Haphazard recollections of life in Edinburgh

As memories recede further into the past, is it distance lending enchantment that leads me to believe our Edinburgh years were the highest pinnacle of Wendy's and my lives? Objectively it simply isn't true. We two and our children have achieved far more in all important respects since coming to live in Ottawa than would ever have been possible had we stayed in Scotland even for a year or two longer. The retrospectoscope casts a rosy glow of unreality over the life we lived in those years, but there is no denying how wonderful and how happy they were for us all. Wendy and I developed strong bonds of friendship with families in our neighbourhood and among my professional colleagues and their families. We explored Edinburgh, the Scottish Borders, East Lothian, Peebles, Fife, Perth, Galloway, quite thoroughly, Ayr, Clydeside and the west of Scotland somewhat.  Our exploration stopped short of the Highlands and Islands, but no doubt that gap would have been closed had we stayed on. David developed a taste for rock climbing and mountaineering in Canada that he would have assuaged as well in the Highlands as in the Rockies. In Edinburgh we discovered Valvona and Crolla's superb delicatessen almost as soon as I found James Thin's and a dozen other splendid book shops, and intimate acquaintance with the good places to buy stuff in Bruntsfield, Leith Walk and elsewhere all over the city rapidly followed. Glowing praises of many charms and attractions are scattered throughout Wendy's diaries. Rebecca's education moved up several notches when she started attending George Watson's Ladies College and acquired a solid grounding in languages and liberal arts. David was set to follow in her footsteps to one of the Merchant Company boys' schools if we had remained in Edinburgh for another year or more. Goodness knows how, but we'd have found the money some way or other. David grew from a small boy to an adventurous pre-teen, who greeted me glowing with pride one day when I came home, with the news, great to him, frightening to Wendy and me, that he had ridden his bike all the way out to Turnhouse (Edinburgh Airport) and back. He was about 8 or 9 at the time, and Turnhouse was 12 Km from where we lived, with very heavy traffic on the road..Early in 1968 I took Jonathan to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary Division of Investigative Cardiology where cardiac catheter studies disclosed the true nature of his heart disease. This led to a flurry of activity for me and my friends in the Division as we considered possible places where surgical repair could safely be done.

R & D at Lands End

 Rebecca feeding swans at Stratford upon Avon

Family in Trafalgar Square



We had wonderful camping holidays in England and in Europe, driving our beloved VW camper van to Harwich, the ferry to Holland, along the autobahn beside the Rhine and across the Alps to a sandy beach near Venice. Each time we stopped often in picturesque and friendly camp grounds where our kids played with a polyglot mixture of other kids their age, and Wendy and I practiced our French, German and Italian. On our English expeditions we explored York, Stratford on Avon, Oxford, Cambridge, the West Country and London

Beside the Lagoon, Venice

Wendy, Rebecca, Jonathan in a gondola, Venice 1969

At top of Grossglockner HochAlpenstrasse, 1969










The photos don't do justice to our wide ranging travels and experiences but hint at bits of it. For instance, one evening in July 1969 we were camped in Bavaria, and like just about everyone within several hundred meters, crowded around a luxury camper from Germany, who had his TV tuned to watch the first American astronauts land on the moon. We actually heard "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind" as it was said for the first time.

Maybe I'll say something about my work in Edinburgh in the next post on this blog.

As a footnote to this post, Ottawa broke previous weather records by wide margins on three successive days this week, with temperatures in the middle and high 20s, more than 10 C above previous records. The climate change deniers were quick to say it was just a freak, proves nothing and anyway it was snowing in western Canada. What they overlook is the frequency of such events. Hardly a week goes by without a new record being set somewhere in the world, usually record high temperature or record rainfall, sometimes both, and record high winds as well. Another footnote: I had a good look at the space station yesterday. It was the brightest object in the sky, sparkling and glittering as the sun caught it, its shape and brightness changing moment to moment as it tumbled across the northwest sky about half way between the horizon and the zenith. I hope more of the crew's observations of weather will soon be made public.