Dear El Bob,
I once replied, when asked by a teacher what I would do if they increased the school leaving age from fourteen to fifteen, I would like to learn German.
You, you, she spluttered will never, ever leave this town and grow up and be a fisherman just like your father - what use would a foreign language be to you?. You can' t even speak English.
Well, Bob, the Good Lord turned me aside from my aims to be a joiner and literally forced me into becoming a marine engineer apprentice (there was no other work available in the middle of the late nineteen forties depression) and five years later the Government gave me the choice, two years in the Army or Five years in the Merchant Navy.
I was fifityone years in the Merchant Navy and had the good fortune to visit every continent on earth apart from Australia and New Zealand.
So my globtrotting was not of my choice - it was ordained by God.
I was killed with asthma and bronchitis in the North - East of Scotland - and I still am. But whilst on the ships and deep in their hot steamy, humid enginerooms I was completely free of everything except sweat and heatstroke.
A willing compromise.
Thanks for being so polite in your posts but we are going through a tense time just now and there were quite a lot I had to get off my chest.
Too many people here seem never to have even heard that there is a world outside of Peterhead.
At least I have met very few.
Most who leave never come back as I had planned to do but my wife wanted back amongst her ain folk.
Robert Louis Stevenson in the very first vers of a book stated "He committed the two most deadly sins a young mand can commit. One was in leaving home and the other was in coming back."
I paraphrase
He also states, "By the time a man gets into the seventies his mere existence is mere miracle."
So, by that I MUST be a miracle.
God BLess You,
rekie
