Vimy Ridge 90th Anniversary - Alec Paterson

Here is my grandfather in his Major's uniform. This must have been taken after Vimy when he was promoted.

We are off in just over a week to join the 25,000 people expected to spend the day of the 9th of April remembering men like Alec. 60,000 who never returned home.

They went off in innocence. Here is a transcription of the first letter home that Alec wrote to hs parents from Salisbury plain. It tells of his trip to England. There is no expectation of what was to come. How could he know that he would survive the entire war and in so doing lose nearly his his friends and see things that no man can witness and not be changed by.

Alec came home. All his cousins were killed and his brother Hartland had lost his leg.

Alec's unit war diary begins today with "At 5.30 today the artillery opened as one gun and the noise and flame was awe inspiring.."

As the day ended in victory for the infantry, orders were received to move the brigade forward. It began to rain that night. They worked all night "It was a terrible night to move guns but all were in position by day light as ordered. Each battery also took forward several hundred rounds of ammunition"

No sleep for any of them now for days. On the 10, they were in action while more ammo was brought up. On the 11th they were in action while they dug in. On the 12, they had orders to move forward again to beyond the Ridge. By the 17th the 5th battery was in Farbus well into the Plain below the Ridge.

I cannot see how any of them could have slept for over a week.The pressure on the horses and the men must have been terrible. By the 17 they were short 187 horses. It meant that the horses were literally being worked to death and that the men were living doing a lot of the pulling.

The site at Vimy looks so clean and peaceful today.

Sophia is so busy

For my five-pounder, I ventured to the best source I could find, Allen’s Scottish Butchers on Weston Road in Toronto. (It’s Mr. Higgins’s favourite.) If you think haggis is mostly talked about but seldom eaten, consider this: In January alone, Allen’s will prepare and package three tonnes of the stuff, roughly 200 to 400 organ sacks a day, each weighing from 1 1/2 to 10 pounds. When I walked in on proprietor Stephen Allen, he was hacking away at a baseball pitcher’s mound of bright-pink lung. If there is a hell for vegetarians, this is it.

Taking his cue from the modern-day haggis practice in Scotland, Mr. Allen adds a considerable amount of lean ground beef. “I tell people there’s not enough sheep in Ontario for me to make haggis for one year,” he said. For his casing he uses beef cap (the large intestine) instead of sheep’s stomach because it extends to a wider variety of sizes. Two of his secret ingredients are fatty tissue from lamb shank and a subtle dusting of nutmeg.

“A spicy meatloaf is the best way you can describe it,” he told me. And it has a slight undercurrent of liver flavour. The texture, unlike meatloaf, is loose, so it’s meant to be scooped rather than sliced.

Robbie Burns is my distant cousin - prouder of this connection than any other in my family.

Haggis really tastes quite nice as the writer says here - more like a very tasty meatloaf.

I only went to my first Burns night supper a few years ago in Toronto. I cried my eyes out. I think that the songs and the verse and the whiskey had combined to reach into my Scots soul.

Burns was an all out artist. All out in every way. In his work, his love - millions are related to him as he had so many girlfriends and bastards many of which were looked after by his wife - and in his full on approach to life itself.

A great ancestor