Remembering at Epiphany

Today we celebrated Epiphany for a second time, and I found myself remembering, as darkness fell, that Epiphany 43 years ago, when I barely knew what the word meant, the day that George James Cosmo Douglas, Dean of Argyll & The Isles, died. A week later, I went with the other members of the St Maura Singers to sing at his requiem in the Cathedral of The Isles on Cumbrae. I came away changed for ever. Talk about Epiphany? That was mine.

40 years later we returned to sing at a memorial service. During the service, George Douglas's missal, covered in a piece of material from the coronation robe of Tsar Nicholas II, shared the altar with a photo that I recall appearing in a magazine a few years before he died. If I met him now, he'd still be 15 years older than I am now. I'd be able to tell him the strange realisation I reached during his requiem, and that he'd taught me to cook. And I wonder how we'd react to each other. He was certainly very kind to the clueless young woman who sang the way he liked and occasionally skivvied for him in the College kitchen. I feared and loved him in equal measure. 


I owe him a great deal.