Rainy day musings

Lush countryside around Auchterhouse

Really heavy rain yesterday morning prevented all activity in the garden, but we were going out in any case to a family occasion in Derbyshire so I would not have had time.

I have been researching my family history over the course of the last six months or so, a subject you perhaps tend to get more interested in as you get older. Specifically, I have been delving into the background of my mother. She was a very private person and only mentioned it once or twice, so I thought it was time I cracked the mystery.

One of things I know for definite is that she was born at 10 Glebe Street, Dundee, a holy grail address for fans of the Broons cartoon characters. They have lived at this tenement since first appearing in print in the Sunday Post in 1936 and I am now the proud owner of Ma Broon's Cookbook, the inside of which contains an illustration of a postcard addressed to the Broons at 10 Glebe Street, Dundee. I am now officially Oor Andy.

The other thing I know is that my mother's mother, the maternal grandmother I never knew, was the daughter of a ploughman. He and his family moved around farms in the Dundee area from the 1880s onwards and I had the pleasure of visiting Auchterhouse, one of the villages where they lived, during a visit to Scotland earlier this year.

Quite what Charles Stewart Christie would have made of my puny efforts in the garden, I will never know. But I like to think there is something in the genes.