Arnold John DiCola - In Memoriam

Dad died a week ago.

Some days it feels like it was just yesterday; others like it happened several months in the past. So much water under the bridge in so short a time and it all flows through my mind like those news clips of the flooding Saguenay River – a foaming torrent shot full of the debris of so many things that we pulled together in so short a time to say goodbye.

Sunday December 4 started early with a call from the Great War Memorial Hospital in Perth that Dad had requested an ambulance to take him to emergency admitting from his residence at the Perth Community Care Centre (PCCC), the nursing home where he had been living since April. He was struggling to catch his breath – more so than usual. “Usual” was hard enough; he was being fed oxygen at a flow rate of 6L per minute 24 hours a day.

(I learned early on that this was an extraordinarily high flow rate, but Dad’s lungs had been hopelessly frail for months. Calling for 6L / minute was easily managed while he was connected to the oxygen generator in his room, but it severely limited the time a portable supply could deliver him the flow he needed before running dry. Although it only happened a couple times, when his portable supply ran out during meals, staff had had to rush him back to his room. Unfortunately, that was all it took to make him routinely apprehensive forever after about being away from the generator in his room.)

I phoned the Perth emergency admitting department and the phone was answered by a person sitting right beside Dad’s stretcher – another much appreciated characteristic of small town Ontario. You don’t have to pass through screens of recorded messages to reach an actual person and, once you do, that actual person won’t demand everything up to a blood sample to verify your identity before giving you any personal information about a patient. The word I got was quite positive – Dad was stabilized, and likely would be in line after a couple hours’ monitoring for a return to his room at the PCCC.

Leslie and I drove to Perth to visit him that afternoon and although he seemed a little tired, his mind was sharp as a tack and his breathing seemed to us no worse than it had been for the past many weeks.

After about an hour, he was clearly getting droopy-eyed and we said good-bye, leaving him to his customary afternoon nap before supper.

We hadn’t been back in Ottawa for more than a couple hours when the phone rang again – the call identification window showed 613-267-xxxx – indicating a Perth number. This time it was the nursing director at the second floor nursing station (Dad’s room was on the second floor) who told me in devastatingly succinct sentences that Dad had suffered a catastrophic turn and would be hard-pressed to live past 11 pm. (It was already about 8:30.) She told me he was calmed – the result of morphine injections and while he would likely be unresponsive when I arrived, he would hear what anyone said to him so long as he remained alive.

Two very fast drives later – me from Ottawa and my brother, Steve, from Ingleside (just outside Cornwall) brought us together at Dad’s bedside. I got there first and leaned in close, saying so many things I had actually rehearsed during the whirling run from Ottawa. After about ten minutes, I ran a quick mental checklist to ensure I had said it all, then sat back, watching, holding his hand. His breaths were shallow, but consistently spaced.

A few minutes later, my brother arrived, with an astonishing tale of having been delayed by stopping to determine no one was inside a “fully engulfed” van that was afire at the road’s edge somewhere between Cornwall and Ottawa. (He recently retired from the RCMP, but acknowledged even his rescue training would not have helped, so fiercely was the van burning when he got to it. He left only after multiple rescue units from area police, fire and ambulance appeared just minutes after he had. Next day, the news brought no notice of any highway fatalities or victims of a van destroyed by fire. But he arrived at the PCCC with that on his mind on top of everything else.)

Steve had his own time alone with Dad and after I rejoined him, we sat and chatted quietly at his bedside, all the while never letting our eyes leave his steadily rising and falling chest.

At precisely 10:55 (remember the duty nurse told me he probably would not live past 11), the gap between one breath and the next seemed longer, then longer, then infinite... the “next” never came. I quickly stepped out in the hall and waved a hand to the nurse – a deeply compassionate woman named Margaret. She must have been waiting for some signal from me because she came immediately to Dad’s bedside and pressed a stethoscope to his chest. She asked for the oxygen machine to be stopped momentarily because even its faint but steady sound was overpowering the stethoscope’s sound channels. She confirmed a very faint heartbeat, but looked at both my brother and me and said simply, “Soon”.

