If you’re in the sitting room, and you’ve just missed him, you’ll know that he’s been there. A book, one of the harmonicas, a blanket abandoned on the sofa. And you’ll see the stove, laid for lighting later, its kindling a Jenga tower on the coals, the hearth neat and clean. You might feel the air stir with a chord, a whistle or a fragment of a song. In the afternoon, you’ll hear him in the next room, playing the piano. Two years into his learning, his fingers are deft now as he plays upbeat tunes – La Bamba, Poker Face – as he practises his blues riffs.
And when he comes into the room, you’re struck first by his height. He’s over six foot three, with a long loping gait. He’ll put you at ease, listening to you thoughtfully, carefully, his blue eyes crinkling with a smile. A blues man moustache and strap. Always neat. His hair is silver now, close cropped, with little on his crown. If you still have a full head of hair, he might mock you gently about that and toss his head as though he is shaking his dark, shoulder-length locks of fifty years ago. His voice is peat dark, a moor in summer sun, the finest Old Pulteney.
He wears merino and denim, and on special days, his kilt. The ancient, autumn muted green myrtle and grey granite of his clan.
He’ll always find something to laugh about with you, even in dark days of illness and loss. Recovering from a major operation some years ago, he kept up the spirits of his fellow elderly patients by planning with them ‘a great escape’ from their ward, as together they recalled 1950s British war films.
Children adore him. He still knows how to play. He is the garden goalie. He is the Xbox buddy. He is the teller of the Tallest of Tales.
‘Laddie, you’d better put that Lego away before you go to bed. You don’t want the Lego Walrus to get your bricks.’
‘The Lego Walrus...?’
‘Did I never tell you about the Lego Walrus?
And they’re off. Such tales.
But what if you’re any old age, and still young at heart? If you care to, catch his coat tails. He’ll conjure for you worlds of words, of fantasy and fun. And you’ll bounce ideas, images and glee. And he might tell you the tale of a summer afternoon long, long ago, when he and a girl launched a super ball from the hayloft of an old Banffshire byre, their laughter ricocheting almost as high as the ball. And he’ll look at me, and we’ll smile.