THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

In the early 1930s, after a few years in Paris trying to make it as a writer, Christopher Redburn returns home, broke and desperate, to the Swordale Estate on the Island of Glass in Scotland. Unfortunately this means that he has to submit to his father’s wishes, something that fills him with dread.

 

Extract from The Last Wolf
By David Shaw Mackenzie
Published by Thunderpoint Publishing

 

Within a couple of days I was back in Swordale. This was mainly because I had nowhere else to go. I had an idea that I might effect some kind of reconciliation with my father. It was a loathsome prospect but I desperately needed money. All the way up there on the train I asked myself if I really was such an unprincipled shit that I would crawl back to my father in the hope that he would give me a few quid. By the time I stepped off the ferry at Strongarve, the answer was pretty clear.

But things were not good at the castle. My father was very ill. He’d had a minor stroke, followed by a more serious one and was confined to bed. He was being looked after by nurses. His condition was such that he was barely able to recognize me. His speech was affected and, for the first few days, before he managed to recover a little, there was no possibility of coherent conversation. He was old and frail and rather pathetic and I almost felt sorry for him. Almost, but not quite.

Swordale was as cold, rain-battered and wind-blasted as I remembered it from my childhood. The floorboards creaked where they had always creaked and one of the windows, whose pane I had cracked with a ball when I was seven, still hadn’t been reglazed. My father had let the place run down. It was Maurice, later, who launched into a programme of repairs and redecoration that effectively saved the place from falling to pieces.

But Maurice wasn’t there. He sent a telegram saying that plans had changed and he was unable to return. This was not like Maurice at all. He’d been as devoted to his father as his father had been to him. Only something extraordinary would have persuaded him not to visit the old man now so seriously ill. But it didn’t take me long to realise what this was.

Maurice’s new wife, Hester, had arrived a week before I did. Their honeymoon over, Maurice had sent her on ahead to Swordale.

Hester was neither prim nor dull. She was very young – only twenty-three – and I found her physically attractive but not beautiful. At that time I believed that beauty resulted from close attention to hairstyle and artificial make-up. I was drawn to women who painted their faces and made them into something that, in reality, they were not. Hester wore her hair loose or in a loose ponytail and put nothing on her face. In Paris women with freckles applied tubs full of cream to hide them but Hester was without such camouflage. Her look was natural, easy and innocent. But perhaps she knew all along that this is what suited her best, that the sprinkling of freckles over her nose and her high cheekbones gave her a special look that powder and cream could not enhance. She was bright and organised and would take the castle staff and the rest of the islanders by surprise because she was very efficient and seemed to think of everything. She even took it upon herself to get some of the rooms in the castle redecorated to make the place more cheerful for my ailing father.

When we met she was wearing a red dress which was in contrast with the general feeling of doom that filled Swordale. And she was far from sombre. ‘I’ve been looking forward to meeting you,’ she said as we shook hands, and I believed her. She rarely said anything without meaning it, even the formulaic utterances that accompany such situations. Of course I had no experience on which to judge the sincerity, or otherwise, of her remark but her tone and her smile convinced me. I began to think, even then, that my brother was a fortunate man to have found someone like this.

A little later, as we took tea in one of the sitting rooms that overlooked the sea, she asked me what it was, exactly, that I did.

‘I’m a flâneur,’ I said.

‘Is that so?’ she replied. ‘It sounds a bit devilish to me.’

I said, ‘I am the man my mother warned me about,’ and she laughed.

 

The Last Wolf by David Shaw Mackenzie is published by Thunderpoint Publishing, and is £8.99.

In this fascinating book, Robin Crawford explores the peatlands of the Hebrides over the course of the year, using the seasons to show how the story of peat is also the story of Scotland, from its first uses during the Bronze Age, through the wildlife and folklore associated with the land during the centuries, to its integral role in the making of whisky. He also looks at the historical, social and cultural importance that peat has played in the lives of many, bringing an emotional resonance to our dark, desolate landscapes.

