The reason we'd been given a three bedroom house was that the mines in the area were closing in 1958 and when we'd settled down and I had been a junior official in the mine for a year we had a good look at things. My wife agreed it was time we moved and I went to the Stirling area and another house in a village. This time the house was at the end of a block with the bedrooms upstairs. The stairway was papered in black wall paper and that had to be changed, followed by each room in turn. The neighbours were kind and helped and we soon made friends. I was allowed to go to play badminton one evening a week with my neighbour on condition that the ladies had a night out at the cinema themselves while we baby sat. The new spring blossom in the picture reminds me of my wife, bright without being garish, delicate without being brittle yet full of life.

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New experiences

Experience in New Communities - All of this Cordon Blue entertainment was new to me and the village but my wife took to it like gin to tonic. In some ways it meant we were different and added to the way many of the locals felt towards me with my university degree. It seems ludicrous that we were able to live comfortably on a salary- I was paid monthly - of £635 a year and dreamed of getting the £1000 a year when my training was over. That £1000 a year came just as our first child, a girl, was born in the cottage hospital and triggered a flood of visitors. Our friend over the back had a girl about the same time and baby sitters were needed when the mining officials (we were both working at the same mine) got together for a dinner dance about ten miles away. Not a hop, a proper dinner dance with long elegant dresses and black tie, waltzes, quicksteps, tangos and the odd eightsome reel. But this was the early sixties and the mines were closing.

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My wife's father died when she was sixteen and his place had been taken by an uncle. Her uncle had visited the village regularly on a bicycle when he was a lad and had visited at least once a year when he grew up and had a car, which was why my wife had visited in the first place. It meant we had a string of visitors, who expected to be fed as if they were staying at the Buchanan Arms hotel. It also meant we were supplied with roasts and joints and the odd bottle of whiskey in case we could not afford that level of luxury. It also meant my new wife had to cook according to the culinary standards she had been taught at her Cordon Blue course at Glasgow's Domestic Science College. We didn't realise it but, in our own way, each of us was being prepared for the nomadic life of senior management in the mining industry and the writing of the Oakhaven stories.

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When we moved into the house, the girls my wife had kept company with in her visits to the village during her school years had all gone, one was an air hostess, another a teacher somewhere else and others finding jobs where they could. A dying mining village like the fictional Cairndhu may have an idyllic setting but it has no work opportunities. Fortunately, an old friend from university had moved into a house across the back gardens and the girls became friends. Neither had been in the village over Hogmanay and when it came New Year's Eve, they were introduced to a different culture. We had a party until after the bells but the friends who had been with us until then slipped off to visit and first foot here and there and were replaced by people even I hardly knew but had seen the light on, met departing friends, and decided it would be nice to welcome the new bride with a dram. About three in the morning, exhaustion set in and we put out the light as the last visitor stumbled down the steep stairs

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I thought I must establish on what authority I can write about someone joining a new community. My wife was the real expert, people were forced to meet me at work. Before we were married, the small mines around the village I was brought up in were closing and there were empty houses. As she knew the village well, in fact, despite living in Glasgow, her family had enjoyed connections with it for three generations and she was happy to settle there. The house we were offered was one of four flats in a block, two upstairs, two at ground level, clad with steel and insulated with glass fibre. It had three bedrooms, a front lounge, a kitchen and bathroom. I think there was a clothes boiler of some sort in the kitchen but it was taken away before we moved in. Our family didn't employ workmen  so we tackled the redecorating ourselves. The only part we didn't redecorate was the high stair. In those days, even the painter used flour and water paste to wallpaper and to get it off, all one did was to splash plenty of water on it, wait ten minutes and scrape it off in big chunks.  The papering was inspected by cousins and uncles, to make sure it was straight and the patterns matched. They needn't have bothered, if it hadn't, my fiancee would have made me do it again but that was her introduction to the family.

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I've been suffering with the cold and couldn't raise the energy to do more than boil an egg and I'm going to divert for a moment to announce that Bees in my Bonnet has been published on Amazon as both paperback and ebook. The first story could have been set in Oakhaven so the diversion is not unjustified. The stories were in my files but it's been hard work to get them into shape for publishing and I now know what they mean when they say editing and proofing are the hard part of writing.

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