Usually at this time in medical dramas on TV, a crash cart will be rushed into the room, paddles applied to a bare chest, a shout of “Clear!” and a whacking, brutal surge of electricity applied in an effort to jolt the body back to life. But in real life, when the patient has pre-signed a “Do Not Resuscitate” order and specified no heroic efforts at life maintenance when it is clear the only “life” as such that would be drawn forward would be solely machine-supplied – the room remains utterly silent. The nurse stood back a half pace or so. I have no idea what she saw that was any different from what my brother and I were seeing, but she watched Dad intently and in mere seconds she quietly spoke only the word, “There”, and Dad was gone.

She gently turned the bed angle back so he was fully horizontal (he had been partially elevated to a slightly inclined position, not quite fully sitting up) and he, heartbreakingly, looked precisely like an old man sound asleep.

My brother and I sat with him for a few minutes longer – I remember the nurse giving me a couple quiet bits of necessary administrative information – the need for a physician to officially “pronounce” before Dad’s body could be released to the local funeral director... I’m sure I replied but I will be damned if I can remember a single one of the many “next few steps” we touched on.

Steve and I went back to the house that had been our Perth family home since about 1970 and chatted long into the night. Ever since Dad had become a PCCC resident, Steve had been gradually transforming the house into a warehouse as he has slowly consolidated Mom and Dad’s “effects” (God, I hate that word!) into the few deeply sentimental pieces each of us wanted to keep, the larger number that various family members had requested – mostly his grown kids who are all gradually building their own first homes, and which we knew Mom and Dad would happily have given... and the rest to go into an eventual small town house contents sale, probably at auction.

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Arnold John DiCola was born May 21, 1930, the youngest of ten children (of whom nine survived into ripe old age; the tenth dying in infancy) and was extraordinary only in that his life was a typical documentary of so many of his generation, in other words, un-extraordinary.

He held some memories of childhood during the depression – mainly pride in how well his family was able to pull together to eat reasonably well, their modest collective income buttressed by the output of a huge family garden and a mother who knew everything that was knowable about preserving food in that decade. His high schooling coincided with the outbreak of WWII. The enlistment of no fewer than four of his siblings into the armed forces – three in the air force and one in the army nursing corps – was probably a major contributing factor to his having to leave high school to start work in order to provide one more income to help the family.

That became a lifelong regret of his, and the degree to which it would nag him was sometimes saddening – that he never got any farther in getting a “formal” education. I still remember on more than one occasion when several family members – usually after a massive dinner and lots of wine – would be in a swirling debate around the family room about some local or national or even international bit of political stupidity (a favourite topic of debate) and he would suddenly find himself grasping for the precise words he wanted to use to make his point and would blurt out, “I just wish I wasn’t so stupid!”

This was a man who himself enlisted in the Royal Canadian Air Force in 1948 and went on to master most of the vital mechanical airframe and engine components of pretty much every aircraft in the inventory of the day, from Vampire to Voodoo, Dakota, “Clunk” (the CF-100 Canuck), “Widowmaker” (the CF-104 Starfighter), T-33 and Sabre.

Along the way, he became a classroom instructor and trained jet pilots how to use their survival tool of last resort – the ejector seat. (He used to shock us with his aside of how he was present one day in a hangar in Trenton when a ground mechanic working in a jet’s cockpit accidentally tripped the mechanism and died instantly when he blew himself right through the hangar roof.) I like to think his training instruction perhaps saved a few pilots’ lives along the way – hardly the education of a “stupid” man.

In the photo, Corporal Arnold DiCola (right) is receiving the Canadian Forces Decoration (CD) in 1960, which after you’ve read this post will hardly surprise you to learn is presented in recognition of completing 12 years of service, the last eight in good conduct. He is wearing the uniform of an RCAF bandsman, the traditional blue fabric set off by gold leg stripes, gold cord epaulettes on the shoulders, gold fabric belt and the crossed bugles sleeve badge. His Corporal’s insignia are also reversed on the cuff instead of the usual chevron position above the elbow.

