2 Days in 1

John Beattie

2 Days in One by John Beattie

I have two days that merge into one. My father was a big, rough man, a gardener from Glasgow who went to Borneo in his early twenties to work as a rubber estate manager in the frontier days when being accosted by a cobra was as common as getting in your ex army jeep to rampage through the jungle. He was my hero, and yet my brothers and I knew that the toughness that was part and parcel of him was softened by a congenital heart problem that came to haunt him in his sixties.

Our family came back to the UK when my father was around forty, he retrained as there was very little call for rubber planting in the West of Scotland, ran a marathon, took up squash and fencing, worked far too hard to put the three of us through private school, and then after he retired picked up hobbies like archaeology while studying for two degrees at the same time. ... (continues)