Duncan Harley

I t’s a funny old life. Many more years ago than I care to remember I considered an army career. The lure of the uniform and an escape from a post-WW2 factory job in a Lanarkshire light-bulb factory was at the back of it. An interview in Edinburgh followed - all expenses paid as I recall. A sad relic of the battles in Korea, replete with coloured gongs and khaki trousers sat behind a desk and asked various questions. “Would I be prepared to undergo basic training at Sandhurst? … did I have a relative who had served in the desert who might vouch for me … did I have backbone? Would I like a Sam Browne.” Well, the answer to most of those questions was a resounding maybe. And I returned to my light-bulb career for a brief period before taking up knitting for a hobby. I only say this since, and I know that I have harped on about this sort of exploitation of writers before, the library @ the Gordon Highlander Museum recently asked me for £60 per day to research within their h...

I went past the Bass today, just to check if the Pictish Stones were back you understand. The sign on the gate advised that they would indeed be back in place alongside the Mary Eerie-Orie gravestone by late spring 2018 following much needed restoration and digital scanning. It is now late summer and the twice buried Mary lies quite alone in her grave. I wrote about Mary in glowing terms in my A-Z of Curious Aberdeenshire book. The unfortunate serial spouse was once buried alive after being mistakenly pronounced dead following a short illness. The story is told in many versions. In one, her distraught second husband rescues her when he hears her desperate cries for help coming from the freshly filled grave. In another version of the tale, the gravedigger spies a gold ring on the corpse’s finger. He tries and fails to remove it by hand and finally resorts to cutting off the unfortunate corpse’s finger with his knife at which point the ‘deceased’ wakes up howling in pain. Anyw...