Happy Birthday To Me

A Trip to Inverness

A bonus post to mark my birthday. Okay, I admit it, the 27th December is not my birthday but it is the day on which I celebrate my new life. Don’t worry, I’m not about to start telling you about my new life in Jesus, this one is an actual, physical new life.

As I mentioned in my post on Inverness, I once died and then got better. I only got better due to the incredible work of a talented surgical team at Papworth Hospital who opened me up and gave me a new heart valve on 27th December 2017.

Photo by Akram Huseyn on Unsplash

They also gave me a new life. Six years I have had now that I honestly would not have had without them. Isn’t it wonderful that people actually do those jobs and have those skills and give the gift of life to people like me?

I know that I wouldn’t have had those six years without them. When I was first admitted to hospital and they discovered that I’d been born with the wrong kind of heart valve, the doctor (he was called Doctor Brown - I love Back to the Future and so was very pleased about that) gave me a choice when I asked if I could go home. He said I could stay in and be referred to Papworth and probably get there within the next couple of weeks or I could discharge myself, be referred as an outpatient and wait six months. He also pointed out that I would be very, very unlikely to be alive when the referral letter arrived. I chose to stay in.

Doc Brown Ready to Restart my Heart

And when I said earlier that I got better, I meant it in more ways than just physically. I hope that I’ve been a slightly better version of myself. I think I’ve remembered to enjoy life more. I think I’ve remembered to be a little bit kinder to people. Perhaps I’ve been a better husband, perhaps I’ve been a better dad. I hope so, because they’re the things that matter.

I don't know whether or not it was Confucius who said that we have two lives and the second one begins when we realise we only have one life. Regardless of who said it first, it's something I try to keep in mind.

When I catch myself forgetting, I will tell myself that I have a great deal to be grateful for and I should jolly well stop whinging and just smile. Most of the time I listen. So, on my sixth birthday, I know that I don’t need a present. I get a marvellous gift every morning when I wake up to a new day.

However, I do have a present for all my subscribers, the second half of my post about Inverness which I visited exactly six months after the wonderful people at Papworth gave me a second go at life.

Inverness is a very small city, it’s only about a third of the size of Dundee in terms of number of residents but it is a wonderful size for a city to be. Shanghai has a population of over twenty-four million people; Inverness gets by with around forty-seven thousand. It doesn’t have a mayor called Mr Ying Yong, though, so it doesn’t quite have everything that Shanghai has. Inverness does, however, have almost everything you could ever want or need and doesn’t feel the need to have two hundred and thirty-seven of everything which, incidentally, is the number of Pret A Mangers in central London.

If you were to write a guidebook to the streets of London in the early twenty-first century, it would go like this: thing; thing; Pret A Manger; thing; thing with a blue plaque on; Pret A Manger; thing; Pret; thing; thing; Pret; St Paul’s Cathedral; thing; Pret A Manger. It is like a backdrop to a Scooby Doo cartoon. Inverness doesn’t seem to need to do that, in fact Inverness doesn’t have a Pret A Manger at all, the nearest one is in the Bon Accord Shopping Centre in Aberdeen. The Trip Advisor website actually has a review of Pret A Manger which reads: “Maybe not for the Inverness folk”, really it does. Sorry, I got distracted there, I am easily led when it comes to a Meatless Meatball Hot Wrap and a Pret Love Bar.

So, where were we? Ah yes, Inverness is small and, apart from the lack of a Pret A Manger and a mayor called Ying Yong, perfectly formed. There have been people living around here since at least the seventh millennium BC, the late Mesolithic period, moving back in as the ice retreated and the temperatures started to warm up. The discovery of Roman brooches among remains of Iron Age settlements here means that there must have been trade with the Romans, who are often assumed to have stayed well south of here and had little contact with the Picts of the far north. It was the Romans who invented the term Picti for the Scots with the word first appearing in the writings of Eumenius in 297 AD. It has been speculated that it may have related to the fact that they painted their bodies or had tattoos but the evidence for that is limited. There are others who say that it was derived from their own word to describe themselves: “Pecht” which meant something along the lines of the ancestors or the ancient ones. Whatever they were called and why ever they were called that, they probably didn’t see themselves as one tribe or race and were only really allied by their joint antipathy towards the Romans.

As with the small kingdoms to the south of the border, the kingdom of Alba coalesced through the dark ages, one of its most famous kings being Mac Bethad Mac Findláich who ruled from a castle here. He took the throne in 1040 after killing his predecessor, Donnchadh mac Crìonain. Their story is well known even if, through the years, their names have become anglicised and morphed into Duncan and Macbeth.

After Macbeth’s death, the new king Máel Coluim mac Donnchada, also known as Malcolm III, burned Macbeth’s castle to the ground. He was no fan of the Thane of Cawdor and that is understandable, as his father was King Duncan. It was Malcolm who built Inverness castle on its current site by the banks of the River Ness though the one I stood outside today to watch the pipe band rehearse, only dates back to 1836.

