Before that, however, was the small matter of my 50th birthday. I liked what Colin and Jack had done the year before on the occasion of their half centuries, so I arranged more of the same - Crathes Hall, Urban Myths, real ale, but a different dress code. Apart from relatives, neighbours and a few business colleagues, a lot of the guests I was inviting I had got to know through my various sporting interests, so I asked them to dress accordingly - in squash, golf, football - or all three - gear.
I thought the evening went well and I enjoyed it and I could only hope the other guests did too. One slightly surprise attendee was Angus Sinclair, the skipper of the large Pelagic Fishing Vessel, Orcades Viking III, that I did some work with and had got to know reasonably well - but I didn't expect him to travel all the way down from Orkney to attend, even although I had sent him an invite. He brought me a large bottle of 25 year old Malt Whisky from Orkney - very nice.
Johanne Kilgour - Colin's wife - penned a nice poem for me:
Wasn't that nice? She's got me sussed alright! You'll note the reference in the second verse to the silver Merc - yes, the old black "hearse" had now gone and had been replaced by the same make and model, but this time in silver and a saloon, rather than an estate car. I even had a personalised number plate - R100 ANS. I tried to get (any letter) 1 ANS but it wasn't available, so this was the nearest I could get. Dawn thought phonetically it sounded like Our Ian's!
Looking back, Johanne's reference in verse 5 to my dodgy knees proved to be accurate.
Ross sat his Standard Grades - or whatever they called them then - I still think of them as "O" Levels - but he also got the opportunity to go to Israel with the school:
Fast forward to summer and our American holiday, which was to be an epic multi-centre journey. We flew in to Washington and immediately made a major tactical error. I got chatting to our cabbie on the way to our hotel - the very fancy JW Marriott on Pennsylvania Avenue, just a hop, skip and a jump from the famous residents in No.1 - the White House. I asked the taxi driver if it was safe to walk about the city centre and he said yes, but, "don't go east of the Capitol after dark" - words that we should have followed to the letter.
Star Wars Episode 1: The Phantom Menace had just been released and both Jo and Ross wanted to see it, so, in the evening, we headed off to the cinema, which was located in busy Union Station, just east of the Capitol buildings. What we hadn't figured out was that, by the time the film was finished, it would be dark and all the thousands of commuters who had been milling around the area when we went in, would be home, safe and sound. We came out to a large, empty, open square. There wasn't even a taxi to be seen, so we started to walk across the square. I spotted somebody in the distance to our left and immediately sensed something was wrong, so I told Jo and Ross to change the direction of walk away from this figure - and speed up!
As this figure got nearer, I could see he had something under his arm, but couldn't quite make out what it was, but it looked threatening. By good fortune, a taxi then zoomed in to the square and we immediately jumped in it and took off for our hotel. I looked round at the figure, who was still approaching where we'd been, and I could now make out what it was he had under his arm - it was a pair of garden shears! As he watched us speed off, he took the shears out from under his arm and took them in both hands and made large cutting gestures towards us, as if he was cutting a hedge - aggressively! A shiver went down my spine - what a lucky escape. Lesson learned - always heed warnings from the locals.
The rest of our brief stay in Washington was a lot less stressful - we did the full tourist thing - the Smithsonian, Arlington Cemetery, Vietnam Memorial etc - although we didn't join the queue to enter the White House - time was limited and we felt it would be better spent doing other things that didn't involve queuing, like going to the Lincoln Memorial:
We did see the Presidential helicopter come and go, but we weren't sure whether Bill Clinton was in it either time.
Washington was just a stopping-off point anyway on our way, through Richmond to our time-share in Williamsburg, Virginia. Fascinating place - a whole town that's virtually a historical Colonial theme park, with the inhabitants playing the part of 18th Century revolutionaries etc. The accents - apparently authentic for the times - were fascinating, with the Plymouth/West Country burr prominent. A fairly typical daily scene would be:
In the evenings, visually we were fascinated by the swarms of fireflies that came out around our accommodation, and aurally by the noise of what we initially assumed were crickets, but turned out to be swarms of Cicadas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cicada). Here's Ross on the decking:
We travelled round the Colonial hotspots in Virginia - including the Jamestown Settlement, where there was a statue of Pocahontas:
Jo had always wanted to do the Colonial thing and even a historical dumbkopf like me found it fascinating. It's always interesting to hear the other side of the "argument". We'd been taught certain things at school and you tend to accept them, but when you hear it from the other side, you see a different slant on things. The "truth", if there's such a thing, is probably half way between the two.
That wasn't the end of our American discovery that year - next stop was New Orleans. Europeans put the emphasis on New, but the locals skirt over the first word of their city and it ends up sounding something like N'Orlins. Our experience in Washington meant that we listened intently when we were given the spiel from the owner of our upmarket historical timeshare building in the French Quarter. He was very proud of his building and his city. He took us up to the rooftop and showed us the sights and also took us on a tour of the building. There were two huge internal doors, which he said were the largest in the city. After all this, we were scared to put a cup down anywhere.
Fortunately, we also had another timeshare that week, just down the road - Hotel de la Monnaie, where Ross stayed:
This property was situated close to the railroad and it could be quite noisy occasionally, but Ross liked having the freedom of his own place for a while. The place we stayed in had a courtyard pool - allegedly the largest pool in the French Quarter - it was still tiny, but I guess space is at a premium:
You'll notice that Lucy has suddenly appeared - she flew over from Redding to spend most of the week with us. She didn't want to wait until we arrived in California to break the sad news about her and Derek breaking up. It had been a difficult time for them after moving to USA, with only Lucy able to work officially.
