Bertie Anderson A Tale of Two Brothers Joseph had been told that if he ever went near Lough Gill to make sure and visit Bertie Anderson. Bertie, he was told, had been a lecturer in English in TCD and had retired down to the Sligo lakeside. So one day, while camping on the island, we set off late in the afternoon for the far shore in the dinghy and made our way to Bertie's house. Bertie was very welcoming and delighted to have visitors, any visitors, I suspected, and the more so the further away they came from. Anyway, there we were sharing a pot of tea in some not altogether hygienic mugs when, all of a sudden, Bertie loudly stamped his foot on the concrete floor. Shortly afterwards he did it again, and again, and this without any pause in his flow of speech. Eventually, when we looked down at the floor we saw he was surrounded by a black semi-circle and being the inquisitive visitors that we were, we politely enquired what that was about. Apparently, the stamping we had observed was Bertie ending the life of yet another beetle and the accumulation of this action over a long time had contributed a complete semi-circle around his chair. You could nearly imagine Uncle Joe Stalin snuffing out opponents with as little regard as Bertie had for the beetles. That was bad enough, but then the lights went out. Probably a fuse, we thought, and offered to go and replace it for him. Apparently, that was out of the question. He lived with his brother, with whom he did not get on, to put it mildly, and the two brothers occupied the house on a very defined territorial basis. Unfortunately, the fusebox was in the brother's half of the house so nothing could be done from this end. In any event, there was the suspicion that the brother had removed the fuse to embarrass Bertie in front of his visitors. We eventually left, with the impression that Bertie was a harmless, lonely old soul and we felt very sorry for him living in such reduced and hostile circumstances. I wonder how he got into that pickle in the first place and whatever became of him afterwards.