St Patrick’s Day. Always a memorable date in my calendar. It was 17th March 1990 that I got married for the first time at the age of 39. I’d survived that long as a bachelor but a holiday romance heli-skiing in the Cariboos in Canada’s Rocky Mountains proved my undoing! I spent my final night of freedom in the glorious Chateau Lake Louise, an hour’s drive North of Banff in Alberta, with a small group of friends. It made for a memorable transition into the married ranks. Patti was a top skier who worked for a heli-skiing company called CMH in winter and for the Canadian Parks Service as a Ranger in the summer. What a life she had until I came along and wrecked it! She lived with her sister and brother in law in Banff, which is where we got married. Banff is a stunning mountain town. Hopefully it has recovered from Patti and I driving down the Main Street in a large old, bright orange, slightly dishevelled pick-up truck with horns blaring, a symphony of tins rattling along behind and much shouting and screaming. We spent our wedding night in a log cabin on a camp site that had been well and truly “doctored” by friends and family. The clingfilm over the lavatory bowl proved to be a particularly effective man trap. We drove outside the Park to nearby Canmore for our Wedding breakfast the following day. Patti was an outstanding cross- country skier as well as a downhiller and she’d decided that we should ski the 18 kilometres back to Banff to work off the previous forty eight hour’s indulgences. I had done a little langlaufing in the Army so had a vague notion of what was involved but hadn’t prepared myself, mentally or physically, for the challenge presented by the warm weather. Waxing cross country skis correctly for the conditions is absolutely crucial so that you can get purchase on the snow when you push forward but also so that you can slide and glide over the snow without sticking. When the snow gets very soft and wet there’s only one wax to use and that’s Klister, which is so sticky it can grip the wet snow. But we’d decided that as a novice, I would use skis with a herringbone base that don’t require wax and which work reasonably well in most conditions; except slush. It was a glorious, piping hot day and the 18 kms took forever as I took one step forwards and two back. The new Mrs T paid for that for weeks to come! We spent our honeymoon driving down through the Big Sky country of Montana and Idaho, stopping off to ski as we went, before spending a few glorious days extreme skiing at Jackson Hole in Wyoming. I’ve just come across an old cowboy hat that we bought there, which has been rotting in the garage for years. It finally seems to suit it’s ageing owner and is now getting a regular outing on the streets of Eastbourne, which has precisely nothing in common with the spectacular mountain setting of the Wild West town of Jackson Hole in the Grand Tetons.
Surely the only other event of interest to take place on 17th March was the arrival of Dennis the Menace. It was on this day exactly seventy years ago that he made his debut on the pages of The Beano. I made my earthly appearance a couple of months later and was able to emulate Dennis’s activities on many occasions in the coming years. How lucky we were to be able to enjoy the innocent delights of those wonderful comics, The Beano, The Dandy, Topper, The Eagle et al and what an impression they made on young minds. Sixty years on the characters and stories are still fresh in what’s left of the mind. Will today’s youth have such memories of their interminable video games I wonder? Life seemed so much simpler then….
ADayInTheStrifeOf 