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Hoots & Havers - October 06

There’s a new heir to the Japanese throne and it sports a wee scrotum. Beforehand they were in deep trouble and were considering changing the constitution because the next head of state was going to be female but an Imperial Y-bearing spermatozoa won the egg race last Hogmanay with the happy result we all know. The scrotum is in the possession of Prince Hisahito and a Mr Tanaka has created a lovely toy for him in the shape of a rocking horse, solid gold, weighing 30 kg and valued at £670,000. I hope it never pinches his fingers.

It is odd that dynastic cultures are all so male oriented because the one certainty is the great difficulty in being sure of the male parentage of an offspring. And of course the longer the lineage you’re trying to cherish the less likely it is to be what you hope it is. Apparently the standard figure applied by geneticists is 10% i.e. one in ten of us are not our father’s son, or daughter. Spread that across the generations and it makes the boast of ancient descent from great men rather unlikely. The small Japanese heir is said 126th in his line.

One of the more disputed successions in our own royal family was that of the son of James VII of Scotland and II of England. He grew up to be the desperately dreary Old Pretender and his birth was something of a surprise since the country was hoping that his Catholic father would not produce an heir. Consequently his birth was well attended to ensure no subterfuge or substitution took place. Besides servants, priests and others unimportant, 24 peers were by the bedside and 20 women, two of whom were French and two Portuguese.  The king was there and his mum. Our own Lord Murray, son of the marquis of Atholl, represented the Scots.

But one would have thought the critical moment came some nine months earlier. All the witnesses ought to have been there to ensure the copulation was properly carried out by the king. That’s the moment when there’s maximum opportunity for hanky panky. It might be more fun to watch, too - if you’re into that sort of thing.

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Down south they’re moaning about overcrowding. This is a tight little island. Immigration must be cut to avoid us being overwhelmed. We were in London one of the last of those hot weekends and went to the park and one could understand what they meant. It was really quite scary to see so many people crowded into it and each group pretending that this was really a little piece of countryside.

There was a wee zoo at the heart of the park and my heart ached to see on enclosure containing nothing but half a dozen oystercatchers. Then we came home again, went behind Aberfeldy and walked for a couple of hours round about the Birks and saw not a soul.

The statistics are clear and interesting. The web says that England has 383 people per square kilometer. Scotland has 64. If the southerners did a bit of voluntary redistribution the problem would be solved. But they may not fancy coming north as we are distinctive in other ways, being three times more likely that the English to kill ourselves or to murder each other.

The comparative space we have up here may be one reason why the right to roam is so embedded in the national psyche. If you go where you want and rarely see anyone, the desire to cock-a-doodle-doo from the top of your own private dung heap may be largely dissipated. Indeed it can seem strange when land round here is bought by foreigners who then try to bar others from it.

We have the good fortune of living a hundred or two yards from the entrance to the Birks where the small and fluffy dog and I often spend the best part of an hour over lunchtime. At the moment the cohorts of Willie Grieve are doing improvements to the path on the east side and what’s going on looks extremely expensive. Although it my tax that’s being spent, I don’t really mind because it encourages the visitors to keep to the paths. My own pleasure is going bush where you never see a soul and at this time of year the woods are almost writhing with tasty fungi. Since the dog is very short in the leg I have to carry her over the shaggier parts; otherwise she hoovers up every twig, leaf and thorn in her path. Today we encountered a couple of deer and the first woodcock of the autumn. I also picked up a mole trundling through the undergrowth and was astonished at the power of its claws as it did its best to dig its way through my hands to escape.

I traversed the same route with my son some ten years ago. He was carrying an umbrella, which broke, and he neatly rolled it up and hung it on a branch at the side of the track. It stayed there untouched until a couple of months ago when I removed it because the branch from which it was suspended came down. It was an indication of how few people ever went there.

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The last couple of months I’ve been banging on about the bizarre things I’ve found on the web concerning my dead kinsfolk. This time it’s my mother’s grandfather, Andrew Fraser. He was a civil servant in India at the beginning of the 20th century. He wrote a book of memoirs and died of Spanish flu at the end of the First War.

His grave lies in the shadow of the Dean Bridge in Edinburgh. In family lore he was very worthy, the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers and himself Moderator of the Indian Presbyterian Church and married to a minister’s daughter from Skye.

I googled him and found he had an island named after him – Fraserganj – in the Sunderban Wildlife Sanctuary in the Ganges delta, and that his dilapidated beach house is still there. Furthermore…‘Local legend has it that he had landed at the place accidentally because of a shipwreck and was helped to survive by a local woman named Narayani. Fraser fell in love with her and visited her regularly. His detractors sent word about his goings on to his wife staying back in England. She came rushing to India and with the assistance of British troops had Narayani shot down’ 

Heavens! Not a word of this can be true, but it’s marvellous stuff. One wonders what sort of stuff will survive, or be invented, about ourselves.