The "Voice of Shinty" Hugh Dan MacLennan speaks ahead of his final Camanachd Cup final in the broadcast booth. He reflects on his early says in shinty and getting into journalism, as well as the impact of the Shinty Memories project.
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00:00 I made up my mind to do this quite a while ago, you know, like a year, not five years or ten years, because
00:06 it was, the 40 was a kind of nice, neat number, and then I realised there was the historical nicety of the
00:17 100 years of the Bach Park. I had discovered I had this cup which I was going to donate to the Sutherland Cup
00:26 as player of the match, which is also, that's 100 years old, this competition as well.
00:30 So there's a whole heap of things coming together, and I suppose that made it easier.
00:36 One thing that did make it easier was the fact that I came to the realisation it was 40 years
00:43 and it was enough a long time, and it was high time I stopped, and that there were now, particularly
00:50 in the commentating and in the Gaelic side, there are so many people who can follow in my
00:56 footsteps. It's not as if anybody's going to struggle to replace me, and I kind of look
01:03 back to when I replaced John Willie Campbell with so many of his roles in 1990, and I thought, well,
01:08 he was kind of fortunate I was there, so I'm very fortunate there's more people around that can do
01:15 it. Also, my wife and I have had health issues in the last 12 months. I had treatment for cancer
01:21 in January, all very successful, and my wife had an operation. She was in hospital at the last
01:30 Camannach Cup final. Ours has been successful, so it kind of focused our minds and our priorities
01:36 for the rest of our lives. It's not that it doesn't involve Shinty, but it needs to be free of the
01:44 kind of burden of fixtures and people in Dublin deciding what I'm doing on a given Saturday in
01:51 July or something like that. So it's the right time, and when I was resigned to it over such a
01:58 long period of time, it makes it easier, I think, but it will get, I think, get a bit more, maybe
02:05 emotional is not the right word, but it'll dawn on me much more as it approaches, because I've
02:11 been doing the last Macaulay Cup final, the last Celtic Society Cup final. There's a string of
02:17 lasts, which have all been very nice, and people have been very good to me, and they've given me
02:22 things and stuff. So I suppose I'm resigned to it and comfortable with it. You talk about having a
02:30 string of lasts there. Is that something you tend to think about, or are you usually quite a
02:36 sentimental person, I guess, in that sense? I am. I'm sentimental in that I place a great value
02:42 on history. I suppose it's the historical thing. I've been used over so many years researching,
02:48 and my life, I always keep telling people, has been run by the clock. You know, it's
02:52 every hour is 60 minutes, every week is, and all the rest of it. That's part of your training when
02:59 you're in the BBC, that you've got one eye on the clock all the time. So the logical extension of
03:05 that is that you clock up milestones, your first of this year, anniversary of that,
03:12 and it becomes habit, I think. I'm just fascinated by all these things. And I think this year it's
03:18 just come up with a huge bunch of them that require special treatment, if you want.
03:23 Yeah, because it really is the closing of a chapter for you, but also for Shinty and for
03:30 the BBC, you know, all these things coming together. Yeah, it is. And I've been doing a
03:35 lot in the last year. It's been 100 years of the BBC in Scotland, and I've been invited
03:40 by the BBC and other people, the National Library to give talks about that. And then when you
03:46 realise if they've only been there 100 years, and I've been there 40 years, I've been doing this
03:51 for nearly half of the BBC's existence in Scotland. That becomes frightening,
03:58 because it puts it into a kind of different perspective. And the other thing was we both
04:03 want to do a lot more travel. We're going to go to the Panama Canal, that's our kind of
04:08 retirement present, do a month long cruise, and then travel to other places. There are things
04:15 we want to do that we just can't do when there are so many games. You'd be doing two, three games
04:21 a weekend, you know. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, let me kind of take you back to the start a little bit,
04:28 and not just on the broadcasting of you and Shinty, because you've kind of become synonymous
04:34 with the sport in a lot of different ways. Was it always kind of your first sporting love,
04:39 I guess? Or were there other things in the mix too? Yeah, I mean, I was born in '56,
04:45 so I'm now 67. And in the 60s, growing up in Cool, in Fort William, there was no Xbox,
04:56 there was no computer, there was hee haw, but a shinty stick, a ball, or a bigger ball,
05:02 which was called football. And we lived directly on a place called Glenkingie Street, which is
05:08 where Duncan Shearer was born, incidentally. He's got some interesting stories about our youth.