On a happier note, we all enjoyed New Orleans, although the humidity was incredible. Walking out of our accommodation was like walking in to a shower. Jo's hair used to explode in to a mass of curls. The food and music were great too - we especially enjoyed queuing up at the Cafe du Monde at the corner of Ducatur St for a jazz brunch, with the house speciality being:
Beignets
Beignets were also brought to Louisiana by the Acadians. These were fried fritters, sometimes filled with fruit. Today, the beignet is a square piece of dough, fried and covered with powdered sugar. They are served in orders of three.
Bubba Gump was good fun too:
We had been advised by our landlord that the French Quarter was safe to walk in day and night, and if you drew a sightly wider circle, this was a safe area during daylight, but, beyond this, it was a no-go area for tourists. Despite this, he encouraged us to witness the locals in action, dancing to Zydeco music, so, one night, we caught a taxi to a bowling rink, of all places and witnessed the most wonderful evening of music and brilliant, exotic dancing:
We went on the Natchez paddle steamer and also dined at Copelands, a local New Orleans restaurant that was hoping to expand internationally, and the Clark family, back in Aberdeen, had been considering investing in:
Finally it was time to head over to the West Coast and a slightly awkward week with Lucy and Derek in Redding. We made the most of it, however - I recall us having a fun meal at the new Logans restaurant, where the floor was covered in discarded monkey nut shells - something it has in common with the bar at the famous Raffles Hotel in Singapore, as we were to discover many years later. I also recall Lucy taking us up Mount Lassen, where there are sulphur springs bubbling away:
We went to the coastal giant Redwoods forests. One of the ancient old trees had become a tourist drive-through attraction:
On our way back to SFO for our flight home, we drove down the coastal route, but we hadn't booked any accommodation, thinking we would easily pick up a hotel on the coast for just one night before our flight. Panic set in when we found out everywhere was fully booked, but a hotel receptionist took pity on us at Buckhorn Cove, Mendocino County and said they did have an old lodge that wasn't being used. We jumped at it - it could have been rubbish as long as it had beds for us, but it transpired to be really good, if a little quirky inside:
It was another tearful flight home, particularly given the circumstances.
Our niece Julie (Hanson-Whaley), Brian and Mary's daughter, was working for Cancer Research and she was organising a major fund-raising event to be held in Aberdeen, called the Relay for Life. Our Veterans' Football Group was still going strong and I thought I would enlist the support of the others to participate in this worthy cause - all the more relevant because Brian Fitzpatrick's wife Agnes was in the final stages of her ultimately unsuccessful fight against cancer.
We got our t-shirts and posed outside the Burnett Arms in Banchory before heading for Linksfield Stadium for the 24-hour relay:
Gary came along - not to participate, but just to watch. I suspect it wasn't the best time in his life:
Julie looked happy, however:
- and so she should have been - our group raised the largest amount of any of the groups in the whole of Scotland who took part in this event:
It was a very well-run event - we even had the opportunity of a leg massage at the end:
Yes, that's me getting the treatment - but look at that huge verruca on my right foot!
Back at work, we were having some difficulties with a large shipment to China. Our senior sales guy, Director of one of the Group companies, and responsible for the larger, wholesale international shipments and who we subsequently successfully sued and sequestrated when we uncovered his fraudulent behaviour, had arranged for a shipment to China, worth a couple of million dollars. We hadn't been paid for this and were getting a trifle concerned about the constant delays and excuses. We - the three Clarks and I, Directors of all of the Group companies - agreed somebody else would need to go to China to try and find out what was really going on. Normally, this would mean one of the Clarks going out, but, on this occasion, Michael suggested I should go and so it was that I headed east on a KLM flight from Amsterdam to Beijing in November, 1999.
Overnight, travelling west to east, arriving early morning, I would normally go straight to my hotel and shower, change and rest, but I was only here for a week and it's a huge country and we had a lot of travelling to do, so, as it was the weekend, we thought we'd better get the tourist thing out of the way as soon as possible, so I was whisked off to the Great Wall:
Next was Tianenmen Square, where hundreds had been massacred by the authorities less than a decade before:
We were staying at the Sheraton in Beijing, so naturally we had to have Peking Duck for dinner:
We flew out to the seaside port of Dalian, where I saw huge developments of upmarket seafront apartments, every single one unoccupied. Foreign investment - mostly Japanese and Korean - had been actively encouraged, but when they bought the land and delayed in developing it, the Chinese Government brought in a hefty tax regime penalising them if they didn't build after a short period of time. So what did they do? They built, of course, but it appears that's all they did - nothing was sold. Very strange. I suspect changes in relative exchange rates were the cause.
We travelled a lot, but the trip was unsuccessful. Not speaking the language, it was hard to suss out what was going on, but I suspect I was treated as a bit of a patsy, as subsequent events unfolded.
I was determined that this would be the last posting recanting the events of the 20th Century, but I fear I have missed several important events. One holiday that comes to mind - I can't remember exactly when it was - was when we went to Jim Cowie's apartment in La Manga. He was a business colleague - you may remember we met up with him in Florida and we all went for a meal at the Teppanyaki table at the Benihana restaurant. Ross, Jo and I spent two weeks there. Great place if you like sports. I even played golf with Kenny Dalglish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenny_Dalglish) when I was there. He had a place there, as did his great pal, Alan Hansen (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Hansen) - ex Partick Thistle - I just missed him - he arrived just as we were leaving.
The year/decade/century/millennium ended for us with a big party at Woodend Barn.
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