Legion's call to bid up for holidays to hard core

Every so often the Rotary Club of Thurso arranges an auction in aid of charity. It has organised one for this coming Friday in the town’s Royal British Legion Scotland clubrooms with the proceeds to be shared, benefiting local charities and Rotary’s water aid projects overseas.

The lots to be auctioned have been donated by a variety of people in the community, and range from a luxury apartment in Spain for a week to salmon fishing on the Thurso and Forss rivers, various "dinners for four", a golf foursome at the Loch Ness club, a day’s hind stalking, and a variety of other items to a down-to-earth attraction – a load of hard core.

Entertainment will be provided by Clapshot and auctioneer Iain Thomson who has the ability, with his good humour and patter, to coax a bid from even the most reluctant member of the audience.

Iain will be remembered officiating at the former Thurso mart, now razed to the ground and screened from gaze whilst Tesco makes up its mind whether or not to build a new store.

Doors open for Friday’s auction at 7pm, with bidding to start at 7.30pm. It should be an entertaining evening.

In As You Like It, Shakespeare contended there were seven ages of man of which the third was that of "... the lover, sighing like the furnace with a woeful ballad made to his mistress’s eyebrow". Strange what turned men on in the 16th century.

The University of the Third Age (U3A) will have none of this nonsense: it reduces Shakespeare’s seven ages to just three: childhood, working adulthood and the third, final age, to those who have done with their working life. U3A exists for these people who, although retired, want to keep active in mind and body. U3A branches are self-help, self-managed learning co-operatives for older people no longer in full-time work, providing opportunities for their members to share learning experiences in a wide range of interest groups. The aim is to pursue learning, not for qualifications, but for fun.

The inaugural meeting of the Caithness group in the summer was held in Thurso’s West Church hall, and it was a pleasure to have Roy Nelson, former director of Dounreay, among the speakers to talk about the Inverness U3A group with which he is involved.

Following its initial meeting, and the interests identified, Caithness U3A plans to start with groups covering French conversation, Italian, philosophy, local history plus a book-reading group.

The next general meeting will take place in the West Church on October 20 at 2.30pm. All are welcome to this comfortable meeting place with soft chairs replacing the austere pews; for those elderly parties hard of hearing, the church possesses an excellent audio loop.

Remember, there is no curriculum – people learn what they wish, and if there is an interesting angle they just follow it.

Our wedding anniversary occurred on a dull September day with the promise of rain, so the available options to mark the occasion were limited. We opted eventually for a visit to Wick.

It turned our surprisingly well, with a visit to the Wick Heritage Centre as rain drops started falling. I had not been inside for some time and the collection, which was started over 30 years ago, has grown considerably.

The many artefacts and displays, with photographs from the Johnston Collection, tell a compelling story of the town in days gone by. What is remarkable, though, is that the Johnston Collection, which is held in trust by the museum and contains 50,000 of the original glass plate negatives, now has some 14,000 of them that can be viewed online.

Go to www.johnstoncollection.net, identify the place or subject in which you are interested and you can bring up on screen images of what is available. Should you wish you can then purchase a copy online.

Don’t attempt to resort to piracy through trying to print a copy yourself, because if you do you will have your wrist slapped. Instead of getting the picture you desire, up will come an image of a boy in a dunce’s cap with the admonition, "Naughty, Naughty", plus a little homily about how the centre helps to keep afloat by selling copies of the Johnston photographs.

The excellent Wick Heritage Centre website, I notice, is designed by local firm Navertech and, unlike others I could name, is kept up-to-date.

The heritage centre closing at 4.45pm left over an hour before an early dinner was available at the Bord de l’Eau, so it was down to the marina at Wick harbour to sit in the warm sun, which had eventually appeared, to catch up on the daily paper.

First into the restaurant for the perfect choice on the menu to have for a special day: scrumptious Lobster Thermidor plus a glass of wine. Then a quick pud before a hasty departure to Wick High School for Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld.

The touring Scottish Opera production was given a widely publicised new libretto by Rory Bremner, the comedian, impersonator and a bit of a linguist, speaking German, Spanish and French. He once impersonated Gordon Brown in a phone call to Labour MP Margaret Beckett who was completely taken in, making a number of indiscretions as a consequence.

Bremner’s mischievous nature was apparent in his adaptation of the opera’s libretto – a burlesque about the antics of Greek gods misbehaving as Greek gods in mythology generally do. The original story was pretty robust, to use a euphemism, for the time it was written (1874) but Bremner took it a stage further for audiences in 2011 and little was left to the imagination when, for example, Jupiter in the guise of a bee pursued Eurydice around the stage.

