THE hankies, the socks and the aftershave have now been put away for a year until I can generously present them to someone else next Yuletide. Of course, if you are one of the people who so kindly gave me one of those wonderful gifts then do please rest assured that I am keeping yours and will always treasure it.
I have also decided that it is much safer for me to keep the malt whisky and the port right here. They don’t travel well.
Sadly, a friend of mine is struggling with her present. Just why someone who is a part-time domestic goddess would even want an egg cooker to cook something that takes a mere five minutes to boil in a saucepan beats me.
There are comprehensive instructions on how to get the best out of it. Stick in your egg, press the switch and you have a perfect boiled-type egg in next to no time. Just like an egg in a pan, in fact.
However, I think this contraption will keep it hot until the toast is ready, because the manual says: “Revolve knob to 50 degrees C infinities after finishing cooking, and be OK to enter the state preserving heat.”
This instructions for this handy non-EU product also has a section devoted to health and safety. All you need to know on how to use it safely: “Must put egg cooker on draughty worktable without tinder or exploder. Forbid covering egg cooker with tinder to prevent from firing danger on using.”
Is it guaranteed? The warranty section says, and I quote: “Component and part not having a consumer being able to be maintained, asks deliver a manufactory if the appliance is faulty, or it’s the personnel who keeps the headquarter or similar sole duty in repairmends coming within the appliance.”
That made my head hurt. Like when I was a wee ankle-biter in Great Bernera and enjoyed being sick in a way that wasn’t obvious. Not just feeling off-colour, you understand. Real vomit-hurling ailments were the best.
When it wasn’t unspecific abdomen pain it was outbreaks of diarrhoea or the after-effects of knocking myself senseless by plummeting off the byre roof again. The more dramatic my malady, the more chance that a district nurse would be summoned to dispense pain-relieving codeine, bandages and magic potions for drying out the contents of my lower intestine.
There was one nurse, in particular, who had a knack of putting my head, my tummy and the world to rights. Mrs Marion Macleod, or Mòr Iarsiadair, as we knew her, would stride in rigged out in her crisp, starched uniform and smelling strongly of liniment.
Despite that initial impression of a sergeant major in hair grips, Mòr was a kindly soul who dispensed something else. Sympathy. While everyone wondered if I was trying to skive school, she was a real medical person with a blue badge and everything, who knew I wasn’t putting it on. The nurse said I had a temperature – so there. She also dispensed almighty shocks to my white bits. But that was only because Mòr, like every fine medical person, had really cold hands.
Afterwards, she would take a well-earned cup of Brooke Bond while sitting round the fire with my grandfather. By the time they were on the second cup, they would have discussed the price of wool, who had taken their peats home and my loose stools.
Better be careful what else I say. Bumping into Mòr in the optician’s the other day, she made it quite clear she reads this column and is still keeping tabs on her whiney little former patient.
Last Wednesday, she celebrated her birthday. While I would, of course, never divulge any lady’s tally without her consent, I understand that Mrs Macleod graciously allowed my namesake Coinneach to mention her age on radio, so I shall be brave and hope she would not ban me, either. Happy 95th, a Mhòr.
Meanwhile, trotting along 30 years behind her is another fellow for whom the last year or so was a bit of an eye-opener. A year ago, Jimmy Ogilvie, the laird of Ogilvie Towers (not currently open to the public), had a cataract removed, opening up an entire new world for him. Even with the thick glasses he wore since the age of nine, he could see very little.
That first op changed his life. Now he has had the other eye done.
Eyeing himself up in the mirror recently, Jimmy Two Eyes realised he was in need of a drastic makeover. Those cool, clear eyes, the distinguished nose and the chiselled jawbone structure were all somewhat diminished, he decided, by the unruliness of the thatch on top. In an effort to spare his blushes over the lack of follicles up there, he had always had a few strands that he swept across the summit.
Think Bobby Charlton. It was an impressively long and utterly unmanageable combover.
Now brimming with confidence, he no longer needed the wayward strands to conceal the baldness that the whole world now knows is merely a telltale sign of manliness and virility. Jimmy O knew what he had to do.
At a sombre service performed in her North Beach Street consulting rooms, his dear friend and personal grooming consultant, Jennifer, performed the snip. In a few short, sharp seconds, the combover that had adorned his napper for the last couple of decades and which VisitScotland has listed as a tourist attraction, was consigned to the dustbin of history.
No more shall Jimmy meander up Francis Street avoiding gusts off the Minch that could get under his flap and lift it skywards. No more shall he enter the Lewis or the Carlton and have to quickly run his fingers over his crown to ensure that everything upstairs is horizontal and properly aligned.
And no more shall the rest of us who wink at barmaids see Jimmy and think he is no competition.