He also developed an unbelievably thorough knowledge of just about every device required to make a car run, and a house to be heated, fed water and supplied with electricity.

This led him through three separate post Air Force careers – in home heating while working with his brother, my Uncle Frank, for DiCola Fuels in Perth; a brief stint in retail working knowledgeably among the towers of hardware at the large Canadian Tire store on No.7 Highway in Perth; eventually completing his working-for-money life as a stationary engineer in Perth’s Great War Memorial Hospital, a link he forged even more strongly when he followed it with more than 15 years working there as a dedicated volunteer.

He was my personal mechanic – and happily so – until cars became so heavily computerized that nothing was ever “fixed” any more. Most flawed parts now are simply yanked from their hot-wired mountings and replaced. I also learned countless basic Do-It-Yourself tips from him and to this day have no fear of switching on any of the myriad of power hand tools in my workshop. (Whether the end result is “good” is a frequent point of domestic discussion, but I digress.)

At Dad’s funeral, I lurched through a few words and I am pretty sure I found what I still think is his greatest legacy. The night he died, my brother and I saw several of the PCCC staff, all of whom clearly knew what was happening and were making a point of saying goodbye – ostensibly because their shift was changing but I have no doubt their goodbyes went to far deeper places than, “See you on Tuesday”. But without exception, each took a quiet moment to tell Steve and me just how wonderful a resident Dad was – a “perfect gentleman”, more often concerned about their needs than his own. He routinely made a point, for example, of telling them to drive home carefully when the weather was anything less than perfect. (Don’t I know it? I got the same message at the end of each of our weekend visits if the day was anything but dry and sunny.)

At the funeral, I spoke about how Leslie and I have many times lamented just how angry the world is becoming these days – you see it especially in the public exchanges between politicians, but also regularly on newscasts where the inevitable first response to a tragedy is speculation about the size of lawsuit to come, and on the “reality shows” that consume so much of what passes for “entertainment” on TV and which seem to feed on a constant stream of hatred, anger, rage, betrayal and just all-round bitchiness. But even more broadly in the wider world, people more often just seem to be blunter, less kind and more prone to anger in even the most innocuous of situations.

And of Dad, I concluded at his funeral as I will here by saying that for all his many jobs, if his most prominent memory in people’s minds is that he was a wonderful gentleman, well there are worse legacies.

I ended by choking out a sonnet I greatly enjoy – and which often serves as a memorial to air force service in much the way as “In Flanders Fields” does for the army. It conveys the unfettered joy expressed by a young Spitfire pilot in WWII whenever he soared among the clouds with his nimble partner. I like to think that in his final minutes, Dad’s spirit left his devastated body behind in the enshrouding warmth of his PCCC bed and carried him far aloft to precisely the same place Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee was when he wrote, “High Flight”. In fact, we are having the first line engraved on the headstone marking his and mom’s side-by-side graves in Perth’s St. John’s Parish Cemetery:

“Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings; Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth Of sun-split clouds – and done a hundred things You have not dreamed of – wheeled and soared and swung High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung My eager craft through footless halls of air. Up, up the long delirious, burning blue, I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace Where never lark, or even eagle flew – And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod The high untrespassed sanctity of space, Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”

(Source: Flightglobal Image Store)

Goodbye Dad. You were one of the smartest people I have ever known. Everything good and wonderful about you that you passed on to your sons will continue to be passed on through us to your grandchildren.

Tear along the dotted line – Driving in Scotland, a North American motorist’s primer. From the moment we arrived at the Edinburgh Airport to pick up our rented car, I made a point of getting into our hosts’ good graces by publicly acknowledging my awareness that in the UK they drive on the OTHER side of the road (not the wrong side). And that does take some getting used to! We had had some preliminary practice in Edinburgh when, as pedestrians, we’d had to adjust to looking in the direction from which the traffic nearest to us would be coming before we stepped off the curb. Here’s the driving version: You roll up to one of the country’s countless T junctions and are confronted by this sign, where the universal “Yield” shape is amplified by an even clearer verbal direction. Certainly it leaves no doubt whatsoever what is expected of you.

