An Empty Chair

Friends of mine are at an interesting but none to pleasant juncture in their lives. Well into their seventies they see their friends of long standing and those of their acquaintance passing away. Once you get into your fifties this does affect all of us.  Those who have filled our television sets, acted in films or been football heroes when young begin to die as age and illness take their toll.  It has to happen and cannot be avoided.  One by one friends leave us, pop/film/TV stars appear old, youngsters ask "Who were the Beatles?"and our Christmas card list shorten in length.  Such is life.  For us three score years and ten or thereabouts is indeed our lot.  Life is short and once you realise that you realise you are no longer young.  Your ageing is reflected in the appearance of friends, the gray hair, wide midriff, grumbles about grandchildren!     

My friends problem however is that they love too much and in this latest situation the dying man was his 'Best Man' well over forty years ago and has always been part of their life.  To see his life ebb away through a horrid illness was not easy for them.  

When my mother died at 94 years of age she was the last of her lot as it were. All her family had gone before her, husband, father, brothers, sisters, even many nephews and one of her own daughters.  Her friends, some going back to the 1930's, had left before her.  As she looked around she could say she was the last remaining member of her family and her 'crowd,' and how lonely must that have been for her? Actually in a sense it was not too bad as she was the type to talk to anyone and would always find a woman with nothing to say to talk about the nothing for hours with!  However if you are used to people being there and suddenly there is an empty chair it is a strange experience and difficult for some to deal with.

   

Amongst those leaving us is one Dave MacKay!  This man supported the Heart of Midlothian as a boy and became a player at the age of 16.  By the time he was 24 he was captaining the side to the greatest ever League Championship in Scottish or British football.  The team that was the 1957/58 competition scored 132 league goals, losing only 29, losing also only one game and finished the season 13 points ahead of their nearest challengers.  Well over two hundred goals were scored in all games that season.

MacKay's determination to win as well as his ability to play football made him a legend in the game. Against his will, he remained a Hearts man all his life, he was transferred to Tottenham Hotspur at the end of the great season for a mere £32,000.   A bargains for Spurs and rather typical of the Heart of Midlothian board.  At Spurs he participated in winning the League and Cup double, winning the Cup Winners Cup and continued as a stalwart of the great Scotland side of the sixties. 

When his time at Spurs had come to an end he intended to return to Hearts and become player manager but Brian Clough locked him in a room and would not allow him out until he joined him at Derby County. A shrewd move as this began Clough's managerial career and extended MacKays.  A few years later he managed Derby himself and won the League Championship.  

He continued in football at lesser clubs for some time before retiring and left behind a legacy few can equal.  His hard tackling, his fair play, his gentleman like behaviour was not forgotten.  A tough man capable of hard work and tough on those around him to get the best out of them.  George Best, a real world class player, one of the greatest, considered MacKay his hardest opponent. Jimmy Greaves the great English forward who played alongside him at Spurs and spent much time with him on the field and in the bar knew that many of his goals came from the talent shown by Dave MacKay.  This man was unusual in that he is considered a football leged by three clubs, the Heart of Midlothian, Tottenham Hotspur and Derby County.  I doubt any man has equalled that record!

However Dave MacKays real heart was seen when watching a Spurs side play Derby County.  A TV commentator asked him what team he would support, came the reply "I'm a Hearts fan son!"   

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How Many Dead?

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Mail Online

I have just had a glance at the 'Mail Online' page and while I expect to see half naked, meaningless celebrities whom I have never heard off, and I also realise that scandal and shock will fill the page, I did find myself shocked by the number of dead people on the page.  One was 'happy Slapped' to death by neds, a four year old was found dead in a washing machine while playing 'Hide & Seek, a pretty young student finds herself dead crossing a road while on the phone, so the driver gets off with that one, and a father is found hanging not long after his wife and two daughters are found dead. Not a bad body count when we are still in the 'Mail's' opening section.

They were joined in the opening section by a 45 stone woman who, the 'Mail claims,' died after stuffing herself on junk food! We quickly move on to a nurse stabbed by her 'ex-lover,' never boyfriend, always 'lover' in this paper, and a 'newly wed stabbed to death by her step son' in the US. There is a cruise ship passenger dying after the gangway collapses, a mother bleeding to death after a long wait for the police, a professional footballer given 25 years for shooting an ex friend in a drugs related case. This led to another murder and about thirty shooting incidents in a notorious London housing estate. However hold on, we are only half way down the page! We still have the 'insanely jealous' boyfriend who bumped her of for finding another man, we must not miss him out must we? 

At a rough count, and it must be rough are there may be more yet to discover on this page, we have about 14, yes fourteen, bodies on one page of the 'Mail Online.' I have missed out the regular things, priests giving communion to dogs, a ship made from plastic bottles arriving in Sydney harbour,  shocking things found on a soap opera and lots of flesh on the side bar as 'B' celebs disport themselves for cheap publicity.

Murder used to be unusual in the UK. We use to manage about one a day, now we are at least ten times that number, although I have no official figures for this guess. The police once shuddered at the thought of carrying guns, now every station has it's 'armed response unit' Youths are always showing off by fighting, now however they all appear to carry knives, and especially so in inner cities. Drugs carry a great responsibility here as all areas appear to have a drug gang of some sort. Heavens, only a few years ago an armed police raid occurred on a house behind my mothers in Edinburgh. I spent 21 years in London and never saw an armed police raid, yet one occurs right next to what once was our playground! Totally unthinkable in the fifties!

There again it is a paper reporting 'news,' and facts are slanted to sell. These sad events take place all too often but life goes on. There are more good things in the New Forest than dead families, some housing estates, even black ones I will have you know, are full of folks just living their lives. Reading the press does give a skewed view of the world around us. When I lived in London the area, Paddington it came under, had about 660 'car crimes.' Stolen or just broken into for a few pounds, that sort of thing.  Maida Vale had well over 700 such offences! Yet when I arrived at this backwater  the local media talked of things taken from cars, garages raided, and police warnings to 'Take care out there!'

The end of the year report told us there had been 24 'car crimes,' and that this area was the safest in the county, and the county had the lowest crime rate in the country! Read your paper carefully!

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