VIEWPOINT
A surprise delivery of a cookbook from a Scottish address has given our columnist an appetite for discovering the sender's identity
Perhaps you know - or have heard of - the Selkirk Grace, a short prayer of thanks usually recited north of the border before countless mountains of neeps and tatties at a traditional Burns Night supper. It goes like this:
Some hae meat an' cannae eat, And some wad eat that want it; But we hae meat an' we can eat, And sae the Lord bethankit.
The grace has been much on my mind today, since the arrival of an unexpected parcel from Selkirk. My mother used to get us to repeat
'white rabbits' at the start of every month, to give us good luck - but also, she said, to make sure everything coming through our door that month was welcome. I had forgotten to do so on the first. I therefore received this parcel with foreboding.
It turned out to contain two books on cooking for carnivores, including one entitled The Big Fat Surprise (which it certainly was) on the importance of having plenty of butter, cheese and meat in our diet. Maybe my benefactor had caught a glimpse of me in profile and thought, 'He looks as if he could do with a couple of strings of sausages inside him'. It is, I confess, unlikely.
After some minutes of wistful speculation - more recollections of temple-shattering hangovers caused by toasts to the 'fair fa' your honest, sonsie face' of the 'Great chieftain o' the puddin'-race' on Burns Nights past -Iconcluded that it was mere coincidence the package had come from an 'R Paton' in Selkirk. I know the town a little, having filmed there for part of a TV documentary series about the River Tweed and the days when every estate had its own tweed made at one of the multitude of mills in the town.
Selkirk is still a good-looking, prosperous Scottish border town in the way of a Kelso or a Melrose, surrounded by rich-looking pastureland and lowland forest. I was lucky to meet the man in charge of one of the last surviving mills who allowed me to design and run off a
