Here we go again - the start of a new life in the North East of Scotland, an area that I'd holidayed in with Mum & Dad when I was young, and also later with the Scouts, but otherwise I didn't know all that much about it - and it was certainly alien country to Jo - and the kids obviously.
My memories of the area were of family holidays in Stonehaven and going to Duthie Park, then later on, camping with the Scouts at what I believe was Templars Park on the South Deeside Road - http://www.templarspark.org.uk/, from where we used to catch the bus in to Aberdeen and walk down to the Beach.
First of all, however, we had to find ourselves a new home, and, for a while, I would have to commute to my new job - driving up to Aberdeen early on Monday morning and returning on Friday afternoon. I took delivery of my new company car - a sky blue Ford Sierra - not as upmarket as the Rover, but I think Jo found it more acceptable - she never liked the ultra light steering on the Rover, nor the sick feeling in the back caused by the softer suspension.
I quite enjoyed the drive up and down to/from Aberdeen every week, but, in those days, there were only short stretches of road that were dualled - and you had to go through an assortment of small towns from Dundee onwards - Forfar, Laurencekirk, Stonehaven etc., none of which were bypassed until later in the decade. All of this added about an hour to the present journey time, even although there were less cars on the road then.
Initially, I stayed at a hotel on Union St. - near Belmont St. It was OK, but I found it noisy at nights. Aberdeen's oil boom meant there were a lot of offshore workers who were either on their way to the rigs or on their way back home and were just stopping overnight somewhere, and it seemed the nightlife in the city was pretty hectic.
I moved to what was then called the Malacca Hotel in Great Western Road (now the Mariner). It was owned by a colourful local character called Gavin Gray and his wife. He was apparently a solicitor - who may subsequently have been struck off - and he was certainly a boozer, holding court nightly in the hotel bar. I quickly learned to avoid getting embroiled here, but at least I could get a decent night's sleep in the relative quiet of the West End.
It's maybe difficult to appreciate 30 years on, but, if you were a football fan - and I was - Aberdeen was the place to be in the 1980's. Our move to the North East came just a few months too late for me to actually make it to Gothenburg for the European Cup Winners' Cup Final in May, 1983, when Aberdeen beat the might of Real Madrid to take the trophy, but they were definitely amongst the best teams - if not the best - in Europe at the time. Watching on TV, I had thrilled to their exploits under the management of a young (now Sir) Alex Ferguson, but now I was actually going to be living locally and I could go and watch this terrific team play.
Saturday matches were out for the first few months as I was commuting back to Balerno, but there were plenty of midweek matches I could attend, including some great European nights. I was there for the second leg of the European Super Cup Final against Hamburg on 20th December, 1983, which Aberdeen won 2-0 and could thus unofficially call themselves the best team in Europe.
Seeing this final was some compensation at least for having missed out on an exotic trip to Gothenburg a few months before I joined Clipper Seafoods. I found out that Dr. Clark had taken his management team on a "business" trip to Sweden in May, chartering a plane to do so, and with tickets for the European Cup Winners' Cup Final to boot! Wish I'd joined them earlier.
My Dad's elder brother Alex had recently retired to Scotland after working in USA for many years:
He was an Aberdeen supporter and had always had some empathy with the North East, even leaving home as a young lad to join the Gordon Highlanders. I suspect it was from him that I'd always had a bit of a soft spot for Aberdeen - the football team at least. When Alex found out that I was moving up to Aberdeen, he asked me to get him tickets for the big matches - in those days, demand was so high, tickets were hard to get - especially if you lived down on the West Coast - and I was happy to do that, and I went along to a number of matches with him for a few years.
Alex would travel up by train and stay overnight in a hotel and, even when we finally moved in to our house in Banchory, he refused to stay with us, preferring his own company in a hotel room in the city. He was always friendly and open, but had lived alone too many years and wasn't going to change his ways now.
Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself again. My three months' of commuting to Aberdeen could mean a bit of a lonely life at times, but it did at least give me time to scour the area and house hunt. Clipper's factory was on North Esplanade East, virtually on the Dee in the harbour area to the south of the city. When I finished work each day, I would drive round the different city areas and eventually the outlying Aberdeenshire towns, trying to suss out where best to stay.
