A Son of the Rock

Big Rab tagged me with this and I’€™ve been stuck for a response as I’m pretty boring really (the good lady has a lot to put up with) and I can’t think of many things even vaguely amusing, interesting or unusual about me – beyond the obvious one of being a published author of fiction.

Except:-

I once performed an impromptu Hokey-Cokey in Soviet Russia.
I was on a school cruise which stopped in Leningrad, as it then was. A few of us were taken to the Pioneers’€™ Palace – Pioneers being described as the Soviet version of Scouts -€“ and they performed some sort of Russian folk dance for us. To reciprocate we Scots did the Hokey-Cokey as it was the only loosely dance-based thing that the adults present thought we would all know.

As far as I know I was the first person ever to discover an incidence of that weakish attractive force that is called a hydrogen bond from a hydrogen atom that was bonded to a sulphur. (Usually they only occur when H is bonded to N, O or F atoms.)
I made a thiol substituted camphor derivative compound which had the hydrogen atom bonded to the sulphur close enough in space to the oxygen atom located elsewhere in the molecule for it to be attracted enough by that oxygen that the hydrogen was effectively weakly bonded to the O as well. The infra-red spectrum showed this as an unusually sharp line.

I have twice appeared on television by accident.
Once on the terraces at Firs Park when the BBC filmed a Shire-Dumbarton Cup tie and I could be glimpsed in a background shot. The other time was years earlier. I was the only passenger on Renton railway station when some TV show or other was recording there for some obscure reason.

I’€™m only two handshakes (or maybe conversations) away from Adolf Hitler.
Some years ago now I met a (still youngish) bloke who’d guarded* Rudolf Hess at Spandau.

I can’t think of anyone to tag with this. If you’re offended by this omission let me know and I’ll add you!

*Since Hess (if it was Hess – there are conspiracy theories) died a while ago now my acquaintance must have been one of the last to do this. He said the Russians treated the prisoner pretty poorly; so they obviously thought he was the real Hess.