Let’s go back 51 years with these treasured photos to Christmas 1970.

This is my mother Janet Duncan and father Joe Veverka spending their first Christmas together as a married couple in Blantyre. My dad had only been in Scotland 11 months and as you see my mother is heavily pregnant, (I was born 2 months later). The cat was called ‘rags’ a rescue cat my mother saved in 1969.

It was an important year for dad. Since arriving in Blantyre that year, he had learned to drive, managed to find work as an electrician, was learning English and had met most of the family and made a few friends. He looks happy as they lodged at my gran’s council house in Stonefield Crescent. I can only imagine how strange and exciting it would all have been for him, so far away from his own family, friends and everything he had been used to in life. All our Scottish family always made my father feel most welcome. Dad spent a third of his life in Czechoslovakia and in time as the decades rolled on, he would become first and foremost a, Scotsman.

Perhaps you can remember when many local houses had fireplaces and TVs like this?