Ye ken I highly prize my moniker as “the biggest gossip in toon”.
No juicy morsel of local news stays confidential with me for more than a few minties before I’ve passed it on. So being a reporter was obviously the perfect jobbie. But, to be a great goss, you have to have brilliant hearing in order to lug into ony fascinating conversations gan on aroon ye. As I did at the hairdresser’s the other day.
Go on, quines, haven’t you a’ done it? Yer sittin’ waitin’ for the dye on yer napper to take, and the wifie next to you is chattin’ awa’ to your stylist. In my case, the lovely Morna, who is such a wonderfully nosey quine hersellie, she brings oot the best in her customers.
But I fair got the heebie-jeebies when I started to listen to their claik. A wifie aboot the same age as me describing how she’d gone into her kitchen in Cults the other day to discover, floundering in her sink… a bat! Man, I near tiddled masellie at the very thought.
As well as dogs and rats, I’m petrified of those fearsome flying foxes which, close up, look the embodiment of evil. I know exactly why they spook me – again, back to Little Mo in Culter. We stayed halfway up Malcolm Road, which has hoosies on one side, gigantic trees on the other. If late getting home on the bussie from Aberdeen, we’d to walk up the road in almost pitch darkness, hand clutching hand, as the bats swooped on us, skimmin’ oor heids and arms with their horrible, slinky, dusky, flashin’ bodies. Sadly, mum couldn’t comfort her wee yin, because she was as afeart as me.
I ken it’s nae hairdresser etiquette to interrupt another client’s conversation, but I couldnae stop masellie. I declared how much I admired her guts
So, how could I resist luggin’ into this wifie aboot her wayward bat? After phoning her son, Robin, for advice, she threw kitchen towel into the sink, thinking it would be scared ootski. But it just got comfy on the paper. Beginning to panic, she sought her neighbour. Together, they lifted it and the towel on to the top of the nearby coal bunker, where it dried itsellie, then flapped aff, never to be seen again.
I ken it’s nae hairdresser etiquette to interrupt another client’s conversation, but I couldnae stop masellie. I declared how much I admired her guts, saying I’d just have scraiked and run. I wondered if she might have bats in her eaves, disaster scenario-ist that I am. She reckoned she might, as well as her son, who lived nearby.
She then regaled me with her other story that proves it makes life worthwhile being a nosey gossip. He’d recently also rescued a bat which seemed to have a broken wing, phoning the vet, who suggested he bring it to the surgery. In he goes with the craiter in an open box. Sez the vet: “You must be the bat man.” Sez her son: “No, I’m Robin.” Luuv it!
Moreen Simpson is a former assistant editor of the Evening Express and The Press and Journal, and started her journalism career in 1970