Its never too late to follow your dreams
karaoke being a cumbernauld
and how did that happen in 2013
i was a three 70 year old weather woman
i had just lost my husband after 50
years of marriage
we’d celebrated with golden wedding
anniversary in the
february and he passed away in the april
and he’d always been my rock and i
didn’t know how i was going to
manage without them i even wrote a poem
about it
anyway i have um
a very loving family i’ve got five sons
10 grandkids and my youngest son
still lived with me so he was there with
me all the time
and then my granddaughter my oldest
granddaughter
she gave me a lot of support and i gave
her a lot of support
because she was very close to her
granddaughter so her and i
get even closer so
visiting back and forward um and she
arranged for me to have a tattoo done on
my 55th wedding anniversary
but just before that i’ve had to move
out of the house
that we’d lived in because alan had a
decided that him and his girlfriend was
going to buy a house
and i was going to be left in this big
five-bedroom house on my own
so um i decided to downsize
the five bedrooms was just far too much
for me
so we i downsized and i moved in
a one bedroom uh flat
and it was a combined living room
kitchen
with a bedroom and a bathroom and it was
just
absolutely ideal so as i say on
the 16th of february nicole took me
to get my tattoo um
a golden red anniversary rose was the
the name of the song that my husband
loved me singing
as part of the tattoo so
life was just going on as normal but i’d
get back to
my own social life and things like that
but now because i had moved away from my
area
um i was just things weren’t
the same as they’d always been so
and at the end of 2018
my cousin was home for australia on
holiday
and i’d always wanted to go to australia
because i had
friends all over australia and at family
in new zealand
and i had been researching the family
tree and had
come across a cousin who lived
outside perth and i’d been in contact
with her
so everybody was yeah quite happy for me
to come and visit
uh so i booked it flew out
on my own um brave anna
just no problem got to pass went to see
edward stayed there with him for about
um eight days and met up with this
cousin
christina who actually was a second
cousin her
grandfather was my grandfather’s brother
so after doing all the family training
caught up with her i then moved went
from there
to sydney where i had a friend who had
moved out
in a 1954.
um i’d seen her once since then she’d
been home in holland in 1974
and they had visited with her then um
but we kept in contact so anyway um
she hadn’t been very well and she had
arranged
for me to go and stay with her sister
and her husband no i thought this was
only for like an overnight stay
but they actually looked after me for
the full time that i was there they took
me back
forward to see casey whenever i could
but
they took me everywhere they took me to
the
sydney opera house they just everywhere
they even took me to where they
filmed home and away which i’m a good
fan of
so i went there and i saw the filming
being made
then i moved from there to a
brisbane where my husband’s old uncle
lived
but unfortunately i couldn’t stay with
uncle bill because he was 97
didn’t have facilities for me to live
with him
and his family were all out working so
they could i couldn’t go and stay with
them i’d never met them
so anyway um i booked any hotel
and my granddaughter contacted friends
who were living in brisbane and
they came and took me out and my son
stephen his best friend one of his best
friends
mark he came and took me out for a drink
and
had a great time in brisbane
but i i then
had to finish up flying for there
to a new zealand on my own
my cousin’s family lived there so i had
an absolute fantastic time because all
these people were making a fuss in me
and i was being treated like
royalty actually i was having a
fantastic time
so when i came back i’d been
over there for six weeks between
australia and new zealand
came home after six weeks and decided
right away
i was going about to go to um canada and
america
where i also had family in canada
i had a cousin that again that i had
found through
doing the family research and i went to
visit her and her husband and they took
me on
the media the the lock on the the
niag they’re false the niagara falls
niagara falls yeah anyway they took me
there
and they i had a fantastic time with
them they took me to seaport stanley
they took me to seaport glasgow
um i just and they were so so so so nice
i had never met them in my life before
and they wouldn’t let me spend a penny
it was absolutely fantastic
so when i left them i went to boston
and the usa met up with an old-school
friend
and my sister’s and she had actually
worked with my husband and i
we’re two years where uh worked on the
buses i was a clippy
and he was a bus driver so um
i went to visit with her and a couple of
friends
i had been in contact with through the
internet
singing they um
they came to visit me and they took me
to salem
then i went from boston to a
nashville meet up with some friends of
the family there
they again i i i was just treated like
royalty everywhere i went
they took me to the grand old opry
and i had a wee a short
singing on one of the pubs in nashville
then i went through there to a alabama
to meet my husband’s sister my
sister-in-law
a lorraine and her husband jess and
their family
and we had a great time catching up with
everything that had happened in the
family and then they took me to new
orleans
and i actually sang in a pub in bourbon
street
in new orleans it was absolutely
fantastic
on the road to the airplane report when
i was going back i was picking cotton
it was it was such an experience it was
absolutely
brilliant and that’s me i had spent
another six weeks
in the u between canada and the usa
so when i came home i thought i’ve had
such a good time
i’ve got to start getting out and
getting in amongst people again
because i was starting to kind of
stagnate before i had went
so i decided that i was going to get a
hold of myself
and i found this um website are quite
good with computers
so i found this website where
