Kat..? 16 7 26 (8) 25 1 23
Thereafter we got on famously as the saying would
have it, as I recall very few misunderstandings to follow... She a somewhat
taller person than I – who once used to think himself of median height for a man
though with serious old age creeping on I have to admit to perhaps shrinking somewhat from my
once dizzy height...hahaha – was staying at the hostel whilst working as a
beater most week days whilst I was using the hostel as a base with frequent
excursions away to stay in bothies a few nights and then return to refresh my
supplies of food, have showers and generally chill out from my hill-side forays... all of which ensured we were to continue for some days ahead bumping
into one another...
So it was I learned that she had been beating in
the vicinity of some hills I had just climbed from a nearby bothy and she in
turn told me of the dignitaries in her party of Grouse hunters with odd
snippets of conversation she had exchanged with some of them… I had earlier
taken pics of her for my pic site on Myspace where from the time of our meeting were to be added pics of perhaps a dozen other people I had met on the hill side or in
the hostels and bothies where I stayed and so on this our last meeting – she just
returning from another day of beating me just back from another bothy — I took
the odd additional pic and then she offered “Why don’t we go drink tea together
as the day was not yet full and the hostels and bunk houses some way off opening…
Well it was a special kind of friendship for me who
was becoming used to the idea of losing friends for one reason or another rather
than making new ones whilst she a young lady just left secondary school,
probably after completing A-levels and doing her first job but with an ease of
conversation that struck me as different… Over the tea we each talked about the
learning difficulties we had experienced in school and she related how she had on
more than one occasion been labelled dyslexic when for the first time in my
life I reflected perhaps I too had been dyslexic? How reading for my school pal Brian and I, who for a good many years were bottom and next to the bottom
of our class of 32 children had been very difficult and how our head mistress, a
Mrs Grundy had each week as we struggled taken us to the front of the rest of the
class to rap us across our knuckles with a wooden 12 inch ruler as a form of
inducement to greater effort! That and my habit of getting place names wrong
like how another teacher, a Miss Metcalf some two or three years later asked me whether
she might be permitted to tell the rest of the class how I had confused the
Magna Carter with the Jolly Carter, the name of a nearby Public House, perhaps in
part to do with the fact I also had great difficulties remembering anything to
do with history..? The uproarious laughter which ensued when I acceded to her request was I guess only to be expected! hahaha
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