The only catch, if you’re from North America, is to remember that the traffic in the lane closest to you is going to come boiling past from right to left – and don’t think I didn’t spend a couple extra seconds on every occasion when I found myself at just such an intersection. (Mantra: Turning left? Look RIGHT and then turn left into NEAR LANE!! Turning right? Look right AND left, cross the near lane and turn right into the FAR LANE!! Roundabouts. At first thought, you might consider the roundabout to be an intersection born in the mind of a psychotic civil engineer. But after as few as two or three passes through one you realize it is a perfectly sane way of controlling traffic and consumes far less land than one of our own high speed cloverleaf exchanges. As you approach a roundabout, you are faced with a billboard-sized map of the exchange. Mark your exit and enter the traffic flow. Most roundabouts are also heavily marked with lane arrows and dividers painted right on the paved surface as well. In the roundabout, just ease yourself into the proper turnout lane and Bob’s your uncle! If you do miss your turnout, you just go round again and catch it on the next pass. It doesn’t take long before you really appreciate that as a HUGE advantage over, for example, the Trans-Canada Highway’s unforgiving exits when you realize you’ve taken the wrong ramp and have to spend 15 minutes travelling to the next exit and 15 minutes coming back just to get back on the highway. (And for the record, it also helps to be in the company of a first-rate navigator who literally mimes your turns in real time with great sweeps of her arm as you enter the roundabout and approach your turnout lane!)

I may never again complain about the government expense required in this country (Canada) to present information in both of our official languages. In Scotland, especially in the North, they do the same thing – but the second language in this case is Scots’ Gaelic (which, it was explained to me, is correctly pronounced GAL-ick, not GAYLE-ick, as it is heard most often in Cape Breton and, of course, Ireland). As this sign indicates, sometimes it can be seen to make a modicum of sense. “Stèisean” is not too far removed from “station” and you hardly even need to know that pittance to derive “bus station” from “Stèisean nam Bus”. But how in heaven’s name, one is surely given to wonder, does anyone take a coined service like “Shopmobility” (a place where you can find one of those motorized wheelchair carts in which you see people motoring around grocery stores) and decide that its Gaelic version should be “Goireasan Ciorramach”? (Of course, come to think of it, on this side of the water who decided that the French for “dandelion” should be a word suggestive of nocturnal incontinence – “pissenlit”? But I digress.)

In fact, after a couple wee drams of a really fine single malt, probably “Oifis a’ phuist” looks like a perfectly rendered English version of how you’d be slurring it out.

Sometimes, even though a sign might be rendered entirely in English, its Zen-like mystery may still leave you wondering just what the heck is the message one is supposed to take away. And sometimes you know they’re just messing around and having a wee bit o’ fun wi’ ye.

As we got farther into the regions of less frequently travelled roads – especially on the Isle of Skye – we discovered two other important facts of driving amid the stunning scenic views. First, because those views are almost entirely rural, you will frequently encounter – and you must give way to – sheep and cattle. Here are a couple random shots of the highland and lowland non-humans we encountered on the roads we travelled in our rented bright red Vauxhall Astra. On one road, we came trundling over a hilltop to find ourselves slowed with the uncertainty of wondering where this little gang might be headed. Turned out they were just moving to fresh grazing somewhere behind us.

