Look who’s blown

SOME stories are too good to be true – particularly those that take place over the festive season. In many Christmas stories, things work out rather too well – the lonely find companionship; those without much joy in their lives suddenly have their world transformed; people are given things they have long wanted but never thought they would get. Some of these stories, of course, may be true, but most are probably no more likely than Santa Claus himself.

So how do you tell if a particular story is true? You check the details. You do that because it’s usually in the details that the flaw will be found. Ask any lawyer. Ask any journalist. They will all confirm that. Check the details and find the fatal mistake that exposes the story for what it is – an elaborate, credible invention but fatally flawed by that one false detail, that one inconsistency.

So if you check the details in this story, the first thing you’ll discover if you look up the fourteenth of December, 2014, is that it was, as is claimed here, a Monday. You will find that on your computer calendar simply by clicking on the arrow on the left and going back to 2014. Monday.

So that should make you think. And then the second detail: Monday the fourteenth of December, 2014, was a stormy day in the east of Scotland. Of course, December in the east of Scotland is, by the very nature of things, a stormy month, and it would be unusual if it were not. But there’s more. On December the fourteenth, 2014, there were high winds in the Edinburgh area – exceptionally high winds. You can check that against the meteorological data. The wind speed recorded at Edinburgh Airport was, at times, over 90mph. That was not all the time, of course, those were gusts, but 90mph was enough to lead to the cancellation of several flights. The 2.40 flight to Heathrow, for instance, eventually left at 4.20, and the 6.10 to Amsterdam was cancelled. Those are facts that can be checked.

AND here’s another detail: Edinburgh has a famously spiky skyline. Cast your eyes upwards and you see all sorts of crenulations, ornamental features and gratuitous spikes. That’s the way Edinburgh is, and that’s why on that particular Monday there were two incidents that were reported in the Edinburgh Evening News the following day. You can check up on these and you will find that a large stone ball – about twice the size of a football – fell from a building in the Tollcross area and landed on the pavement below, severely damaging the concrete surface but fortunately missing a pedestrian who was only a few feet away.

You can read the interview with her in Tuesday’s Evening News. ‘I was walking home,’ she said. ‘I was going to call in at the supermarket to pick up some sausages for my husband’s tea and suddenly this muckle stone ball comes crashing down. My first thoughts? Just as well I had stopped to look at a shop window or I would have been a few seconds later and that would have been it. My second thought was that it was a meteorite. We’ve been warned about those, you know, and I believe it’s only a matter of time before one hits us.’

That interview is all there, as is the report of another bit of damage – this time to a building on Queen Street, where several slates were blown off a roof and caused considerable damage to a car parked in the lane at the back. Again, the report is there under the unambiguous headline ‘Falling slates cause damage to parked car’. And at the end of that report there is the sentence: ‘There were no further reported incidents associated with the unusually high winds. But the police have urged the public to continue to be vigilant.’

The key word in that is reports. Nobody reported anything else, but that is not the same as saying nothing else happened. Because it did. ON THE fourteenth of December – it was a Monday – very high winds hit Edinburgh. At Edinburgh Airport, gusts of 90mph were recorded, but elsewhere it was thought the wind speed was even higher. According to an amateur meteorologist, the wind speed in Leith reached 103mph – well into hurricane territory. This was not for any length of time, of course; these were gusts. But a gust can do extraordinary things, as anybody with experience of high winds will tell you.

For Tom Macdonald, the weather was neither here nor there. He was 44; he lived by himself since his wife, Maeve, had gone off with a man she met in a petrol station; he had a very ordinary job in a Scottish Government department where he dealt with… well, nobody ever took any interest in what Tom did at work. He had one child – a teenage daughter – who lived with her mother and the man from the petrol station. She and Tom had a perfectly good relationship but she always seemed to be a bit distant, as if she found him slightly dull. As did Maeve, with whom he also had a courteous and reasonably friendly relationship, notwithstanding the circumstances in which their marriage had ended.

‘I don’t want you to think I was bored,’ she said to him. ‘I don’t want you to think that.’ But you were, he thought. ‘It’s just that Iain and I hit it off right from the word go,’ she continued. ‘That’s no reflection on you.’ ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind. The important thing is that you and Fiona are happy.’ Fiona was their daughter. ‘And Iain too, I suppose.’

‘Well that’s very good of you, Tom,’ Maeve said. ‘Very generous.’

Tom sighed inwardly. It was easy to be generous when you had nothing in your life. It made no difference, really. You were generous because there was nothing else for it but to be generous.

He thought of what she had said. Iain and I hit it off from the word go. How did you hit it off like that in a petrol station? And how did the word go come into it? He knew that was a metaphor, but he could not help but imagine her going into the petrol station to pay for her fuel and suddenly she hears the word go, and it is Iain standing there who has said ‘Go’, and she went…

Oh well, he had the flat in Morningside and he was not hard up, and he still had his golf club membership which he would do something about next summer when he would start to play golf again, and… And that, unfortunately, was it. There was nothing else, really. Just that.

He looked at himself in the mirror. He was not in bad shape, but he was definitely a bit thin. That was because he was not eating enough. People had said to him that he should eat a bit more and put on a bit of weight, but somehow he had lost interest. When he came back from work, dinner consisted of a boiled egg and toast or some pressed cod roe from a tin, fried up on the cooker with a teaspoon of olive oil and served with frozen peas. You do not bother too much with the frills when you live on your own and life seems a bit dreary.

Of course, you could go out. You could join some sort of social club – he walked past one each day on his way to work.

There was a rather scruffy-

Settle down for an enchanting flight of fancy from one of our best-loved master storytellers ... a truly uplifting Yuletide yarn that might – just might! – be true