Start somewhere.

Where to start?  I wouldn't be typing this if I hadn't been born, so lets begin there.
On the 22 July, 1939, my father Colin Ian McKay was out in the front paddock at Dalmore, the home farm, in Methven, feeding stooked oats from a haystack into a traction engine driven steel mill. This provided grain to feed the farms draft horses (and chaff from the straw).

 

img: folksong.org.nz - Ballad of the Coleridge Run

Unlike in the photo there was fresh snow on the ground.

At about 9 am my Aunt Jessie ran out to tell Ian that I had been born in the Methven Cottage Hospital.

That was the end of thrashing for the day for Father.

I appeared to be a bit on the undernourished side, so I spent the next three months in a Plunket run Karatane Hospital wrapped in cotton wool and eating through a nose dropper.  I have no recollection of this! (Karate Hospitals were through out NZ by mid-tewentieth century.  I don't know which one I was in - may have been Christchurch, or Timaru.)