What A Lark!

Between the years 1968 and 1972 I very much enjoyed working at Baird’s Newsagent’s at Morningside Drive particularly so during the school summer holidays when it was light, warm and with no school you were in no hurry.

Most often the paper run was done alone but sometimes in July my sister Anne would chum me. During the run I would send her up to a house to deliver a newspaper but when she came back I'd vanished behind a tree or a wall, only to leap out and scare her. 

The 1960s was a decade of rapid change with a greater accessibility to fun, luxury goods compared to the austerity of the 1940s and 1950s. Allied to this was the refreshing pop movement of the 1960s with a change in attitudes embracing a youth culture in clothes, music and technology changing our lives for the better, even when we were on our paper runs. 

All the way from Hong Kong with the advent of technology we could now work to music! In the late 1960s there was an explosion of cheap mini radios that came on to the market. And for many of us of a certain age it was a must have purchase. 

So, instead of solitary contemplative walks I could now enjoy the dubious charms of ‘Tony Blackburn’ on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show as I traipsed up Morningside Drive

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Lord Stott

On occasion I had to cover for an absentee and loved delivering the judge’s (Lord Stott) ‘Scotsman Newspaper’ to Midmar Gardens because I would nip around the garden to look at the goldfish in his garden pond.

Photograph Graeme Paterson

The morning’s adventure was sometimes finished off with a coconut bun from Martins the Bakers on the corner  of Morningside Drive before sitting on the wall outside the former Bank of Scotland bus stop at Comiston Place before taking the 16 bus back home to Oxgangs. How I enjoyed that last stretch along Oxgangs Avenue standing on the open platform trying to look cool by sticking my head out against the breeze. 

And as I walked the 60 yards back home to 6/2 more often than not some of the younger Blades children were already out the front playing, the start of another summer holiday day in Oxgangs.