I, LIKE many other Scottish families, have devastatingly experienced the death of a loved one from terminal illness. My father was diagnosed with short-term terminal cancer. He was very pragmatic and faced his illness with huge bravery. His fear was not death itself, but how he would die. To put it bluntly, my father’s cancer experience over four months was devastating. He required medication to manage the extreme pain from his cancer, but this medication caused him terrifying hallucinations. With no other options, my dad had to continue with this treatment, and we watched our kind, sensitive, loving father become someone we no longer recognised and who no longer recognised us.
“It was the Evening Times,” smiles Hugh, who is 84 and now lives in Maryhill. “He always enjoyed the Lobey Dosser cartoon…” For the uninitiated, Lobey Dosser was the creation of Ayrshire-born cartoonist Bud Neill, who began writing for the Evening Times in January 1944. Ten years and 3000 cartoons later, he was interviewed for the newspaper and admitted he had been astonished when his first cartoon had appeared, and again when another one was published a couple of days later. “Come to think of it,” he wrote, “I have been living in an almost perpetual state of astonishment since then….” His most famous character was Lobey Dosser, the sheriff of Calton Creek, in the wild west of Arizona. He debuted in 1949 and Glaswegians took him – and his two-legged horse, El Fideldo, and his arch-enemy, Rank Bajin – to their hearts.