05:16 And we just had to jump a three-foot fence or a four-foot fence to get into the school playground,
05:22 and the school had a school shelter, brick structure, which was made up effectively as
05:28 two goals. It was an open structure with a pillar in the middle. And you'd have people
05:33 shooting in at shinty on one side of it, and football on the other, and sometimes both across.
05:40 And we just played and played and played. There was nothing. It's not a cliche, there was nothing
05:46 else to do. And every hour that God sent, we played outside, whether it was there or at the
05:53 back of the house or whatever. And we were lucky to have older folk around us who coached us.
06:00 It was long before people invented coaching, but they taught you how to block, they taught you how
06:06 to defend yourself, how to hit the ball, how to stop the ball, all that stuff. And that's where
06:13 the actual game and my connection with it started. It was unavoidable.
06:19 How then did you get into the broadcasting, the research historical side of it?
06:26 Well, I followed a fairly traditional path. I went to high school, played a lot there,
06:32 quite successful juvenile team with Fort William, then went to Glasgow University. I was five years
06:38 in Glasgow between university and teacher training. I got a university blue in Glasgow.
06:42 And then it was always a kind of safety thing to get my Gaelic teaching qualification so that I
06:50 could go on to do other things. And during university, I realised other things would
06:55 probably be broadcasting because the BBC was very good to us in those days. They were
07:01 just beginning to expand. Gaelic radio even then was tiny, but they were beginning to look to the
07:06 future to cut the crop of Gaelic speakers in university who were graduating. And they would
07:15 give us little scripts for pocket money to come in and record. And if you're good, you got more
07:21 of them. If you weren't good, you just dropped off the ladder or couldn't do them or whatever.
07:26 And there was always the opportunity. And when I left university, I was actually offered a job
07:31 and I turned them down, would you believe, because I wanted to get my certificate for teaching,
07:36 which was an insurance policy. So when I went to teach, I went to Milburn Academy in Inverness,
07:44 where fortuitously in all sorts of ways, John Willie Campbell, who was the voice of Shinty at
07:52 that time and had been since 1968, was one of the assistant rectors. Colin Bailey was another one.
07:59 Willie Weatherspoon was my rector. And his son went on to be a very decent Shinty player,
08:06 Ewan the photographer, and developed his own skills in Shinty and photography.
08:11 But so that's really where I got into it. And then I started helping John Willie. I played
08:19 for William in Inverness for a couple of years after I came back north and then
08:24 started helping John Willie on Saturday. He used to provide results for literally everything. He
08:31 was the PA of Shinty. And he did on Saturday, he took all the results in. And in those days,
08:37 he had to phone up people to get them. No mobile phones, no text, nothing. So he needed all hands
08:42 on deck. That's where Charlie Bannerman became involved originally as well. So we got involved,
08:48 got doing more of that. We started to split up some of the work. He gave me some of the jobs he
08:55 was doing, little, we sectioned it up so it would be less of a burden on him. So I was doing Shinty
09:01 for the Sunday Post and various bits and pieces. And then it came in '82, '83, I got the offer of
09:09 a job again at the BBC and what was then called Radio Highland. And this time I took it.
09:19 I'd been teaching for four years and I began as what was called a station assistant, which sounds
09:26 like you're going to work on the railway, but it was actually playing all the records and the tapes.
09:32 Tapes, you might not know what tapes are, you can Google it. But we used to, I was sitting at the
09:38 desk putting out all the programs and then worked my way through the system and I became a senior
09:44 producer in the news department in the Gaelic service, which took off in '85. So my timing was
09:50 right. There were plenty of, no opportunities for me career progression wise in Gaelic really,
09:56 but there were clearly in the BBC. And then we were sent for 10 weeks training to London.
