John Gibson: Do hang on to that old hurdy-gurdy

True to type, I was last to switch off the lights when we flitted from North Bridge down the road to Holyrood.

They knew it was me because all they could hear was the clatter of my typewriter. Just me and the removal men.

This was a million years before the computer, bear in mind (what’s a computer?) and it’s a tug at the heart strings to see that vintage typewriters are being upgraded so they can be used in the old-fashioned way, for typing through an ink ribbon, into a computer. Upgraded typewriters are priced from just under 500 quid. So that cobwebbed old hurdy-gurdy in your attic could be worth a bob or two. The ribbons doubtless will have dried up.

Light relief

You might dare rate my ancestry somewhat bizarre. My father was a conductor. Not with a baton. No, on the 12 buses serving Portobello to Corstorphine.

My grandad was a professional mole strangler and my great-grandfather was a part-time lamplighter. He trimmed the wicks on the gas lights in the Canongate.

Stout, sturdy men. All well over 15 stones. So you’re mystified, if not intrigued, that they produced a ten-stone wimp churning out a daily column as lightweight as this.

Grow for it

My girlfriend Fleur fawns over me. She thinks I’m a pansy. My name’s down for an allotment, by the way. Want to grow my very own vegetables.

Afterwords . .

. . . it was Adrian Mitchell, one of the Liverpool poets era no longer with us, who declared: “Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people.” How true.