A brief survey of happier days. I’m an honest man who believes in hard grind for fair reward. Evidently, we are a dying breed – thanks to greed merchants and unscrupulous individuals. Mr Murdoch and I have much in common, it seems. We are both Newspapermen to the core, our own Newcastle Mercury predating the Thunderer by some fifty years! We live and die by the pen, and by results – tough, but fair minded and compassionate where loyalty is key.
Mary Savage was Brigid’s mother, a lovely lady. We got on well. Brigid was my first, and probably last, love. Childhood years together in Dar es Salaam, East Africa. Together again in Newfoundland after my divorce and her separation – six gifted children, four of mine and two of hers, but unhappy marriages.
For dissenters or stitch up merchants, we have no patience. Thunderers both and common heritages it seems with Scotland, the Highlands and Lowlands and Skye thrown in! Exile and exclusion is in our blood, and hugely proud of it we are; a branch, post Culloden, Aikenhead and Dupont, were accomplished Apothecaries in Cork, Daunt’s Square, during the French Revolution with their neutral standing ensuring that both Edinburgh and London reaped the vital benefit medical science needed from Paris and rewarding our family lines globally since, and particularly in the USA and Canada.
My father’s war service and our predecessors in the Great War was distinguished as was my mother’s in the ATS and her brother’s in the RAF and their own history in Australia, where steadfast service to King, Queen and Country was fundamental too, with quietness and resolve but blessed with many gifts, not least a sense of humour! I won’t be bought either for any number of pieces of silver!
Meditationes Sacrae ipsa scientia potestas est (knowledge itself is power) by Sir Francis Bacon 1597
Alastair Brett was kindness personified supporting me in all ten London Marathons I ran for St Joseph’s Hospice, Hackney and Mary Aikenhead’s nuns, between 2000 and my last in 2010. Ditto Christopher Riches, ex Editorial Director, Reference, Harper Collins.
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