10:03 And early on in that period, I took a phone call from someone in Glasgow and Radio Sport
10:11 who said, we want you to do the Shinty Cup final for us on radio now that you're working for the
10:17 BBC anyway. And I thought it was a wind up, you know, I just didn't believe it. But David Francie,
10:22 the great commentator, arrived to pick me up to take me to Wembley to show me how he worked,
10:28 because I discovered he was going to be the commentator. I was going to be the co-commentator,
10:33 helping him through it because he had never seen a Shinty match. So that was quite a surreal
10:38 experience, the whole thing of getting hooked up with a doyen of broadcasting where I just
10:43 put my foot in the door. And that led to doing the first Cup final in '83 in Fort William,
10:50 funnily enough, at Claggan Park, which is no longer used. And that was what's led to the 40
10:58 years. I then, the next step, the level change of that was when Giannulli decided he was retiring
11:06 in 1990. And that coincided with an expansion of telly, started doing more. BBC One did a live
11:16 Cup final. And John was a radio man through and through. But because I was in radio, they thought,
11:22 well, he can do the telly as well. So that's the kind of, and then 1980, sorry, 2008 was the next
11:31 big change when the Gaelic TV service came on and we went from one game a year to five, six,
11:38 seven, eight a year. So there was a lot more to do. But I had developed then, by then I was doing
11:44 all John's Saturday night results and all that stuff, which no longer happened. So there was
11:49 a bit of logic to it, a bit of being in the right place at the right time and just taking the
11:57 opportunity when it was there. I didn't, no way did I in 1983 think I would have ended up doing
12:03 all the stuff I've done. It's just that it wasn't anywhere on the horizon, just a swell pro.
12:09 So did you find that starting to report on it and broadcast on Trinity matches
12:15 changed your perspective of the sport or changed your love for it at all?
12:20 No, none of these. If anything, it enhanced all of that. But one thing it did change was my
12:26 relationship with it in terms of rather than being a player and talking to players as fellow players,
12:35 I was now talking to them as a journalist or a broadcaster, which is a different relationship
12:41 because you're either looking for stories or you're being critical, particularly being critical
12:47 was a new thing. I had to develop relationships with people like the Camanacht Association,
12:53 with whom I've had very difficult times over the years for one reason or another. Sportscotland
12:59 was an interesting dynamic. I had to learn how to deal with them and be critical of them and
13:05 stand your ground and deal with sponsors. So there's a whole new range of aspects involved.
13:12 And there was just the technical stuff of how you did it. I mean, when I started, it was certainly
13:19 pre-mobile phone. I mean, one thing that has changed enormously is the equipment.
13:23 Recorders were huge big things you lugged around. Nowadays, we do everything on the phone
13:30 and a little earpiece or something. So all that changed. You had to master how to get back in time.
13:38 You had to master where all the telephone boxes were on the West Coast of Scotland because you
13:43 had to phone in on landlines. So I can tell you where nearly every phone box used to be.
13:49 Now they are now. So all that happened. And then when mobile phones came in, you had to learn where
13:55 there was a signal and where there wasn't. I can tell you there was a tree in Inverary you had to
14:00 stand beside because it was the only place you could get a signal. So difference between being
14:06 live and recording. Being live every Saturday night was great training. But because I'd been
14:12 trained by the BBC, it wasn't that daunting, really, because I had proper BBC training and
14:18 how to condense it. At that point, 19 matches into a minute. You had to have a match report plus
14:26 the top 10 results or something in a minute. You should try it sometime.
14:31 I keep just hearing that and think I have no idea how that's even possible. So fair play to you for
14:37 that. Yeah, it's the equivalent of writing a court report in 50 words.
14:43 But delivering it by voice live. Yeah, that's obviously a great skill to have.
14:52 You mentioned stories there when dealing with the players. At the risk of just running away
14:58 with reminiscing and nostalgia, are there some sort of standout moments from the last 40 odd
15:05 years for you? Yeah, I mean, in terms of matches, you know, you could pick, I could give you 100
15:10 games and 100 incidents that would stick out and escapades we got up to. I mean, the game itself
15:18 has changed. Society has changed an awful lot since I started. I mean, it's a whole generation.
15:25 I'm now dealing with the sons, if not the grandsons of players I used to play against in
15:30 juveniles or in school. I've lost a lot of friends. I mean, literally lost them in the death
15:39 sense in the passing, who were at school with me, for example, or who died young. And you feel that
15:46 as you grow older, you come to appreciate the friendships you made. In Shenton, you know,
15:55 I remember playing against Sky in a cup final at school at 17. And then the guy I played in was
16:02 sadly killed in a car accident last year. And that was really, really traumatic for everyone.
16:08 The person I had built up a great relationship with him over the years and lost my schoolmate,
16:15 best mate in school, collapsed and died on a Shenton field completely accidentally.
16:21 Nobody near him at the time. And I was only 26. I think it happened in '86.
16:26 And John Willie and I had to compose his passing, the incident, for Radio Sport. They interrupted
16:36 the football coverage that day to get John on to say Joe Toll has collapsed and died on the
16:41 Shenton field. Now, that was a huge challenge for John and I had to help him compose his report.
