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Coffee dregs
Today we are used to having an abundance of high-quality coffee houses in Scotland but back in 1984 this was not the case. Peter Hutchison who was the Editor of the STGA Newsletter in 1984 wrote a leader column in which he said he was fed up of having to apologise to French and, above all, Italian visitors for the appalling quality of coffee served in otherwise high-quality establishments. ‘Indeed, in the granary type whole food coffee shop of a water driven flour mill in the central highlands I was horrified to be served instant coffee from a tin behind the counter to accompany my wholemeal scone and jam,’ he reported.
A Tale of Kindness: Andrew Thackrey’s first tour
‘With some butterflies in my stomach I drove my wife early one Friday morning to the school where she worked as a teacher. She was about to leave on a weekend trip to Paris with some of her pupils. The butterflies in my stomach had nothing to do with the fact that I was going to be left alone for the weekend but rather because I was going to do my first tour with German visitors and I was going to be able to put into practice some, if not all, of what I had learned on my Blue Badge course.
‘The brief was straightforward- pick up the group at a hotel in the Cramond area, do the tour and then direct them towards the north as they continued on their way to the Highlands. "Guiding is fun", I repeated to myself, as I drove to Cramond, located the hotel, the coach and the driver and awaited the arrival of the tourists, then coming out of the hotel. Just as they were getting into the coach one of the men literally dropped dead right in front of me. An ambulance was called and took the man to the nearby Western General hospital with our coach and tourists following. At the hospital it was confirmed officially that the man was dead. The coach driver expressed his condolences to the widow and then told me that we would have to continue with the city tour. Before leaving I told the widow that if she wished to stay in Edinburgh she could come and stay with me.
‘After the city tour we all went back to the hospital where much had happened. The German consulate had made preliminary arrangements for a cremation in Edinburgh before the widow returned home. She told me that she would like to come and stay with me, removed her luggage from the coach and we drove off. As we came up Leith Walk I remember her saying: "What would my husband be saying. He has only been dead for three hours and here I am going off 'mit einem fremden Herrn' (with a strange man!)"
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