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Hoots & Havers with James Irvine Robertson

August 06

The other day I was told there was a photo of my grandmother up on the web. She’s there opening an extension to the course in the King’s Park by driving off from the first tee when she was lady captain of Stirling Golf Club in 1912. She is indeed there – and now here - and the bloke behind with the buttonhole is Dr Watty Yellowlees’s father who was then the town’s provost.

To find this picture I put granny’s name into Google. To my surprise she turned up more than once. And in one place I found a picture this old boy and the lassie, who, the website informed me, were her mother and grandfather, a John Graham. I found this downright creepy but, before I was overwhelmed with paranoia, it seemd a good idea to find how the photos got there.

The site on which they appear is Canadian and glorifies the owner’s ancestors ‘The Sugar Macfie Family of Scotland’. I emailed to ask where the pictures came from. Because such sites do not receive many visitors I received an enthusiastic reply.

Back in 1980 a farmer named George Macfie died in Clarenceville, Quebec. He was a bachelor and had no heirs. At the farm dispersal sale someone noticed an album of old family photographs and took the trouble to pick it up and pass it on to the only MacFie she knew - who lived in Montreal. And he is the owner of the website.

It turned out he was remote kin to the late agriculturalist and similarly descended from an Alexander MacFie who emigrated from Scotland in 1824. Alexander had a big sister called Mary who stayed behind. Each of them married, she a Graham, and their families kept in touch for a couple of generations. Once snaps were invented, they would send each other snaps. And , on the right, this jolly old cove is Mary’s son and my great-great-grandfather. The other is his daughter.

Is it seemly to rather fancy one’s great-grandmother? It’s not a question that theologians have had to wrestle with very much down the ages, but probably not. Anyway she’s a bit young for me, but if I was a few decades younger...

* * *

Uncle George stopped practicing medicine in Kenya when he hit 88 a few months back, mainly because he decided his faculties were making accurate diagnoses increasingly difficult. He hasn’t let up, though.

As has been mentioned before in this column he has a bee in his bonnet about the catastrophic birthrate in emerging Africa which turns every attempt to improve the quality of life for its inhabitants to dust and ashes. Even if the state had the tax revenue, it’s not much use in building schools for an extra 500 children each week if there are 1,000 being born.

There are two grave problems - AIDS and missionaries. The traditional RC missionaries are not too bad. Many tend to be pragmatists and, so long as the Pope doesn’t find out, are quite happy to preach birth control and the use of condoms

It’s the born-again Protestants that kill people. They come into the villages where one child in six still dies before the age of five and one woman in 13 women will die during childbirth. They flash their $20,000 American teeth in sunny smiles, preach the virtues of abstinence and block sex education because it’s ungodly.

So George has invented a ruler. Most of rural Africa has the cow at the basis of the economy, so people are intimately acquainted with the ovulation cycle of cattle. The snag is that they reckon the human cycle is similar but it isn’t. In fact it’s diametrically opposite.

George has taken a bog-standard 30cm ruler and stuck a bit of plastic on it that outlines the female ovulatory cycle, pinpointing the days when conception is likely, possible, unlikely and impossible. These he hopes to get into every child’s school bag and give the girls some control of their own fertility. He’s done one or two presentations. The African Medical and Research Foundation intend to run six-month clinical trials in several schools and have little doubt he’s produced a life saver.

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