Lunching with Friends

Yesterday we drove 2 hours to have lunch with friends. We picked up Haig and Trish Hamilton and drove up the A9 (Scotland's major north-south route) to the town of Kingussie (kenYOUsee) to meet Sandy (the man with the beard in the photos above) and Patsy Thomson (the one whose hair is still dark in those photos) who had driven down from Cromarty. The 6 of us had enjoyed a previous luncheon 6 or so years ago (none of us can remember the year for sure). We had a most enjoyable time yesterday , starting with drinks in the garden of the Columba House Hotel before moving into the dining room for our meal.

We caught up with each other's most recent holidays abroad (Italy for us, Germany in a camper for Sandy and Patsy, and British Columbia for Haig and Trish who went there for their daughter's wedding). We caught up on where our children are and what they are doing and then showed off photos of our grandchildren.

The way we met these two couples is one of those "small world" stories. Sandy, who lived in Glasgow, and I met online in 1995 as members of a discussion list on Scottish independence. He and I had a number of things in common, among them, working in higher education and choral singing. In off-list chats, we got to know each other better. During our first self-catering holiday in Comrie in 1996 (the first time we rented a place for the duration and cooked for ourselves), Sandy and Patsy drove over to Comrie for the closing Comrie Fortnight parade and to stay for supper with us. We hit it off right away and the four of us became good friends. When Sandy and Patsy came to a conference in the States later that year, they visited with us for a few days.

When they retired, they moved to Cromarty on the Black Isle, north of Inverness, where we continued to see them during some of our holidays. (One of those times we house- and cat-sat for them while they took a 3-day jaunt to Orkney.) In the late 90s, Sandy wrote to say that his former brother-in-law, Haig, and his wife had retired and moved to Comrie. (Haig's late first wife was Sandy's sister and Haig had stayed in touch with Sandy and Patsy.) Sandy gave us their address and urged us to look them up the next time we were in Comrie. They had bought a cottage on the same road and just 2 doors up from the cottage where we did self-catering. We did and found that we 4 hit it off right away.

Haig immediately began talking with Don about golf and when Don said he wasn't a golfer, Haig said "Well, you will be." He told Don about the Comrie Senior Men's League and told Don it was the best way to form social connections with other men in the village. Don was certain he was unlikely to ever take up the game. While they were chatting, I asked Trish what she did while Haig was off playing golf and she replied that she was a patchworker. Then we learned that Haig sang in the Crieff Choral Group. Well, you can see that we were destined to become friends too. In fact, Haig and Trish had us to stay with them when we moved to Scotland and the place we were to rent wasn't ready for occupancy yet. (I'm pleased to say that after 2 weeks together, we're still good friends.)

And so we 3 couples have enjoyed staying in touch and have now had 2 reunion luncheons. We don't see Sandy and Patsy as often as we'd like but are awfully glad they introduced us to Haig and Trish. We vowed that we wouldn't wait so long for the next reunion luncheon.

We were still so full from our big lunch that Don and I skipped dinner. We did, however, go to the Deil's Cauldron Restaurant to play Petanque. We played a game with David and Liz Nicolson and then a 3 girls versus 3 boys game with a third couple. It was great fun until close to the finish when the midges started to flutter around.