Ten years of Leaving Dundee

     My vanity led me to writing this entry today, the tenth anniversary of my first blog entry to Leaving Dundee. When I started writing it my fancy may have been that it would be a considered, and weighty, anthology of  recollections and reflections of my life and thought. It has not turned out like that. It is not by any definition erudite or scholarly. It is a ragbag of scatterbrained passion, polemic and prolix, but what has amazed and gratified me is that people read it. I don't mean that people in their thousands and thousands follow Leaving Dundee but somewhere between 50 and 100 folk visit the sight on most days and some even make comments.

    Popular entries have been tales of my boyhood and school life in Dundee. Others which have been read are those of the fate of a Dundee FC supporter. My political outbursts sometime cause a stir and a number of the illustrations have created amusement and been admired. Tales of family members through the generations are pored over as are recollections of my life after leaving Dundee. 

   An entry I particularly like because it involves so many people from the Totnes community is A Load of Old Bull: the Tale of a Totnes Inn. This was written after The Bull closed in October 2017. Happy news it was when it re-opened in December 2019, only to shut its doors again in March 2020 because of the coronavirus pandemic. Anyway, I know I may be interrupting my flow, but the hot news I have for you is that the Bull Inn is re-opening to serve meals tonight!

     Returning to the blog some people have said they quite like the"poetic"doggerel  I write, but rather than discuss this further I thought I'd tell you something peculiar. The Leaving Dundee blog consists of about 50,000 words. One of those words, and it is used only once, is "Hitler." The piece containing this word is, I think, mildly amusing, but it's no great shakes, and yet it is by far

the most visited entry. Now tell me what that means?

     Finally let me say I have been fortunate in my close family and my wider family, as I have been with my friends, none of these people are perfect but they are all good people.They inhabit these pages.

    I was unwell recently and my young granddaughter painted a get well card for me. She entitled her painting - seen below - Sunset, Rough Seas and a Boat with a Flag. That'll do for me.