Latest addition to the clan
James Rupert Oscar Hay, born 3 April 2008, a son to Rebekah and Ross Hay.
Ailsa Rayner on her graduation day
Our daughter Ailsa and her children Jessee and Dane Ross with us on her graduation from James Cook University, Cairns on Saturday 12 May 2007.
‘Cathie, 92, is in print again,’
Kate Mcpherson, It’s a Small World, Ross-Shire Journal, 28 April 2006.
CAN’T be bad—still writing and publishing love poems in your 10th decade!
For a ploughman’s daughter who left school at 14 after education at umpteen country schools in the Black Isle, Mid and Easter Ross as her father followed the plough and available work, chirpy Cathie Wells of Dingwall has certainly made her mark.
Straight from school she entered private service and the pen has scarcely left her hand. Who knows where a little patronage, continuing secondary education - and university even - might have led? One can but surmise.
Cathie’s current publication Poems and Adages Down the Ages will benefit at least four charities locally. Copies will be on sale for £3 each at The Puffin Pool Shop in Tulloch Street, Sue Ryder in High Street, and across the road in the Bits and Pieces shop in a joint venture between Highland Hospice and Crossroads Care.
This is her third outing in print - all of them benefiting charitable causes - and it was produced for circulation by Elma Blackhall at the Ross Council of Voluntary Service at Thorfinn House.
Among Cathie’s special souvenirs is one ancient wally dug. ‘It is one of a pair which belonged to my granny so that makes it very old indeed.’
The other one was broken towards the end of WWI on the cement floor of her parents’ cottage kitchen on a Black Isle farm. And the 92-year-old scribe remembers the incident with great clarity. ‘I must have been about three and a half and the time was New Year. My elder sisters who were away came home to spend the holiday with us. I can see it now as if it was yesterday. ‘They came in a flurry - greeting and kissing. I remember they had presents. I’m sure nothing too dear I but dear to us all the same. My brother got a small gun and I got a doll, also a packet of sweets. I can visualise them I yet - all coloured and striped. In the confusion of laughter and dancing around - disaster! One of the dogs crashed to the floor. Exit one wally dug!’
When Cathie’s mother died many years later she fell heir to the remainder of the pair. ‘It reigns supreme in my china cabinet and reminds me of that day long ago.’
Cathie is pictured with the memento which helped inspire her writing. Other precious items she treasures include her granny’s midwifery diploma of 1882 signed by a surgeon at a lying-in hospital in the Scottish capital. Other writings related to Cathie include a beautifully produced record of her amazing life to mark her 90th birthday are well worth a read.