The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Treating car parks as cash cows is wrong
Sir, – On a recent business trip to Perth I was surprised to find in these difficult times the council still have parking charges in place.
On returning to my car, I had a frustrating time paying for the time I had spent at the South Inch as the machine would not accept £1 coins.
On speaking to the helpline I was directed to one of the others on the site, to no avail.
Perth used to be a lovely town to visit, but if the council keeps using car parks as a cash cow there will be nothing left except their Swanky Towers in Tay Street.
Ian Robertson.
Station Road, Crook of Devon.
“The son of a minister of Longforgan Parish Church, named for his father who served at Longforgan Parish, helped to advance the Free Church in Australia,” emails Donald Abbott of Invergowrie.
“He was Adam Cairns Jr. His father was the Rev Adam Cairns, who lived from 1757 until 1851, and, before serving at Longforgan, had served as minister at Lundie and Fowlis Parish. He lies buried in the kirkyard of Longforgan.
“His son, also Adam, born in 1802 in Longforgan, had been homeschooled in ancient and modern languages by his father in the manse of Longforgan and was later inducted at Manor Parish near Peebles.
“He served as a Church of Scotland minister at Dunbog, near Cupar, from 1833, and then ministered at Cupar itself. He went out at the Disruption of 1843 and became the first Free Church minister of Cupar. His Free kirk in Cupar serves today as Cupar Baptist Church.
“Adam Jr married Janet or Jessie Ballinghall at Ayton, Abdie, Fife, and they had one son and five daughters.
“Having been awarded with a Doctorate of Divinity by the University of St Andrews, he was inducted in 1853 to Chalmers Free Church in Melbourne, Australia. This son of Longforgan went on to have a great influence over the development of Presbyterianism in Australia, being the first principal of the Theological Hall in Melbourne in 1866.
“He celebrated his jubilee in 1878 and died in 1881, having served for 27 years in
Australia. He returned to Scotland twice, in 1865 and 1876, to plead for more Free Church ministers/missionaries to serve in Australia.
“On a personal note, given that Invergowrie Parish Church is partly descended from its mother church in Longforgan, the people of the eastern Carse should be very proud of the good works
undertaken by the father and son, both named Adam Cairns. This piece just might awaken interest in those fine men and their ministerial attributes.”
Jumped the gun
Further to James Smith’s item in Friday’s column about flowers at the graveside of his relatives, he has come back to say: “I definitely jumped the gun in making contact to try to solve the mystery.
“I should really have thought that relations in Alyth, to their great credit, might just have been maintaining the flowers all these years.
“The good news is that I was on the right track to find the answer because I now also know that they read the Craigie column regularly. Anyway, thanks for being there and for many of the interesting snippets you print and memories you revive.”
Most-mentioned mums
Mothering Sunday was yesterday and, just for fun, the online card company thortful has released an “on-screen mums” list, using social listening data to discover the fictional mothers who were the most mentioned on social media across the last 12 months.
The most popular were: Mary Poppins (Mary Poppins), Shirley Bennet (Community), Morticia Addams (Addams Family), Moira Rose (Schitts Creek),
Michonne (Walking Dead), Miranda Bailey (Grey’s Anatomy), Cersei Lannister (Game Of Thrones), Molly Weasley (Harry Potter), Cookie Lyon (Empire) and Lorelai Gilmore (Gilmore Girls).
Mary Poppins has been crowned the top on-screen mum. While not a mother in the traditional sense, she’s a strong maternal figure and practically perfect in every way!
A rogue addition to the list is Cersei Lannister (Game Of Thrones) who comes in 7 th place. She’s probably one of the most divisive on-screen mums, yet despite her villainy, she was dedicated to her children – not that it helped any of them too much!
The full list can be viewed at thortful.com/ blog/the-ultimate-ranking-of-on-screenmums/
Sense of occasion
“Now that we are allowed to meet up with a friend out of doors,” says a regular reader, “I have been trying to think of ways to make the most of that time.
“Obviously, in Scotland, the weather plays a huge part in what we are able to do, but it would be nice to make the most of the opportunity. I have planned a picnic with one friend – complete with basket, flasks of soup and filled rolls. Another friend is hoping to organise an afternoon tea with her sister to feature dainty sandwiches and cakes.
“Any more suggestions?”
Episode 76
All the way along the meandering coast road to Keill, Daisy wonders what kind of difference she can possibly make, what is it that is worrying Mrs Cameron so much? After all, Cal’s a grown man, a significant part of his parents’ antique and fine art business, with talents of his own. William Galbraith is very successful as an artist, but surely that means that he can do without his son. And surely that would suit Cal.
He seems to be a gifted dealer with the knack of finding a bargain, but he’s also a clever restorer. If the worst-case scenario involves closing the Glasgow shop – and she can see that Fiona might be finding it a bit of a trial, having to work with the appalling Annabel – then surely she could retire from the shop and do her own thing: research or teaching.