There were about a dozen pipers and a similar number of drummers, mostly wearing white shirts and black waistcoats with their teal, red and white tartan kilts. A few don’t seem to have got the dress code memo, though, and have turned up in shorts and t-shirts. It’s an unexpected delight to watch them and listen to them. The bass drummer doesn’t have his bass drum in front of his chest, as I’m used to seeing it, but high up, in front of his face. I have to confess to having not the slightest idea what the tunes were that they were playing, I’m not sure anyone really knows. Try it, go to YouTube and type in “bagpipe music”. As each new tune starts I challenge you not to think: “Isn’t this the one they just played?” Anyway, regardless of that, I happily spent half an hour listening to them.

Just outside the grounds of the castle is a large statue which depicts three ladies in medieval robes, one of whom appears to be pouring wine into a child. They depict faith, hope and charity. Apparently they used to stand on the roof of a drapery store in the High Street before it was knocked down in the 1950s. The statues were then bought by a collector in Orkney. I didn’t even know that there were people who collected life-sized statues but evidently that happens. I don’t know who they were but their garden must have looked like a scene out of that Doctor Who episode where the weeping angels attacked the earth.

After the collector’s death, and it is not recorded if this was at the hands of a weeping angel, the statues were returned to the city and placed in their current position, in 2011. This evening there were three youngsters who looked like students standing in front of the statue and reading all about it. Two girls and one boy, I can only guess which one was Hope.

I’m not so sure about charity but faith and hope are two big things to have as a youngster, particularly a youngster about to embark on a new life. I guess thoughts like this were in my head because my elder daughter, Emma, was married less than a week before this trip to Inverness. It was a wonderful day, a day with family and friends, a day to celebrate life and love and faith and hope. It’s a day that no-one was sure I’d see and I cried in celebration of their young lives just starting. 

I think one of the many reasons that we love a wedding is that it manages to make us remember all of the things that have made these two young people who they are, that is what the best man and father of the bride do with their speeches, but it also forces us to look hopefully toward the future. We live in hope, we live for hope, we live through hope. A wedding also reminds us that we should take notice of today because it is very special.

Looking back is all well and good as it tells us the story of who we are but that’s only of any use if we’re telling the right story, not the true story. We must tell ourselves the right story, the one that works, the one that makes the very best of today. Because today is all we have, it’s where we live.

Too often we try to live in the past, to remember when we were at our best, our fittest, our most vital or to blame the things that the world did to us then for the problems we’re having today. When we’re not living in the past we are living in the future, imagining how good our lives will be when we lose that weight, get that job, land that life partner, have that money.

The Spanish have a proverb which says that tomorrow is often the busiest day of the week. Have you ever noticed how much better you will be at sticking to a diet or going to the gym or studying or working hard when you look just a little into your own future? The truth is that you won’t be, you’ll just be you, living on that day. You may have learned how important diet and exercise really are or you might finally have admitted that the only thing that’s going to get the work done is to sit down and do it right now, but you’ll still be you when you get there.

While reflecting on the past or planning for the future may be useful, they are not the things which make us happy. Have you noticed, in general, how much happier dogs are than human beings? That’s because they’re living today. You have to remember to live today. These are the good old days. Happiness is not where we’re going, it’s how we’ll get there. I like to remind myself of that fact as much as I can. That’s why I bunk off, even if it’s just for a few minutes, from what I have to do, to do a little of what I want to do or, at the very least, realise what it is that I am doing. Some people might call it mindfulness, I call it bunking off. Imagine if you took just a minute now to experience this moment not just as one more moment going past in the ongoing tale of your day but as a moment you were totally aware of. Perhaps imagining what it would be like if you were looking back on this moment from thirty years in the future but could experience it fully.

What might you appreciate that you would otherwise miss? Is it the people that you are spending this moment with? How much would I like to share this moment with all the people I’ve lost over the years? Imagine looking back on this moment from thirty years hence and think just how deeply grateful you would be for sharing it with the people who are around you right now.

Whether you have the warmth of the spring sunshine on your cheek or you are watching the rains of autumn spot and spatter your window, take a second or two to experience them. That’s bunking off just as much as travelling to Inverness to stand on Inglis Street and watch another piper play at the foot of the Market Brae Steps. It is a wonderful and wondrous day to be alive and that goes as much for the day on which you are reading this as for the day on which I wrote it. Every single day that you are alive is a wonder and can be a joy if you remember to live it, to notice that you are living it and to be thankful.

One of the wonderful things that travel can do for you is to return you to that blissful state of immaturity when you see new places, meet new people and learn new things. It can stop you growing old and can stop your world narrowing. It can expand your world again, expand your mind. Not all of us are as smart as Ralph Waldo Emerson who famously said: “The mind, once stretched by a new idea, never returns to its original dimensions.” Too many of us conform to Winston Churchill’s appraisal of Stanley Baldwin: “Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.” Bunking off is about not hurrying on, bunking off is about stopping for a while and finding a little more of the truth of what it is to be alive, of what it is to be us.

Thanks for reading Bunking Off with Adrian Bleese. Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work or read more right now here Above the Law