Speaking of the Vauxhall Astra, I will be first in line to sign a petition to demand that car rental companies throw an owner’s manual in the glove compartment of every car they rent. In my case, I was stymied entirely by how to pop the gas tank fill-up cover (not the gas cap, but its covering little door). In every car I’ve ever owned, this was accomplished from within the car – typically with a small push or pull lever located somewhere near the trunk release. But it was only when I was sitting beside a monument to Bonnie Prince Charlie gazing woefully at a gas gauge perilously close to “E” that a helpful Scottish teenager ambled by. Presented with my question, he walked back to the gas fill-up cover, lightly tapped it and watched it pop open. Just like an IKEA cabinet door. Then he looked at me with hugely sympathetic eyes and, after peering into the back seat to satisfy himself there wasn’t an empty whisky bottle on the floor, said simply, “Good luck!” I could not help but notice it was in precisely the same tone one uses with a friend who’s just told you that tomorrow he’s going to snowboard down the face of the Matterhorn. The Astra also has its headlight bright / dim switch located where it is in every car I’ve ever owned – on the steering column lever. But the “on / off” switch? Nowhere in sight. My having failed to find it when I first thought it might come in handy actually required our coming back rather too quickly one evening from a restaurant dinner about 10 km from our bed and breakfast on Skye. It was only the next day when, prepared to dismantle the steering column if necessary, I finally found the switch on the face of the dashboard, but tucked away so close to the steering column that it was out of sight when one was sitting in the normal driving position. So rental car companies – help us out here, please! Make an owner’s manual standard equipment. Not all of us are prepared to spend the $1.00 per second for the internet satellite uplink to search one out online when no free WiFi is near.

This is Hamish. Hamish is a “hairy coo” If you think I’m making that up, just Google “Hamish the hairy coo” to see how many fans he has, and how many virtual places there are where photos of him have been posted online. Hamish is a tourist attraction entirely in his own right and lives at a roadside stop near Stirling that includes a café, a large souvenir shop and a sizeable parking lot to accommodate his many admirers. (“Hairy coo” souvenirs, in fact, are available all over the Scottish northlands and Islands. The shaggy highland breed makes for incredibly soft stuffies and they render beautifully on coffee mugs.)

And not just quadrupeds, either. Yep, that’s a remarkably curious emu peering at Leslie over the passenger side mirror. He (or she) strolled right up to the car on one rainy day and took a real interest in the back and forth beating of our windshield wipers, pecking with a chisel-like beak that threatened to do them serious harm and wandering away only when I turned them off. The second thing we discovered in rural Scotland driving is that a great many roads are single lane – nicely paved in most cases, but single lane nonetheless. But as the road shrinks, Scottish hospitality and courtesy expands at the same rate. Every couple hundred metres or so along a single-track road, there are “Passing Places”. Clearly marked, these paved pullouts generally are no bigger than the space required to accommodate one or two vehicles and more often than not you find yourself in a race to see who can be courteous first. The moment you see an oncoming car (or its driver sees you), one or the other of you ducks onto a passing place and blinks your lights to signal the oncoming driver, “No, no; I insist. After you!”

Here we are tucked into a passing place that also just happened to offer a wonderfully moody photo op. And yes, that sidewalk on the right side of this photo disappearing around the slope in the far distance is actually the road. There are helpful signs everywhere. The twisty highland roads give you lots of “Slow down!” warnings of tight upcoming corners and will even help tour bus operators stay out of trouble.

But the best part of taking yourself off the well-travelled roadways? It is worth it!

It`s been a while. I know that. But life moves in its cycles and for the past long months (probably more than a year, now that I think of it) I`ve been enveloped by some of those cycles that saw my Mom become seriously ill and, after a long but inevitably destined fight, die in February this year. As I write this, my Dad is struggling with two separate serious illnesses – non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma that is just running away and severe emphysema.

In the past few months, my brother and I have shepherded his move from our family home of many years to a nursing home, which he seems to have adopted as his new home. But it`s been a weird and even occasionally funny struggle riding along when his episodic fading hold on reality takes him.

One day, for example, during an extended hospital stay, he told me during a visit that for several nights the previous week, the “Chinese cleaning people” were sneaking into his bathroom and washing out their underwear in his sink. He honestly believed this to be true and offered as evidence the fact that the sinkside bar of soap was reduced in size each morning. I’m not recounting this to ridicule Dad. Rather, his situation is what it is and that is just one example. We actually laughed about it when I fed the story back to him during a subsequent moment of lucidity. Suffice to say the place my brother and I have come to is “one day at a time”.

I am not – you will be happy to hear – going to turn this into a diary of dying. Instead, I plan to use Baby Duck as an occasional escape capsule, and that’s the ride you’re invited to join.