16:48 And fair play to me, he delivered it. But there are other things, you know, we went on trips.
16:53 One of the highlights of my career was writing for the Courier, doing the Talking Sport column.
17:00 You should track through a few of them and see in the probably early 90s, see some of the things that
17:07 I used to comment on. We went to Scariff. Sky and King Usy went to Scariff in some part of Ireland.
17:16 I can't even remember where it was on a jaunt. Sky and King Usy built up a great relationship
17:22 in the early 90s. They had some fantastic matches. We went to Nova Scotia in 1991.
17:28 68 of us. 67 came back. One stayed by choice. >> Right, OK. That could have gone dark,
17:37 considering what you've just been talking about. >> Yeah, yeah. I won't name him to save
17:41 embarrassing him. But one guy who was on that trip was the great legend Donnie Grant. And if
17:50 you haven't heard it, Donnie died last night. >> Oh, wow. OK. >> That's something you should
17:56 follow up in certainly fairly soon, just because of the fact he's gone. But Donnie and his wife,
18:02 Jan, were on that trip with us. And I mean, it was hilarious. We've got cartoons from it.
18:09 We've got pictures, poems. It was just there are so many memories from that trip, which have been
18:15 brought into focus again because Donnie has died, because Donnie was one of the leading lights of
18:19 the trip. He partied with the best of them and a great organiser. So these trips and the camaraderie,
18:29 the things you used to get up to, in my playing days, it was just ridiculous what we did.
18:35 University Shinty was very social. We were quite competitive. We reached three Sutherland Cup
18:41 semis, but we never won anything really. But we weren't there to win anything. We were there to
18:46 have a good time on a Friday night and Saturday to go to play Shinty. So yeah, great memories,
18:53 absolutely great memories. But above all, the camaraderie and the friendships we built. And
18:59 as I say, these change from being a player to being a broadcaster where some people didn't
19:05 like things you say or said in a commentary, they would let you know. And some of it, I think,
19:11 was fair criticism. Some of it was harsh. But then the same applies to the journalism.
19:15 A lot of the things I wrote created waves. But I don't think I was only ever threatened to be sued
19:25 once, I think. That's pretty good going. I was in the manual for 40 years. Yeah.
19:30 Still think I was right. Well, as long as you stand by it, that's fine. So, I mean,
19:37 that leads me quite nicely to the Shinty Memories project, which I was going to ask you about.
19:42 I guess there's probably been quite a lot written and done over the years on, you know, what it is
19:50 and how it came to be. What sort of impact, then, have you seen it have on the communities?
19:56 Where we have established groups, and I'll choose my words carefully, where the groups are working,
20:02 they have a great impact. Where they're not working, it's not because it doesn't work,
20:07 it's because we can't find people to take the leadership role in a group. That can be for a
20:14 number of reasons that they're maybe a bit, I wouldn't say scared to get involved, but reluctant
20:20 to get involved with something that is almost medical, in the sense that what do we do if,
20:26 and can, you know, there was early doors, it was a perception issue. Some people wouldn't go to
20:33 groups because they might catch dementia. You know, it's like the HIV thing, it's perception.
20:38 And I get it, you know, I wouldn't criticise anyone for it. It's part of an education process.
20:45 But where they work, they work really well, and no more so than in Baidnoch, where Donnie,
20:51 Donnie was our ambassador, first two ambassadors were Donnie and John Mackenzie, who were
20:57 horrendous opponents. I mean, they will admit that themselves, they were the world's worst
21:04 when they got together on the field. And after that, Donnie was diagnosed with dementia,
21:10 latterly, I can't remember now how many years ago, but he openly declared that he wanted to be used
21:19 as, I don't like using the term, but so that people understand, as something of a guinea pig,
21:24 you know, we could learn from him what he needed. And he could benefit from our support
21:32 on an individual basis. And we learned an awful lot from Donnie, because we kept asking him,
21:37 what do you want us to do? You know, so we could work out, you know, what is it's such a,
21:42 there's such a variety of types of Alzheimer and all the rest of it. But we also quickly realised
21:49 that it couldn't possibly just be about Alzheimer's, because there are other issues like loneliness,
21:54 peripherality in terms of shunty, and but the loneliness thing, and we realised that
22:01 actually, what we're dealing with is the same thing, in a way, as leads to a completely
22:07 disproportionate amount of suicide in the Highland communities. I'm thinking specifically of Lochaber,
22:13 where we've lost an awful lot of young shunty players to suicide. No different to me,
22:18 than a bunch of older folk who have got dementia. Society is losing somebody for a reason that
22:25 might have been maybe not avoided, but certainly could have helped or supported with and, you know,
22:34 we got universities involved, we took it to a different level. And the only limiting factor
22:41 is getting this leadership thing. In some communities, there are some areas we know
22:46 it would be of great benefit. We know, but then that's a resource issue for us. I can't do every
22:52 group. But I can help train every group and I've written a manual on how to do it. So it's a
22:58 question of how to, if we've always been short of money, it doesn't cost anything to do it, but it
23:04 costs money to produce mugs, key rings, pictures, all that stuff that you need. So that's been a
23:12 limiting factor. But I think we're about 10 groups at the moment, I'd like to see that expand to 20.
