New Statesman Scotland
A donkey believed to be the oldest in Britain has died at 55 - 30 years after being saved from the knacker's yard. Its owner, Jim Ferguson, bought Zebedee for £20 after going to market to buy a horsebox. Zebedee has been buried at Bower House, the Scottish country estate near Dunbar where he spent his last 14 years in retirement.
"He was born while German bombers were trying to destroy the Forth Railway Bridge. The story is that the fright to his mother caused him to be born prematurely. He was originally called Nye, we think after Nye Bevan, but the link between the left and donkeys seemed unkind." (East Lothian News)
The only surviving complete edition of Robert Burns's collection of dirty or bawdy poems has been found and reprinted by an American university press. It seems that a group of Edinburgh literati were expressing regret, in a city pub, that no copy of Burns's The Merry Muses of Caledonia had survived Victorian prudery, when "a working-class drinker intervened to say he had one". He was politely rebuffed but scurried home to find it. He did indeed have what seems to be the only extant copy . . . This is now reproduced as a facsimile of the 1799 publication at a price of £90.
(Scotland on Sunday)
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