My Tain grandmother's great aunt (her grandmother's sister, if you see what I mean) lived to 101 and before she died in 1967 my cousin Brian took it upon himself to tape-record some of her memories of her early life in Tain and the Highlands.
As a belated birthday tribute to Brian, who has turned 90, I want to mention one of the old lady's recollections.
It was one of the most terrible winter storms, so violent that she rose from her bed and went over to the window of her bedroom in the family home in Tower Street, Tain.
In the black of the night, the mighty copper beech tree in front of the house was swaying and tossing like a thing possessed, the smaller branches whipping back and forth only inches from the window glass.
She said that it was a miracle that the tree didn't come down - and that the next day people heard the dreadful news of the Tay Bridge disaster.
During the storm, the bridge had collapsed killing all the 75 people on the train which had been crossing it at the time.
To hear Aunty Flo, as I knew her as a young lad, tell the tale, to hear her old Tain voice, a voice that has now vanished from the Highlands, brought the drama and terror of the storm home to me.
Over the subsequent years I have many times gazed at the old tree and remembered her words. They made the events of the 28th of December 1879 seem very real -perhaps because she was just 13 then, the same age as me at that time, and around her bedroom would have been the Christmas presents she had received only three days before.
But "all these things must come to pass" and at four in the morning two Sundays ago, during another storm almost 131 one years later, the old tree finally succumbed. With a thunderous crash, one that shook neighbouring houses, the copper beech was no more.
Fortunately no-one was hurt and damage was almost entirely limited to a front porch. If it hadn't fallen the way it did, then things could have been much worse.
During the week I knocked at the door and asked if I could have a small part of the tree's wood, now being chopped and sawn - not for the fire, but as a memento, something tangible to have and to touch, as part of the tale, as part of Aunty Flo's memory.
As I write, it sits on my desk. Sentimental? Of course it is. After all sentiment is one of the quiet melodies of life.
"Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay! Alas! I am very sorry to say" William Topaz McGonagall's clunking verse, written a year later in 1880, famously commemorates the disaster.
"Oh! Ill-fated bridge of the silv'ry Tay, I now must conclude my lay
By telling the world fearlessly without the least dismay
That your central girders would not have given way
At least many sensible men do say
Had they been supported on each side with buttresses
At least many sensible men confesses
For the stronger we our houses build
The less chance we have of being killed!"
"Er, yes" As literary critics doubtless said at the time.
The railway engine - typical Stone fact this - that had pulled the doomed train that December night was later recovered from the depths of the Firth of Tay.
Number 224, a North British Railway 4-4-0, was subsequently repaired and put back into service. However with black humour its drivers soon nicknamed it "The Diver" and being superstitious many of them were unwilling to drive it across the replacement Tay Bridge after it was completed in 1887.
The Diver was finally retired and broken up in 1919.
William McGonagall struggled to make ends meet during his lifetime. At one time, however, he was permitted to earn a living by reading his poetry in a Dundee circus while the crowd pelted him with eggs, flour and rotten fish.
This didn't seem to bother him particularly - but he was outraged when Dundee City Council decided that the poetry readings were getting out of hand and would have to be banned.
Thus he penned the following:
"Fellow citizens of Bonnie Dundee
Are ye aware how the magistrates have treated me?
Nay, do not stare or make a fuss
When I tell ye they have boycotted me from appearing in Royal Circus
Which in my opinion is a great shame
And a dishonour to the city's name"