23:18 But that raises all sorts of questions as how you would resource it for a start. But the benefit,
23:25 none have failed. None have failed where they've started. They've gone on to develop into either
23:32 Shinty and rugby, Shinty and football, Shinty and curling. And we bring in other aspects of
23:38 the community through that. There's a very successful Inverness one going now, the football
23:42 one. And we hope to get a Shinty one in connection with the development of the Bach Park. That would
23:50 that'll be a crucial part of that. Give Inverness a home where they can bring people in and bring,
23:57 you know, people will then be safe for a couple of hours and partners can leave their partners,
24:04 go away and do shopping or something. We hadn't realised that was so much of an issue,
24:09 the full time caring bit of it. But we don't solve dementia, you know, we don't treat it.
24:16 We just help people who are living with it. Yeah, a lot to be done.
24:21 Absolutely. And it's very, I mean, it's easy for me to say from the outside and not having had to
24:29 deal with any of that. But it is a very worthwhile thing that you're doing.
24:34 It's very fulfilling and rewarding. I think it's the word. When you get somebody writing to you
24:41 or phone to say, oh, we've got little bits of film where we filmed one woman with her husband,
24:46 Douglas McIntosh, who was just reclusive, probably at his end. But when John McKenzie went in,
24:55 we filmed this. John McKenzie went into a sitting room and started talking to him about matches,
25:01 and he took scarves and balls and boots and all that stuff. He became a different man.
25:06 And we filmed and his wife's reaction to that. And she spoke to us after that and said, look,
25:14 that's the Douglas I married. But he won't be with me when I go home. You know, I mean,
25:20 it's sobering stuff. But as I see the benefit you get out of one successful meeting makes all the
25:28 rest of it. None of it's not worthwhile, but. Just gives you a better return, you know.
25:33 Yeah, we have to build on Donnie's legacy is a kind of next step for us.
25:40 So when you think about the Shinty Memories project and all the history that you've compiled
25:48 in Shinty, all the broadcasts that you've done, I feel like this is quite a reductive way to put it,
25:54 but you must just be so proud of everything that you've done and accomplished.
25:58 Yeah, I mean, I don't want it's very easy to say that none of this would have happened if I hadn't
26:05 done it. And, you know, it's for other people in the future to decide the value of it. But I can
26:10 see the value of a lot of it. And I really started and Donnie Grant was key to this, too. I was
26:15 reflecting on it last night. Donnie was chairman of the Centenary Committee in 1993, and that's
26:21 when I wrote my first big book, the book called Shinty. And it was the history of every Shinty
26:27 club and the history of the game all to mark the centenary. An absolutely bonkers challenge,
26:35 but because we had a good team and because Donnie was running the whole thing, we pulled it off.
26:39 And that's what whetted my appetite. The next thing that really got me into the history was,
26:45 I wasn't that good at history in school. I think I got a C or a B pass in my highers, nothing more.
26:52 And I didn't do history at university. So I got more interested in it through that book.
26:58 Then I did the history of the Ben race and started writing other stuff. And then in 1998,
27:05 a guy who was a former playing colleague, but also professor of Scottish history, Alan MacInnes,
27:12 who was in Aberdeen at the time, persuaded me that I had wasted my brain,
27:18 is the way he put it, for a long time. And it was high time I did something useful.
27:23 And he persuaded me on a Friday evening, he had been giving a talk to the Gaelic Society of
27:29 Inverness and he came to stay with me. And for old times sake, we had a drink or two.
