I am Gordon Mackay, part of the Doric Future Team, and Kenny Davidson was a great friend of mine. He was a charismatic man, around 20 years my senior.
We met first met when I moved to the North East in 1981, sadly Kenny passed away in 2011, but during these 30 years I came to know so well and we had some joyous times together. I loved his sense of humour and admired the pride he had in his Doric roots, I hope this article will enable others to experience the same joy by reading and enjoying his unique work.
A former merchant seaman and officer with the Metropolitan Police, Kenny had a great back story and was always full of yarns. In 1996 he approached me to see if I could help him produce a couple of small books featuring the notes he wrote as a schoolboy in an old school jotter back in the late 1940’s. The first was called “i Ploomin’s Grep An Werd” and is a schoolboys account of the Antient Order of Buchan Ploomin, he dedicated this book to my son Ewan. The second book was called ‘Mi Doric Loon’ both books captured vividly the time he spent claikin’ wi’ his granda, and hearing the great tales he had to tell.
I’ve tried hard to extract the content from the printed page as accurately as possible, I’m afraid that I may have made some typo’s on my copying of the text, but I hope this doesn’t diminish in any way the joy of the stories contained within these short books.
I have also attached PDF versions of both books for you to cross reference and perhaps even spot some of the typo’s I may have inadvertently overlooked, please let me know if you spot any and I’ll update my digital version.
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