um that it was called meet up
um no it wasn’t a dating thing it was
like an umbrella
uh meet-up thing
named um where they had different groups
where you would be interested in um
people that wanted to go for walks
people that wanted to go any quizzes and
things like that so i joined this group
called older and bolder and it was for
people over 50 which was
fine with me but is this it say it
wasn’t a date nothing like that
what we would do was we’d be meet at
meet up in glasgow
once a fortnight go to this pub
have a meal a drink and make up
teams would maybe be 12 years there and
we’d make up a couple of teams there
would be a quiz
and we would take part in the quiz which
i thoroughly enjoyed i love quizzes
anyway i also joined this other group
called widowing widowers
and um got together with um
lots of new friends made loads and loads
of new friends
of both male and female but mostly
females
and they we would go out for nights out
and things like that and we decided
that we were going to go to krakow in
march
we were going to go and see the
concentration camps
so um we got it all booked paid up and
everything
um everybody was excited about it and
then
covert has covered 19 hours and we were
all
floored we couldn’t go anywhere we were
stuck in the house getting
a groups on whatsapp and meeting up with
people you know
keeping in contact with each other
through that but
we couldn’t meet face to face and it was
really
annoying because we were getting on so
well and i made so many really good
friends
so i was stuck in the house um didn’t
even know what to do with myself
and then my granddaughter nicole
she started up this group called
cumbernauld
covert 19 looking for volunteers
to help people who were safe
self-isolating
and taking their dogs for walks and
getting shopping for them getting their
prescriptions and things like that
and um i was i was desperate to help
but there was no way i could help do any
of that because i was self-isolating as
well
so i thought and i thought and i thought
what can i do
what can i do and the only thing that i
know i can do
is i can talk and i can sing
i might not be the best thing about but
i love to sing
ever since i was a wee girl family
parties
everybody had that party piece my mother
was a fantastic yodler
all the family my granny and granddaddy
harmonized my mother and father
harmonised
and my father encouraged me to sing
and i would start singing and he would
say to me if you sing a song right
through anna
i’ll give you a half a crown and i
thought
right okay half a crown was a lot of
money then
so i would sing my wee heart but every
song i sang he’d have an excuse
nobody gave him a half a crown he would
say oh you went off
tune there he sang it wrong words there
so
but it didn’t bother me because i
actually loved singing
i love to sing and i’ve always loved to
sing i sang in a karaoke for
years years so i started i found out
that you could do this
um streaming video
on facebook
and i’m quite good with computers so i
had a weird look and i found out that i
could do it
um on the 19th of march
i started singing online
and i got such a great response oh i’ve
been on for about half an hour or
something
and i got this great response for people
saying you’ve cheered us up anna
you’ve really cheered us up you’re doing
really well so that was all i needed
so every night then from that then on
i would because i had an audience it
gave me incentive
to make sure that um i put some makeup
on
did my hair got the earrings on got
glammed up before they would go online
and meet up with these people they
couldn’t talk to me they could type in
but they couldn’t
talk to me i was the one that was doing
all the singing and they were sending me
requests and
i’ve got a fan a fan base
so it was really great and i kept on
doing it
right up until the 23rd of august when
um my sister who lived in manchester um
had a stroke and i went down in
manchester
for um a couple of weeks at
to spend some time with her
unfortunately unfortunately she actually
passed away on the 29th of august
and we had our funeral on the 11th of
september
so and all that time i hadn’t went
online
but after this funeral on the 11th of
september
i went back online and i dedicated that
show to elizabeth
and a lot of them were friends elizabeth
because she’d been watching my show and
her and i had been interacting
so it was great that we were and i was
singing a lot of her favorite songs
so i got
no long after that i get a call from
one of the presenters on cumbernold fm
106.8 to ask me if i would
let them interview me and i said
why would you want to interview me
because you’ve been doing this all that
time i said
yeah no problem i’d love that always
wanted to be a star
so anyway um i went to the station
and they interviewed me and i had a
great afternoon talk
i didn’t go to the station sorry they
phoned me and done the interview over
the phone
and it was great i thoroughly enjoyed it
and i got a lot of good remarks about it
and about a week later they contacted me
and asked me if i would like to do a
show of mine
on the radio and i thought
a radio star i’d love to do that
so what can i show would you like me to
put on whatever you want anna it’s up to
you you can do what you want
and i thought well i don’t want to do
one where i’m singing
i want to do one where i’m aiming for
the more mature
um listener so i decided
that i would go on for an hour in a
wednesday night at 6 00 p.m
and play a lot of a old songs
songs that brought back memories for
people and
it was uh it was
things that they gave them memories of
when they were young when they’d get
married and things like that
and i’d ask for requests so
i started getting requests and i decided
that i was going to call a show memories
of the way we were
and so until now
every wednesday night i go on there and
i start off
with me singing a wee bit of
memories like the corners of
my mind misty watercolored memories
of the way we wear
so now i’m a radio star
i’m a facebook star at my age
i’m a karaoke queen of cumbernauld
and i’m loving it so just remember
don’t put off until tomorrow what you
can do today
and you’re never too old to follow your
dreams
thank you very much