So let me begin with an apology to anyone who reads this blog and also drops in on my Facebook updates. If you’re one of the latter, then you already know Leslie and I returned not long ago from a trip to Scotland. I covered some of those details in my Facebook photo captions of the 20 or so pictures I uploaded there, but our Scotland trip was an amazing experience and I plan to ramble on a good deal more about it here.

Rather than follow the example of our last major trip (the D-Day and WWI battlefields of northern France and a following week in Paris) that I wrote about in the order in which it happened, I plan to focus on Scotland as a series of vignettes – each built around a photo or two, to provide several tastes of that country’s wonderful variety of flavours.

I’ll throw lots of history at you, because it’s my blog and I really enjoy the history attached to the scenery. Treading the same palace floor as did royal feet as diverse as those of Mary, Queen of Scots and Queen Elizabeth II will do that to you. As, for that matter, will stomping about heather-covered land walked by Rob Roy, Bonnie Prince Charlie, Robert the Bruce and William Wallace.

And in no particular order.

But why the apology? (You ask.) It’s actually to those Facebook followers, because – as I mentioned – most of my Facebook photos will re-appear here (but with considerably more narrative, so please come along again, even if the photo is familiar).

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“High in the misty Highlands,
Out by the purple islands,
Brave are the hearts that beat
Beneath Scottish skies.
Wild are the winds to meet you,
Staunch are the friends that greet you,
Kind as the love that shines from fair maiden's eyes.

Towering in gallant fame,
Scotland my mountain hame,
High may your proud standards gloriously wave,
Land of my high endeavour,
Land of the shining river,
Land of my heart for ever,
Scotland the brave.”

The 2011 Royal Edinburgh Military Tattoo. There simply is no sound on earth to compare to as many of 15 different pipe bands simultaneously skirling “Scotland the Brave”. It just sends chills through you.


In the first of these pictures, the front rank consists solely of pipe majors – parade leaders of bands. I think I can count about 15, which will give you an idea of just how many full pipe bands are arrayed in the huge crowd of neat ranks behind them.

Part of this performance involved marching back and forth the length of the outdoor arena. When the field is this crowded, to achieve “marching back and forth” leaves you pretty much with only one option – to complete a 180-degree turn and march the opposite direction between (!) the already close-packed ranks of those still oncoming bandsmen.


The second shot shows that manoeuvre partly completed – if you look REALLY closely, you’ll note that each line is facing the opposite direction of the two on either side of it. They were literally brushing each other’s shoulder epaulettes as they passed.

This year, they also featured what the official program called “probably the most unusual band in the world” – the Band of the Royal Netherlands Army Mounted Regiments – Music Corps of the Bicycle Regiment.


As if marching and playing an instrument at the same time weren’t enough of a challenge, the musicians in this 24-member unit play while cycling in formation. The musical unit was formed in 1917 (the bicycle corps itself dates to 1894) and in fact they still wear uniforms first issued at the start of WWI.

Obviously, they recognize that the dominant audience reaction is going to be laughter, because they do play the clowns during part of their performance. At one point, for example, one of the cycling musicians took what looked like an awful tumble. Instantly from the sidelines a medical team rushed out with a stretcher. In short order, they administered a quick tire pumping to the bicycle before carting it – not the rider – away on their stretcher.

Oh, if you’re wondering, the bass and snare drummers do indeed play while cycling. The official program again: “The hardest job in the band is perhaps the role of the snare drum. To free both hands for his drumsticks, the drummer steers with prongs running from handlebars to elbows.”

Anyone familiar with the Edinburgh Tattoo simply holds his breath when the show approaches its finale, because it ends the same way every year. A solitary piper stands on the battlements of Edinburgh Castle, bathed in a single spotlight, and plays a lament. This year, it was “The Parting Glass”, a song traditionally played as a farewell at memorials. Any shivers that went through me at this point in the evening had nothing whatsoever to do with the cooling night air of the Edinburgh.

