The rooftop bar of the London Hilton, with its magnificent view of that vibrating city, was as good a place as any to reflect on the fact that I have been enjoying West End musicals for half a century.

That evening I had just come from the Prince of Wales Theatre, with its current attraction of a song-and-dance show to celebrate the career of the late Bob Fosse, the American dancer and choreographer who enriched such productions as Damn Yankees, Cabaret, Chicago, and Sweet Charity.

I had first seen Fosse as a dancer in Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate in 1953, before he emerged as a brilliant creator of dance patterns. We were still in that post-war period when the Americans invaded the London West End with everything from Oklahoma and Annie Get Your Gun to Carousel, South Pacific, and Call Me Madam.

In that Drury Lane production of South Pacific, incidentally, I still have the programme to show that the chorus included Sean Connery and Larry Hagman (JR Ewing from Dallas), who was, of course, a son of the star, Mary Martin, who washed that man right out of her hair.

For the true essence of the London theatre, however, we depended on Ivor Novello, who had supplied Drury Lane with so many musical hits since the 1930s. And on the way back from the Fosse show last week I paused by the stage-door of the Palace

Theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue and remembered that this was where I stood, exactly 50 years ago, waiting for Novello's autograph, having just seen him in his last big show, King's Rhapsody.

A few months later he went home from the theatre to No 11 Aldwych and died of a heart attack in the early hours. Since then, Britain has produced no theatrical composer of that calibre, with only Andrew Lloyd Webber filling the gap in his own way.

What a different London we see today. But, then, what a different world we live in. From the rush of the metropolis, I could hardly have ended the week in greater contrast - away up there in the rural solitude of Buchan, where we were celebrating the life of that fine poet, Flora Garry, who died in June.

Saturday would have been her 100th birthday, which was as good a day as any to mark her return to that corner where she was born at the farm of Mains of Auchmunziel in the parish of New Deer. Following the interment of her ashes at the kirkyard of Culsh, we joined in a service of thanksgiving, led by the Rev Alistair Donald.

Some of Flora's poems were read by Robbie Shepherd, Charlie Allan, and

Morven Sievwright, and a Doric prayer was offered by Sandy Ritchie, of the Buchan Heritage Society.

Flora came with the century and she went with the century and, although she had spent a large part of her life elsewhere, there was a sense in which she had never really left her native patch at all. All her thoughts, her experience, and her poetry were filtered through the values of her Buchan background.

Giving the eulogy, I placed her in that triumvirate of North-east poets who had done wonders for their native tongue, the others being Charles Murray and JC Milne. She moved with the career of her distinguished husband, Robert C Garry, Regius Professor of Physiology at Glasgow University, but remained the true voice of the North-east dialect, even if she came late to poetry and was not published in book form until she was a pensioner.

So we sang hymns and Robert Lovie led us in a spirited rendering of Hame and Guidnicht, composed by Gavin Greig for his 1894 musical play, Mains's Wooin', in which Flora's mother played the leading role.

For each tribute, the congregation burst into applause, an unusual reaction in the Aul' Kirk of Scotland but a thoroughly appropriate and welcome one. At the end there came a voice which silenced them all. It was the warm, gentle tone of Flora Garry herself, reading one of her poems - and that gained the biggest cheer of all.

As we left her to her eternity, I wandered through that kirkyard on the hill and looked down towards Maud and out to those rolling farmlands of Buchan, which may be scarce of hills but not of beauty for people like Flora, with eyes to see and a soul to absorb.

All my own folks lie here so I paused by the family stone - and felt glad that I was still around to savour the silence of a timeless landscape on such an afternoon of early autumn.