vivdunstan

Exploring another branch of my maternal Scottish family tree, and finding a nephew of my 5xg-granny from Melrose who was a Professor of Hebrew, dying at North Leith in 1901. His dad, husband of my g..aunt, had been a schoolmaster at Galashiels in the early 1800s.

Booking a table for breakfast tomorrow after my yearly haircut. "Did you say Dunsinane?" Hahaha! That would be a first. We'll see how our name is written on the sign tomorrow 😜

Usually we get Dustin, Dunstone or especially Duncan. We often joke we should change our surname to the last for an easier life ...

Dunstan is a Cornish surname mainly, though it's also strongly associated with Somerset, especially with St Dunstan from Glastonbury. It's also a name I knew as a child in Melrose, with St Dunstan's an area there.

Finally getting to this, though it will take us at least two watches to get through it, given how sedated I am. Eyes were peeled for Leaderfoot Viaduct near Melrose near the start! There was much excitement there when the filming happened.

Impressions so far, halfway through, are positive. Though if anything it seems over hectic: too many prolonged action sequences, not enough calmer bits. I don’t remember earlier Indy films leaning so heavily towards the former, but that may just be my bad memory!

I’m impressed by how well the de aging of Harrison Ford and Mads Mikkelsen worked. I expected it to be more jarring. I only found some bits when Indy’s face turned side on to look badly fake. I found the horse and bike race visual effects more dodgy. Amused to see a pipe band, in a bit filmed in city centre Glasgow.

Phoebe Waller-Bridge is doing a good job, and Helena is suitably unreliable and hard to pin down. Nice to see John Rhys-Davies again. Though he’s toned the accent down! And Toby Jones was fab.

Was just chatting to Mum, and she reminded me of my performance at High Cross Church in Melrose as Angel Gabriel in the Nativity Play. Whose speech was delivered not from the pulpit as intended but from behind the Christmas tree, invisibly 😜 The funny thing is I can remember quite a lot of that, including the effort of learning the speech. *So* long ago now ...

Just been chatting in the comments on my accordion tuner's Facebook page with someone who may have sold us one or more accordions at Clinkscales between 1976 and 1981, and also brought down my first accordion teacher from Lanarkshire to work in Melrose. Bill Sharp was my first accordion teacher when I was aged just 4 in 1976. And again later in the late 1980s before uni. Small world!

Mum loves to recall the story of little me in Melrose glued to the accordion shop's windows. And absolutely sure, though aged just 4, that I wanted one. And always going back to look in the window some more.

Finally installing Python3 on my new Mac so updated my family reconstitution code from Python 2 to 3 (very easy). Running both versions in test sequence produces identical results, core output and GEDCOM file. And the Python 3 runs 3 times faster than Python 2! This is reconstituting nearly 7000 baptisms and 3000 marriages at Melrose parish in Roxburghshire (Scottish Borders) before 1800. Putting children into families with parents, and outputting family groupings as a GEDCOM file for import into a genealogy program. This is the only Python program I've ever coded. I was a computer science PhD student when my neuro illness struck at age 22 in 1994. I had to drop out, and have barely coded since. But something must have stuck! The pseudo code was easy to convert into Python, even for a newbie.