Dad was a military bandsman during his 20 years in the Royal Canadian Air Force and all I could think was how much he would have enjoyed seeing this show. But as Leslie said to me, when I told her why tears were streaming down my cheeks, “We’ll just enjoy it for him.”

When Hollywood myth meets history – and mytheth it entirely

This is the National Wallace Monument.


It’s dedicated not only to William Wallace but also Scotland’s “Hall of Heroes” in an exhibit that includes busts of warriors, authors and even economist Adam Smith, the man who largely slammed capitalism in “The Wealth of Nations”, because in his experience, most capitalists are driven only their own gain and their own security, and “never [was] much good done by those who affected to trade for the publick good”. (Every entry on this blog is an education in itself, isn’t it?)

The first thing Leslie and I did after getting up on day 1 was join a day-long guided bus tour through the lowlands and into the highlands away from Edinburgh. I confess I was full of doubts about how much I’d enjoy it – but we booked it because it came with tickets to the Tattoo and it was otherwise sold out.

As it turned out, I can now recommend exactly this experience. First of all, if you’re like most people, you need a little time to tune your biology – which is still five hours out of synch – with what the local clocks are telling you that you should be feeling. And secondly, in the hands of a competent and entertaining guide, you can find yourself having a heck of good time!

So back to William Wallace. As our tour guide informed us in no uncertain terms, a lot of Scots really dislike this “bloody Australian dwarf” – Mel Gibson – entirely because of his movie, “Braveheart”.

Most egregiously, for heaven only knows what reason, Mel’s movie has William Wallace being betrayed by Robert the Bruce. Didn’t happen, and since both are national heroes in Scotland, Scots especially dislike Mel for this.

History records that Wallace’s greatest victory was at the Battle of Stirling Bridge, a site within view of this monument. It’s called Stirling Bridge because its critical element was, duh... a bridge. Mel made the battle look like an open-field brilliant tactical win with no bridge to be seen anywhere. In fact, not so much a Wallace win, the battle was actually an English loss, because of some appalling strategy on their part. Their heavy mounted cavalry could only cross the bridge two abreast and Wallace – though outnumbered -- simply waited until about half the English had crossed. Before the whole army could form up and use their superior numbers, he threw a small defensive force onto the bridge, splitting the English army, and wiped out those on his side of the river.

The remaining English army, having watched the annihilation of half their number, decided discretion was the better part of valour and abandoned the battle.

Even this monument, which predates “Braveheart” by more than a century, had been criticized for being too... *ahem*... “upright” for Victorian sensitivities. But since “Braveheart” was released, visits to it and the rate of inflow of tourist dollars have skyrocketed. Bottom line: this monument appears to be doing to the Stirling sky what many Scots feel Mel’s “Braveheart” did to Scottish history.

In an hilarious sidebar story, a Facebook friend steered me to this monstrosity, which may or may not still be on the grounds. (We missed it and all I’ve been able to discover online is the existence a widening movement to have it removed. Apparently, the highly impressionable sculptor did his work very shortly after seeing the movie, according to a woman who works at the Monument’s gift shop – a story she told to blogger David English, who writes on his blog:


“This statue stands at the base of the William Wallace Memorial near Stirling Castle in Scotland. Wallace was the 13th-century Scottish rebel warrior, who was portrayed by Mel Gibson in the movie, Braveheart. So what’s wrong with this picture? The statue’s face looks more like Gibson than Wallace. I asked the woman at the gift shop about this, and she explained that the sculptor completed his work just after seeing the movie. She seemed a little embarrassed about the mistaken identity.

Update: I've been told there's a movement in Scotland to get rid of the statue because it doesn’t represent the historical Wallace. After the officials in charge stated they wouldn't remove it, someone sprayed it with red paint. The officials then encased the statue in Plexiglas, in order to protect it from similar incidents.”

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That’s all for now. But it’s more than enough to get my feet back into the waters of Blog Lomond. I’ll be taking you round and about Scotland for a few updates, but if an occasional unrelated excuse for a rant presents itself, I’ll go there too.

Until la prochaine.