complicated trip to shoot duck in Manchuria.  There were five of us red-necks and we were there for a week.  In total we shot 6 duck which worked out at something like £1,500 per bird.  Two weeks ago, as you may recall me telling you, my son and I went on a similarly challenging northern journey this time to the Arctic Circle to fish for brown trout and char, camping on a wind-swept spot above a lake and in the foothills of Kebnekaise, Sweden’s highest mountain.  Now I’m the first to admit I am no fisherman.  I went armed with my daughter Lottie’s rod, a box of Monte Cristo No 4’s, a bottle of Talisker Dark Storm and a good book.  But we were assured the place was teeming with fish so I fancied my chances.  Bob is keen as mustard of course as is Sophie’s Swedish cousin Henrik who was with us for this adventure, all 6ft 8ins of him.  No sooner had the helicopter dropped us off in the wilderness and we erected our tent than they were away, thrashing the rivers and lakes for all it was worth.  Meantime I wandered 50 yards to the water and had a few cursory casts before the absence of instant gratification and quite a serious tangle made the option of a glass of whisky and collecting wood for our fire much the preferable choice of activity.  They returned four hours  later by which time I had a great blaze raging, all ready for some brown trout stuffed with herbs and salt on which to sizzle.  Sad to say they had not even come close to catching a fish.  That was Wednesday.  It was the same story on Thursday and on Friday.  Nada.  Not a sausage.  Bob saw an Arctic char at one point, but it was ill and swimming round in circles on its last legs so to speak.  He fished and fished manfully and in between sessions stalked reindeer ( with his camera ), but our luck was out.  The fish just didn’t want to know.  It was a beautiful spot though.  Oh, all right, here’s a picture for you.  And late on Saturday, our last full day, we ( yes……I contributed ) caught five brown trout between us and they were totally delicious so all’s well that ends well.

 

And here am I bemoaning my luck but come to think of it the reason I wasn’t here last Friday was I was up in Fife for the Big Stick, our annual family golf competition.  Yes folks.  I only went and won it again.  That’s not luck really though is it?

 

Friday 8th August, 2014

So as someone famously once said, appropriately enough given my circumstances, "I may be away for some time."  But hopefully just a couple of weeks rather than a lifetime.

I am off to the Arctic Circle to share a tent with that crazy maniac of a boy - my son.  We will be dumped in the middle of nowhere by a helicopter which, with a bit of luck, will return five days later to take what’s left of me back to Kiruna. 

The idea in the intervening period is that Bob will have taught me how to survive in the wild and to fish.  Hopefully I might even have caught a couple of brown trout though with my luck I doubt it.  More likely the only thing that will be bitten at the end of my rod is yours truly by swarms of mozzies although I have stocked up big time with Avon Skin So Soft and a dozen Montecristo No. 4’s for good measure.  Sorry.  That sounds a bit flash.  I wouldn’t have bought them if I had known what was going to happen to my Porsche this week.  It has blown up big time and I don’t even want to say how much the garage bill is. I was so shocked that I took the opportunity of a meeting with my Japanese boss to ask him for a pay-rise.  I kid you not.  That got predictably short-shrift treatment.  His response was pretty blunt.  “Go and buy a Toyota.”

 

Oh well.  Easy come easy go.  I’m out of here and forget reading research on the train home this evening at least.  I’ll be learning the words of a famous Swedish drinking song “Heylan Gor”.  Have a good one.

 

Friday 1st August, 2014

So your 16 year old son announces in the middle of this week that he’s a bit bored.  Yup.  My reaction would be the same as yours I suspect.  Get a life Bob.  There’s a fantastic Test Match on the telly.  This didn’t wash with him however.  Pleading boredom was simply a tactic to improve the odds of getting our approval for a hairbrained plan he had hatched.  That cunning ploy aside it was clearly hastily conceived and you might even say a touch reckless. He wanted to head off to the coast on the train, with his dog of course, to indulge his favourite passion, an extended bout of fishing followed by a night out in the open.  His first choice of destination had been Woodbridge, but on closer investigation he found that he would need a boat to access any decent water there.  After more research he selected Sheringham, just up the coat from Cromer, as his destination.  Google Maps revealed Oak Wood on the western outskirts of the town where he imagined he would spend the night having built a fire and dined on roasted sea-bass freshly pulled out of the sea from his vantage point on the stony beach below the cliffs of the North Norfolk Coastal Walk.

 

I’m not a totally irresponsible parent.  Let me assure you, I thought it was crazy too.  I tried to talk him out of it altogether; or to  go just for the day;  and then finally, pitifully, at least leave the dog at home.  He was not for compromising however and so, even without the comfort of the Life 360 App which, coincidentally, had caught my eye in a Bloomberg article earlier that day and copy below, I gave him the grudging thumbs up.  

 

IPhone-Ready Apps Mean Teens Tracked Without Calling Home: Tech
2014-07-30 04:01:00.6 GMT
By Olga Kharif
July 30 (Bloomberg) -- Becca Ludlum knows better than to
expect her teen son, Michael, to call home as he skateboards
from the mall to the park to friends’ homes on long summer days.
Ludlum instead relies on a downloadable smartphone
application called Life360 that uses satellite signals to follow
the kid’s comings and goings.
“If he’s late to dinner, I can check where he is,” said
Ludlum, a 36-year-old blogger from Tucson, Arizona. “He is not
going to call me every time he gets somewhere -- he gets
embarrassed.”
As teens in growing numbers adopt smartphones with global
positioning system technology, they’re easier to keep tabs on
using mobile apps like Life360. 

 

I must sneak one of these little beauties onto Bob’s phone sharpish.  Mind you give him his due, he answered his phone half an hour later when I rang him again – in the faint hope that he might have had cold feet and called the whole thing off.  He was slightly out of breath and told me he was running the two miles to the station trying to catch a train to his first stop Norwich. I took a deep breath of my own and re-crossed my fingers. 

 

Happy to say, all’s well that ends well.  We heard from him a couple of times that evening.  Once when he had discovered a sandy cliff face swarming with nesting birds and he wanted us to help him identify them.  For the twitchers amongst you they were sand-martins.  Later to tell us that he and Weasel had been for a swim in the North Sea and had decided to sleep out in the open on the beach.  He was a very happy lad with seemingly not a care in the world.  And yesterday morning as I made my way down to Wentworth - just wanted to drop that one in and I can tell you about my stupendous 7 iron over the water to secure victory on the famous 18^thhole of the West Course if you care – I spoke to him again.  He was on his way home after another swim and a breakfast of Heinz baked beans.  Somewhat bizarrely he whatsapped me a photo of them being heated up.  “What about all the sea-bass you were going to catch Bob” I asked?    “That’s a sad story Dad” he said.  “I didn’t actually do any fishing.  I left my rod on the carriage rushing between trains in Norwich”.