Remembering John Byrne, Ross-shire Journal
'Get Me Some More, Just Like Him' I unearthed my Certificate of Scottish Education today, during what my beloved, late Grandmother would once have referred to as a "right good bogle" about the loft. It can be unnerving up there, balanced on rafters, juggling baby clothes and bags of tax returns, whilst past-lives flood back. I spied the document before I recognised it, in its latest incarnation it has become dog-eared, tattered, the colour of butter. But, there it was, present-day proof of my teenage self's attainment in higher education. Aside from the subjects of Art and English, believe me, these long sweated-over results were anything but assured. And for a while, even Higher English, to steal a line from the class's set text, was as dead to me as the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveller returns. However, as fate would have it, beneath my teacher's Fair Isle tank-tops beat the raging heart of an iconoclast. If he couldn't breathe
