Scud Broons new flat Diaries

Well, that’s the first month over with and all in all it’s been a no’ bad wee journey so far – F-ckin Baltic though but now that spring, theoretically, [at least] is here the cold should be the last thing on my mind. People at work have been great and very kind and my family have been out of this World as always. It’s a funny thing but when I’m eating my scrambled eggs or Bacon sandwich or whatever when I get in from work in the morning I get a great view of the Pentlands from Scald Law to Hillend- ish but right in front of me, maybe Three or Four Hundred yards away is the wee Bowling club[Letham] and next to that is what remains of the old road which before Livingston was built used to come out onto the Pumphy to Mid Calder road near to the entrance of Dandy’s farm. I can’t remember but when Davy B and I were bairns that old road was a favourite walk of my mothers and she used to take us for walks along it- sometimes starting at Harrysmuir Road and on down through what is now Pine Grove and the Mall and eventually out at the wee junction on the Mid Calder road and sometimes she would take us in the opposite direction. I remember her telling me once that one day as she was starting out on the walk, Mr Porteous, the local bobby told her that it would probably be the last time she’d be able to take us that way as the heavy machinery was about to move in and start building what is now Craigshill- and here I am Fifty years later able to look out at where I used to go as a toddler. ‘That is the land of lost content, I see it shining plain-the happy highways where I went, and cannot come again’ .