He a son of Auld Reekie – but for John Blaikie, Kirkcudbright is where his home and heart are.
Meeting John at his home high up off Boreland Road, the rolling hills of Galloway can be seen in the distance.
And, as it turns out, he is a true man of the outdoors, canoeing on Loch Ken or scaling vertiginous peaks in the Cuillins.
Ever since he was a boy, John tells me, he likes nothing more than to be in the mountains.
“It all started with the Scouts – when I’m in the hills I’m in my happy place,” he smiles.
“You can switch off from any troubles going on at work.
“Up in the mountains you can solve these things and everything gets put in perspective.
“I find it very relaxing.”
John is chairman of both Kirkcudbright Canoe Club and Galloway Mountaineering Club, and confesses to being “a bit of a Munro-bagger” – the arduous hobby of climbing Scotland’s mountains higher than 3,000 feet.
“I have only 22 out of 282 to do,” he says.
“And if I had 11 days I reckon I could do them all.
“My favourite of all is Blaven on the Isle of Skye.
“Galloway Mountaineering Club is going back there next year.
“I’ve done the entire Cuillin ridge over one weekend, bivouacking over night half-way below the In-Pinn.”
From personal experience I know that stands for the Inaccessible Pinnacle, a fearsome pillar of rock on Sgurr Dearg requiring a strong head for heights and an abseil back down.
“It’s classed as a moderate climb – there’s good hand holds all the way up but it does get a bit exposed,” says John matter-of-factly.
“We climbed it without a rope but took one with us so we could abseil off.
“I did it once when it was misty – you couldn’t see the bottom which makes it far worse.”
John has been in high places abroad too, including a personal trip to Nepal in 2011, two months after his mum Betty passed away.
“We were supposed to fly into Lukla Airport for a trek to Everest base camp,” he tells me.
“But the weather was too bad and we put together plan B to do part of the Annapurna Circuit.
“We went right up to the highest lake in the world, Lake Tilicho.
“I took a pill box with some of my mother’s ashes with me and left it there, on a cairn.
“She knew I was going in November but died in September so she never knew I’d got there.”
John knows more than most the danger mountains can present in severe weather, recalling when, aged 16, he was among 14 pupils from Ainslie Park High School who got caught in a blizzard on the Cairngorm plateau during a challenging winter navigational trek on November 20-21, 1971.
The party had left Lagganlia Outdoor Centre and split into two groups, each led by an instructor, but as conditions worsened, as planned, both made for the Curran shelter.
John‘s group reached the crude metal and stone sanctuary safely but the other group didn’t – and five children froze to death under the snow.
“It turned into a white-out,” John recalls quietly. “But we had been trained to walk along a compass bearing and to count our paces.
“We hit that hut bang on and there’s no question our compass and map training saved our lives.
“Usually it’s 160 paces to 100 metres. In snow it can be double that, so you have to make that correction.
“To keep on the compass bearing in near-zero visibility, one person would go 20 metres in front with someone directly behind keeping him on the correct heading.
“The whole group then walks up to the guy ahead and the same thing is done again and again.
“That’s how we hit that hut.
“It was so cold that my balaclava was stuck to the wall.
“It was like sleeping in a freezer.”
More than half a century later, John still feels children need to be exposed to the great outdoors.
“Kids have to learn how to assess the dangers,” he says.
“They need to be shown how to prepare for the conditions and to use a map and compass – not their phones, because phones can fail.
“I’ve been coming down Ben Nevis and met folk not even at halfway in cagoules and trainers, with no back packs, asking how far it is to the top!
“I just thought ‘you are an accident waiting to happen’.”
While his wife Pat sets down a steaming mug of coffee and a pile of biscuits, John tells me he was born in Edinburgh in 1955, where his dad, also John, had an ironmonger’s shop.
There’s an immediate family connection to the region – John’s mother Elizabeth came from Dumfriesshire.
“She was Elizabeth Nairn Morton – her proper name was Bessie but everybody knew her as Betty,” he smiles.
“My grandfather Robert Morton had Fishbeck Farm between Lockerbie and Lochmaben.
“My mum met my dad in Edinburgh while at the Edinburgh College of Domestic Science, better known as Atholl Crescent.
“My dad almost became a dental technician as his father, William Blaikie, was a dentist in the city who had the first car in Edinburgh with pneumatic tyres – that was his claim to fame!
“But in his wisdom my father decided to open a hardware shop but it was hard going.
“I used to deliver cans of paraffin up and down tenement blocks from a wee push cart, carrying the cans up the stairs.
“We had a van and would go with my dad all round the outskirts of Edinburgh.
“In summer we’d go down to grandpa’s at Fishbeck and take a cottage at Kippford or Rockcliffe for a couple of weeks.
“I have fond memories of coming down – that’s what sparked my love of Galloway.
“We would walk over the hill from Kippford to Rockcliffe and go into the wee corner shop at Kippford for a stick of barley sugar.”
At Ainslie Park High, John recalls, his mild dyslexia left arithmetic skills untouched but caused mayhem with his spelling.
“I was put into classes where you were not expected to pass exams – but I got my O-levels and Higher Geography anyway,” he says.