Cal could set up his own business, buy and sell online, do restoration and upcycling in Argyll, sell in Glasgow and Edinburgh and further afield. It wouldn’t be the end of the world. But it’s really none of her business, is it?
“What am I like?” she asks Hector, who is on the floor beside her. Everything is easier when there’s a lot of cash floating about, she thinks, and has to remind herself that, if she sells Auchenblae, there will be quite a lot of cash floating about in her life as well.
Wild flowers
In Keill, she leaves the dog in the car with the window open and drops off several bin bags full of clothes and bric-a-brac to delighted charity shop volunteers, and asks the way to the church of St Columba and the adjacent cemetery. When she tells them whose grave she’s looking for, she can see that they’re curious, but politeness prevents them from enquiring too closely.
“It’s my grandmother,” she says, taking pity on them. Now they will be able to place her. They obviously know all about Auchenblae and Viola and everything that has gone before. They direct her to a narrow road at the back of the village.
“Follow the signs to the distillery,” they say, which amuses her, but the distillery is apparently a couple of miles beyond the church. She has picked a bunch of wild flowers from the garden and she takes them out of the back of the car.
The headstone is easy to find, because the charity shop ladies have described it to her, one of those ostentatious Victorian affairs, with Viola’s name the last one on it: Viola Neilson, born in 1920 to Hugh Neilson and Lily Galbraith. Lily’s surname startles her. Could her great-grandmother have been related to Cal’s family in some way?
But Galbraith is a common enough island name and, like the McNeills, there would have been plenty of them. There are other names on the stone: Hugh’s parents, Alexander and Mary Neilson, who both seem to have lived well into old age in the 1950s, with Mary outliving Alexander. Hugh Neilson “fought for his country” but the year of his death is 1921 at the age of 30, not long after his daughter, Viola, was born.
Granite headstone
There is no date of death given for Lily on this ornate stone, but glancing to one side, she sees a plain granite headstone, very much smaller than the Neilson edifice: “Sacred to the memory of Lily Galbraith, beloved daughter of Islay and Iain, who passed away on December 24 1930. Sweet flower transplanted to a clime where never comes the blight of time.”
How odd, she thinks. This separation. She senses a story here. Were Lily and Hugh engaged to be married? Had the war intervened? Had Hugh been injured, but not too badly to father a child? Presumably, after his death, Viola had been brought up by her mother and her Neilson grandparents, who had assumed guardianship after Lily herself died.
She notes that after Lily’s death, Viola had clearly remained at Auchenblae, rather than being brought up by her other grandparents, Islay and Iain Galbraith. She thinks, with a little frisson, of her father saying: “Viola would have wanted you, and back then she might have got you.”
The Neilson family had clearly been wealthy and powerful. The Galbraiths, possibly tenants, would have fallen in with their wishes. That was the world into which Viola would have been born.
Then she notices that, already almost obliterated by yellow crotal, the name Jessica May Neilson has been carved into the big stone between Mary and Viola Neilson. Jessica May: “Sadly missed, never forgotten” without any date at all.
How could she?
How could Viola ignore Jessica’s marriage? It occurs to her that for a long time, Viola couldn’t have known where her daughter had gone, and had probably found out about her early death only long after the event. Her father had been so worried about Viola claiming custody that he had kept everything as quiet as possible.
Answers to questions
There had been no newspaper intimations, only a small mention in one or two of the folk magazines; but Viola wouldn’t even have been aware of those. And back then, social media hadn’t got going. It would have been good to have got to know her grandmother.
Good to have found out more about her mother and her Neilson forebears, about Hugh and Lily. And why Lily Galbraith, who outlived her husband by only 10 years, was buried in a separate grave. It occurs to her that perhaps the answers to some of these questions might lie in Auchenblae. There must be papers somewhere: letters, birth and death certificates perhaps. She’ll have to hunt for them.
There’s an empty stone vase with a metal flower holder, misshapen with age, fitted into it, at the foot of the larger grave. Nothing for Lily. She has brought a plastic bottle from the car. She finds a tap, fills the vase with water and arranges the flowers, but she makes up a separate posy and puts it on Lily’s grave.
There’s a church, lower down the hill, dedicated to St Columba, with a stainedglass window of the saint, standing up precariously in a small boat with an island behind him. It makes her think of the islet, Eilean a Cleirich, she can just see from the upstairs windows at Auchenblae.
Cal told her that one of Columba’s monks built a cell there and spent his time praying for the souls of the islanders who converted to Christianity. There’s an ancient graveyard there, too, where the old lairds and their ladies were traditionally buried.
How odd, she thinks. This separation. She senses a story here. Were Lily and Hugh engaged to be married?