It seemed to me that house prices in the city might be beyond our budget, especially if we wanted 4 bedrooms to accommodate our growing family, so although I looked at individual properties in the city, soon I was exploring further out.
I experimented with driving times at rush hours and quickly concluded that north of the city just wouldn't work for us. It took too long to get through the traffic from the harbour to the north of the city before you could really start driving. Ironically, north of the city - say, the Ellon area - would have been a far better bet for me in the long term, given the locations of our factories in more recent years. Of course, I didn't know that then - I was only thinking of where I worked at that time - I didn't foresee the subsequent changes and acquisitions.
Instinctively, just as we had done when we moved to London and Edinburgh, our preferred location was on the side of the city that was the nearest to the West of Scotland, where the rest of our family still was. Stonehaven was the number one preference, but we weren't really aware of the effects of high pressure haars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haar_(fog)) in summer - despite having seen a bit of this when we lived in the Edinburgh area. In any event, we couldn't find any suitable property in Stonehaven at the time.
Once I had selected a few potential houses that we might buy, Jo and the family came up to view. We looked seriously at property in Newtonhill (boom town, said Jo), Westhill (mmm) and finally Banchory. The 6 town houses in Arbor Court were complete structurally but only two (I think) were occupied - one of them occupied by the Duncan family who were effectively acting as selling agents.
Forbes Duncan's father had been the main retailer in Banchory, occupying the furniture store that is now Taylor's of Banchory, and he had decided to expand in to house construction with this development in the grounds of the Tor-na-Coille Hotel. The venture was the final nail in his business coffin and he went bankrupt - reportedly one of the largest ever individual bankruptcies in the country.
Anyway, we liked the town and the location seemed good, and the house was big enough for the six of us and was (just) within our price range. They were being offered at a fixed price of £60,000 at the time, which was attractive to us as most properties under the Scottish system were going for a lot more than their "offers over" advertised price.
Arnlee Property of Westhill took over the completion of the houses internally - we bought just in time to tailor the kitchen and the fireplace.
Having discovered Banchory was a fairly easy journey to and from work along the pretty and quiet South Deeside Road, and having decided to buy the house in Arbor Court, I changed hotels for the last week of the my 3 month commute and moved in to the Tor-na-Coille Hotel. On discovering that there was a thriving squash club at the back of the hotel, and that they also served real ale (Devanha, a fledgling micro-brewery based in Alford), I was kicking myself for not finding this little oasis sooner. It would have been perfect for me - and I would have made friends and kept a little fitter over that autumn/winter.
Rewinding a little, there was, of course, the small matter of Ross' baptism and we wanted to do this in Currie before we moved up to Aberdeen:
My abiding memory of my 3 month commute to Aberdeen is coming home to Balerno on Friday evening. It was normally not long after 7 pm when I got home, and, not having seen any of them all week, I was expecting perhaps a nice welcome home greeting - but I was sadly mistaken. The A Team (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_A_Team) was on TV then and they were all transfixed. None of them even turned round - and, if I tried to speak, I was soon told to keep quiet. I'm not sure I've ever really forgiven Jo for this.
I had to adopt alternative, diversionary tactics - although they weren't entirely successful. I haven't previously mentioned that we had a wonderful canteen at Clipper Seafoods and we would get served 3 course meals in the boardroom every day - not quite up to the haute cuisine standards that I'd had when I was at Buchanan's in London, but excellent local fare - and some terrific stodgy puddings, like Eve's Sponge, custard and ice cream etc. I would also get served tea and biscuits regularly during the day, and, on a Friday afternoon, knowing I was going back home to a gaggle of kids, the canteen manageress used to stock me up with supplies of chocolate biscuits to take home with me. This was to be my bait - but the little fish were a bit slow in biting. Only when the A Team was finished would they give me any attention and even that was very brief - it was over as soon as they had their chocolate fixes.
We managed to sell our house in Balerno OK - I think we got £45,000 for it - so now we were ready for the big move north over the school Christmas/New Year holidays.
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