“Geography always caught my imagination and I had a good teacher who would say ‘John, you will always lose 10 per cent because of your spelling.’
“It was always the same – I would get ‘b’ and ‘d’ mixed up.
“To write ‘Bob’ I’d be told ‘just imagine – Bob with a book on his back’.
“And I would ask ‘but what way’s Bob facing?’
“I could count no bother but I never got my English Higher.”
“Ainslie Park did have a great outdoor adventure philosophy though,” John adds.
“We’d go up the Tay canoeing and go climbing as well.
“I stayed on for sixth year – only because we were going on a trip to France.
“We took a minibus over with a big claymore on the front.
“On the French-Swiss frontier the border guards were staring at us.
“They asked if it was real but it was only polystyrene!
“The trip was great – we kayaked down four rivers, one of them fed by a glacier.
“I would have loved to have been an outdoor education instructor, but it wasn’t to be.”
Finished with school, John met a French girl in Edinburgh and moved to Lyon.
“I went over thinking I could get a job,” he smiles ruefully.
“But I couldn’t speak French and I ended up coming home after two weeks.
“I ended up in the National Coal Board’s retail order office in Edinburgh during the miners’ strike of 1973-4.
“All the miners could order coal and get so much free but when the strike hit it was just chaotic.
“There were a lot of pits around Edinburgh and I remember you couldn’t put the phone down without it ringing again – everybody was looking for coal.
“It killed the mining industry and looking back it was a very sad time for the miners.”
Next job stop, John tells me, was the retail trade.
“I was an inventory control clerk at Safeway – a fancy name for checking stuff coming in the back door,” he laughs.
“After two or three years a job came up at Harper’s Cash and Carry in Morningside, which became Booker’s.
“I became assistant manager but ended up leaving because they bypassed me for the manager’s job.
“They brought in somebody else to be the new manager and I had to show him what to do!
“I thought I could have done this but I lacked confidence and maybe that’s why I never got the job.
“Then one day a chap came in who worked for Co-op Insurance and suggested I get into that.
“It was something I’d never thought about but down visiting my first wife’s parents in Kirkcudbright I saw a job advert in the Galloway News for a Co-op Insurance agent.
“I thought ‘och, that’s what that guy said!’ so I applied and got it.”
During his time with the Co-op, John explains sadly, the insurance business completely changed.
“When I started I became friends with the families – they saw me as their insurance man and if anything happened they would turn to you.
“We had to buy our books when we started and you got a loan to start you off.
“Your book had all these customers on it and the more you added the more its value went up.
“You were picking up money once a fortnight or once a month.
“I was not a particularly good salesperson, but I played to my strengths.
“The Co-op had a really good car insurance policy and through word of mouth I built up one of the biggest books in Dumfries and Galloway.
“That gave me a big income but then everything started to change to selling life insurance, pensions and mortgages.
“I was not really cut out for that and you had to sit exams – and being dyslexic that was difficult.
“I would get really nervous, my hands would shake and I had to take beta-blockers to calm me down.
“I failed the first time and passed the second but there was far more writing and record keeping.
“Then the home calls were stopped which I felt took the heart out of things.
“It was no longer a proper service giving people advice and I hated cold calling.
“The Co-op’s office in Dumfries shut and we had to travel down to Carlisle.
“Then all the commissions to the sales persons were cut.
“The Co-op bought the books back which gave me some money but within three years my income had halved.
“At that point I thought I could retire if I wanted to so in 2008 I did, with a good pension from the Co-op.”
I do my calculations and work out that John was only 53 when he “retired”.
“Aye, I felt too young not to do anything,” he laughs.
“I’m not somebody who can sit about – I enjoyed gardening and thought I’d stick an ad in the Galloway News.
“It was mostly grass cutting and keeping gardens tidy.
“I did bit of painting and decorating as well and really had too many customers.
“Covid gave me a reason to start cutting things back and learn to say the word ‘no’ and put everybody on a 14-day rota rather than seven.
“There’s still one elderly person we go weekly to – Pat cuts her grass in the sit-on mower while I follow behind with the push one!”
John, who has four boys and a girl from his first marriage living in London, Carluke, Dalbeattie, Castle Douglas and Kirkcudbright, along with five grandchildren, is also chairman of Kirkcudbright Summer Festivities, the go-ahead volunteer group running a busy events schedule.
“It was after a Thursday Scottish Night at the Harbour Square about 25 years ago that I got involved,” he recalls.
“Tom Lamont said they needed people to help out otherwise things would start folding and they put an appeal out over the Tannoy.
“I’ve been chairman for approximately 10 years and I’ve always remembered what former chairman Harry Marland used to say: ‘We are here to maintain the economic vibrancy of the town’.
“He was right – if you bring in the visitors that will make money for local pubs, shops and hotels – it’s all about making money for the community.
“And if it wasn’t for the Summer Festivities charity shop we just couldn’t do all that we do.”
John takes great pride in his role, explaining how the events programme has grown out of all recognition from the original offering.
“When the festivities started in 1971 there was a six-week period where stuff was put on,” he says.
“Although annual turnover is around £130,000, even the tattoo does not cover all its costs. The country fair does bring us in money – it’s very family-orientated and we keep our prices very low compared with elsewhere.”
