Newsletter 2006

This year’s newsletter, the 25th edition since the first ‘true’ newsletter in 1981, is unique in that it has not been written by John. It is with this year’s mail-out that we mark the passing of Dr. John Middleton who will be known to all of you in some measure as the heart and soul of Mount Mary. In the early editions, David was called upon, on an annual basis, to proof read what he often considered to be a daringly provocative rag that made the likes of ‘Lots Wife’ and ‘Farrago’ look like “Teddy bears go shopping”. “I’m fairly sure you can’t say that” he would calmy advise, to which John would reply “well they bloody well deserve it!” David realized very quickly that the Mount Mary Newsletter was John’s scalpel with which he was surgically correcting the abnormalities of the known world. Or perhaps it was his pair of obstetrical forceps by which he was to deliver the foetal world from darkness into enlightenment. In any case, he retreated from the editor’s role, saving his advice and slowly coming to the understanding that this was a process not to be tampered with. Except for adding the occasional ‘cross’ to a “t” which didn’t have one or perhaps cautiously suggesting that John and the Oxford Dictionary could work a little closer on some of the spelling it was all his own work from then on.