27:34 And at the end of it, he had persuaded me to do a PhD in Aberdeen University on some Shinty
27:42 related aspect of history. And this was news to my wife who came home from our dance class
27:48 to discover I had signed up for this. I thought Alan would forget about it.
27:52 But on Monday, the fax, this was a long ago, it was fax machine, look it up on Google.
27:58 The fax machine produced a form with sign here at the bottom of it and a big X.
28:06 And that was it. I self-funded my PhD for four years, ended up going to Australia, New Zealand,
28:14 Canada, all over the place researching Shinty. I did my PhD and that was it because I then fed
28:23 off that for years. But I accumulated five filing cabinets of stuff. And one of the challenges of
28:31 my retirement has been, I won't even show you what I'm sitting in here. I'm organising everything
28:38 and putting it in various places, principally the Inverness Archive Centre, the Bach Park
28:46 building. It's not a museum, don't call it a museum. We'll be home to some of it.
28:51 And then, you know, I had that post in the National Library as writer in residence.
28:59 So I've been hitting them with archives of match programmes, all the paraphernalia,
29:06 which would have been and has been lost. Shinty has not been good at record keeping.
29:11 Goodness knows what would have happened to the original minutes had I not deposited them
29:17 in the National Library many years ago. I've just recently been given a heap of Inverness archive,
29:26 which I'm going to deposit in the Archive Centre for that Malcolm Fraser, I don't mind naming him,
29:31 in Crown Circus. And he's at things like the match ball that was used in the famous game in 1888
29:42 to decide which kind of ball Shinty would use forever and ever. Now, had he not done that,
29:50 we don't know what would have happened to it. He wouldn't have thrown it out or anything like that.
29:53 But if you replicate that through all the families in Shinty, who have all got something
29:58 relating to themselves or their family, medals, balls, all that stuff, posters,
30:04 pamphlets, yearbooks, getting the Shinty yearbook was the single biggest thing that has preserved
30:12 the archive game starting in 71 and has gone on ever since. And the courier has been part of it,
30:18 you know, printing it and whatever. I've just had a request from everyone to phone Hugh Dan,
30:25 he'll know or he'll have something about it. They want to know the earliest references to
30:30 Marine Harvest. What have you got? My answer to that is why haven't you got it? You know,
30:37 to the official? The answer is, we don't have the capacity. Some of it's been thrown out.
30:44 So you're relying on the good luck of me having it. Some of it's good luck, but other is
30:49 actively gathering it. But now I have to make sure it's preserved because come the day I'm not here,
30:53 A, I don't want it to be a burden on my wife and B, I don't want it lost.
30:58 So I want to put in a safe place where somebody else can make use of it.
31:02 So if you see behind me there, that is like 1% of what I've been dealing with.
31:10 You'll be kept busy in retirement then.
31:13 Library next door, but as I say, some of the stuff's away and I'm pleased with that.
31:18 Yeah, absolutely. Hugh Dan, we've only got a few minutes left on the meeting. I've pretty
31:25 much covered everything I was going to ask you. I appreciate that. It's a bit of a whistle-stop
31:29 tour around your decades in Shinty. Is there anything else you would just want to add on?
31:37 It's all been good. There's been ups and downs. Some of it's been difficult for various reasons,
31:42 but that's life. I can hear my phone, so it's in the house.
31:45 Shinty reflects so much of what's happened in Highland communities over the years. It
31:54 reflects a lot of what's happened in Gaelic. I've been at the centre of a lot of that,
31:59 one way or the other. I'm not claiming anything, just that I've been involved with it and I've
32:04 seen it change. I've seen some of it develop. I've seen some things go backwards, which I don't like.
32:10 I think we touched on it earlier. I've been quite willing and keen to make my position on
32:18 these things known. I'll be able to throw some shackles off in that respect when I don't have
32:25 employers anymore. I won't be lost to Shinty or rugby. I've got some rugby match. If you could
32:31 be careful about this, the cup final is my last Shinty broadcast. I've then got six or seven rugby
32:41 matches to do in the Super Series to finish things off. I expect to conclude everything
32:47 on November the 17th, which is the end of the rugby. It's been in wind down for a long time,
32:55 Andrew. Some people think I've retired already, but the Shinty thing will be the last. It's the
33:04 official retirement date. Everybody's got an official date and then there's the actual date.
33:09 So the very last commentary should be the end of the rugby. But as far as I'm concerned,
33:15 it's pretty much finished at the Shinty. The Highland Fling, of course, is a big part of that.
33:20 Yeah.