I’ve sent my Christmas present list up the lum to Santa Claus. It’s lengthy, as you can imagine. Near the top is a book by my old colleague Peter Ross, A Tomb With A View. It has had fulsome praise and I’m sure it’s wonderful because Peter is incapable of writing a bad line. If I don’t get it it’ll be because Santa’s snaffled it for his own post-delivery reading.

Like Peter, I have an obsession with graveyards. Glasgow’s Eastern Necropolis is one of my favourite places on Earth and I’m hoping to have my ashes scattered there.

You can judge the mettle of a place by the quality of its graveyard and the Necropolis is testament to that, even although some of the rogues, slavers and religious maniacs living there should be disinterred and their bones ground for grit.

I always recommend a visit to it for anyone new to the city, which usually means I don’t see them again.

The huge statue of John Knox dominates the skyline, although he isn’t actually buried there – he’s under the tarmac in the car park of St Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, which is the best place for him in my view. His pamphlet The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women (The First Blast) is all that needs to be said about him.

I’ll discover if this new book contains the wonderful tale of Margorie McCall, buried in Shankill Graveyard in Lurgan. The inscription on her tombstone says “Lived once, buried twice”, and it’s true. The first death was in 1705 when she succumbed to a fever and was buried to prevent whatever she had spreading.

She was interred wearing a valuable ring which her husband was unable to prise from her finger.

This was a double incentive for body-snatchers who could get paid for body and ring. And they duly turned up after dark and began digging. However, they too couldn’t wrench the ring free so they decided to cut off the finger whereupon, as the knife went in, Margorie snapped out of her coma and woke up screaming. Presumably O’Burke and O’Hare then did one. She climbed out of the grave and made her way home.

Her husband was in with the kids when he heard a knock on the door.

He told them, sadly, that it was the same knock as their late mother’s.

When John opened it and saw his wife standing there in a burial shroud, blood dripping down from her finger, he promptly dropped dead on the ground.

Margorie seems to have got over it quite quickly because she remarried and had more kids, and when her time came she went back to the same cemetery for the second time, hence the inscription which also carries the faint one of John.

Down to a T

A PRESENT to myself, the best kind, will be a T-shirt and a poster of Glasgow’s heroes and heroines – in the manner of Peter Blake and Sgt Pepper – by Renaissance keelie Stu Henderson, aka Stu Who?. I think I can recognise all the characters although they’re not all from the city but earn pride of place because of their association or what they have done.

Hence Harry Lauder and Ricky Ross. You can quibble over who’s missing but it’s Stu’s choice and so be it. I’m also thinking of adding in another T-hirt, one in the band’s iconic typography, Irn Midden.

Legend of ‘Muchty

SOME years ago I wrote a rather tongue-in-cheek piece about Auchtermuchty’s finest Jimmy Shand, whom older readers may recall as a Scottish country dance band leader and accordionist (he doesn’t feature in Stu Who? iconography). He was amazed to receive a request from his record label, I think, that I write a dedication for a forthcoming one, or a commemoration of some sort.

It wasn’t paid but even then I didn’t feel I could refuse, so I did.

And I really hate the accordion because listening to it brings back memories of chapped knees and wet short trousers that rubbed welts into the thighs and being virtually force-fed tripe.

I discover there’s a Jimmy Shand website and from that the information that he had a Top 20 record in 1955 with The Bluebell Polka and appeared on the BBC TV “Pop Music” programme, which must have been some sight, him in his kilt and all. He was knighted in 1999. But even more important is that several pubs, a diesel train and, what greater honour, a racehorse were all named after him.

There is also a statue of him in his hometown of ‘Muchty which, being clearly some kind of inspiring musical place, was also the home of the Reid brothers Craig and Charlie, aka The Proclaimers.

I recently came across an electric ceilidh band (I know, I need to get out more, but there’s nowhere to go!) named as an homage, at least in part, to Shand called The Sensational Jimi Shandrix Experience.

It’s led by Sandy Brechin, who almost made the Eurovision final in 1997 with the band Do Re Mi, featuring Kerry. They were pipped by Katrina and the Waves who went on to win the contest for the UK with Walking on Sunshine. Sandy’s song was Yodel In The Canyon of Love, which seems more than a little smutty.

Gritty pleasures

THE first winter snow brought out the snow ploughs and gritters, although as ever too few. But one of the many pleasures of this is to follow their progress on Transport Scotland’s live map, all of them named in dreadful puns.

Hence, Sir Andy Flurry, Plougher of Scotland, I Want to Break Freeze and For Your Ice Only. Although I couldn’t find Gritter Thunberg.

If you want to follow your favourites, head to the Transport Scotland website.