Bremner set the opera in the present day. There were references to bankers and their failings, and a familiar phrase banded around at the moment, heard more than once was, "we are all in this together"; a newspaper backcloth proclaimed NEWS OF THE underWORLD.

A singer portraying Public Opinion appeared in a prologue to the opera explaining her role as guardian of public morality, returning from time to time in largely unavailing attempts to curb the licentiousness.

The opera ended with the familiar cancan, with no let-up in the rampant passion.

It was all a jolly romp and probably no more daring in its impropriety, in relative terms, than the original production in 1874. Most seemed to have enjoyed it immensely, judging by the applause, but one or two in the audience had pursed lips.

Driving home afterwards I reflected on the day and reckoned I had not enjoyed myself as much in Wick for a very long time.

NIECE who bombards me via the internet with funny stories, sent recently a raft of newspaper advertisements from the past which you would never dream of seeing now.

Here are just two: An advertisement for an aromatic cigar, and featuring a glamorous blonde gazing adoringly at her boyfriend as he smokes a cigar, with the legend: "Blow (the smoke) in her face and she will follow you anywhere!"

And my favourite, which with such a large proportion of the population now being classed as obese, could solve their problem. It shows a slim-looking young woman of fashion, circa 1920, contemplating a large array of desirable fattening foods:

!Eat, eat, EAT!

And always stay thin.

Fat the enemy that is shortening

your life – BANISHED!"

How? – with sanitized tapeworms.

Learning the language is easier for some

I read recently that Rory Bremner is adding Russian to his repertoire of foreign languages so that he may read Pushkin, and others, in their native tongue.

I mention this because it is rare to find in the local newspaper a graduation announcement for a student who has taken a degree in foreign languages. So I was surprised to see in a recent Groat a young woman, Fiona MacLeod, who had gained a BA Hons In Japanese, of all languages.

Fiona chose the course at Leeds University, which involved a year in Tokyo to be immersed in the language at its source and to assimilate the culture of the country. I understand she hopes to be able to use her Japanese in a marketing career.

One of my daughters took a degree in French and German, and had, similarly, to spend a year abroad before undertaking her final year.

Instead of working in a French school, which was the conventional thing to do at her college, she chose to work for a mail order firm in Paris. Her duties included dealing by phone with customers’ complaints: not only good for her French but she gained some good experience in how commerce was conducted in France.

Although French and German are available in the Caithness high schools, with some French started in primary six classes, they are not widely popular (incidentally Gaelic is now only taught in the north at Tongue), and not many students go on to take foreign languages at university.

The reason, of course, is that English is learnt as a second language almost universally and so we don’t see any real need to acquire another tongue. On holidays we expect and usually find everyone to have some English.

In China, rapidly becoming a major force in world trade, it is estimated that 300 million – approaching a quarter of the population – speak or are learning English as part of China’s economic strengthening strategy.

With our general lack of linguistic ability it came as a great surprise a few years back when a competition was held to see who in Europe spoke the most languages, and the winner was a Shetland schoolteacher. He had acquired an incredible 28 languages, and when, a little later, a BBC reporter was sent to interview him, he was amazed to find that the teacher had learned two more in the meantime. I spoke to the linguist at the time and he told me the tests on his ability in each language were very searching.

Some people, it seems, can sit down and by an obscure gift simply assimilate a language in no time at all. I did my two years army national service many years ago and served in the Intelligence Corps in post-war Austria. We had enough German speakers for the main task in hand of interrogating Austrian prisoners-of-war still returning from Russian captivity as long as five years after the war was over. They were retained by the USSR since they provided free labour for rebuilding the country.

But the secondary duty was dealing with people illegally entering the country from Soviet bloc countries: this was the time of the Iron Curtain between East and West – the Cold War.

We were short of speakers of Serbo-Croat, Slovenish and Hungarian, and although interpreters could be used this was not always desirable. A regular army colleague, a fluent German speaker with some slight knowledge of Hungarian decided to learn it seriously. He took himself off for a fortnight’s local leave with a Hungarian national as tutor and devoted the entire time to learning the language.

Now Hungarian is notoriously difficult but when he returned to Graz (Austria’s second city) where we were based he was a competent speaker of the tongue.

But why should we bother? Twenty years ago the Economist put together a list of some 20 English terms that had become more or less universal.

A quarter of a century later this list must have grown considerably and, who knows, with greater travel and movement of people, by 2100 perhaps English will have become the first language worldwide.

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