 

Extract from Into The Peatlands: A Journey Into the Moorland Year
By Robin A. Crawford
Published by Birlinn Ltd

 

Angus Gillies is just one of hundreds of thousands, probably millions, who have emigrated from the peatlands of Scotland. He was born about on the Hebridean island of Lewis, but like so many before and since he sought a new and better life far away on the other side of the Atlantic. It was an ocean he knew well; twice a day it would either softly wash up the island’s beautiful white sandy beaches sparkling luminously turquoise, or crash mercilessly against the ancient rocky cliffs, threatening destruction – sometimes both.

Angus (Aonghas an Gillies in the Scottish Gaelic his people spoke) grew up in Kirkibost, a township of small, self-sufficient farmsteads or crofts on the Atlantic seaboard, and must have gazed over the ocean all his life. People had been living a similar lifestyle on its edge since at least the Iron Age 3000 years earlier – and probably for longer – growing a few crops, pasturing their livestock on the island’s vast moors, taking what they could from the sea and shore. But by the mid-nineteenth century that way of life was under threat as never before and, like so many across the Scottish peatlands, islanders were drawn or forced out to the ever-expanding industrial towns and cities of the mainland, to the central Lowlands, London, the Americas and across the British Empire in the hope of a better life. They were victims of a society in flux, experiencing massive social changes following the Industrial Revolution, fleeing poverty, famine, family feud, clearance, dictatorial landlords, oppressive tradition and constricting religion. It was a huge risk to leave for life on the other side of the world, and for some it was fatal, but to stay would have been impossible. So, aged about twenty, he left. Never to return.

More than a century later Marion Laitner, an American, aged ninety, visited Kirkibost. Through family history research she had discovered that she had second, third and fourth cousins living there and as she was reaching the end of her long life she wanted to see the place where her people had originated and the setting for so many of the tales passed down to her. She was welcomed – as so many are – with the generous hospitality of the island and the joy of family reunited, but a further surprise was in store. She was taken out onto the moor where the family had for generations cut the thick, muddy peat to burn as fuel. At a particular spot the top turf was removed for her and there, preserved in the peat, was a footprint – it was the footprint of her father, Angus Gillies.

As she placed her own foot beside the preserved print her cousins explained that on the day before he left his mother had given him a creel and sent Angus out to the bank to collect some peats. Then he was off, like so many of the young islanders. She was desolate at his leaving, but she had to cope the best she could. Life went on.

On her next trip out to the peat bank to collect fuel she discovered one of his footprints there. As the only memento she had of her son she covered the print with turf, and after she died new generations of the family preserved the footprint until that day more than a century later when his daughter returned to her father’s homeland.

 

Into The Peatlands: A Journey Into the Moorland Year by Robin A. Crawford is published by Birlinn Ltd, and is £12.99.

David Robinson finds echoes of Muriel Spark and William Boyd in Kate Atkinson’s latest novel, a book that only confirms her reputation as one of the UK’s most talented novelists.

 

David Robinson Reviews: Transcription
By Kate Atkinson
Published by Doubleday

 

London,1950. Juliet Armstrong, a BBC radio producer on her lunch-break, is drinking a cup of coffee in Moretti’s cafe, wondering why a former colleague has just blanked her in the street. Ten years ago, when they were both working for MI5 – him as an agent with a string of closet British Nazi-supporting informants convinced he was a German spy, her as a secretary transcribing their bugged conversations – they had worked closely together. Now, it appears, she is being targeted by someone they brought to justice, and he doesn’t want to know. Why?

That’s a much smaller question than those huge existential ones at the core of Kate Atkinson’s last two Costa-wining novels, Life After Life and A God in Ruins, but it’s central to Transcription. Its plot spins out from historical facts – there were such MI5 stings of British Nazi supporters, those transcribed conversations were archived, similar arrests were made – into something more dizzyingly head-spinning. But at its core, this is Atkinson taking on the conventions of the spy novel and making them her own. She’s already successfully done that to crime fiction with her Jackson Brodie novels (Case Histories, noted Stephen King, was “the best mystery of the decade”). I suppose she’ll be tackling science fiction next.

To look closer at Atkinson’s craft, it might be instructive to make a brief comparison with William Boyd’s Restless, with which Transcription has a lot in common: a Second World War setting, a female narrator who becomes a spy, MI5 manoeuvrings to keep the US as a potential ally  (though these are more extensive in Boyd’s novel) and massive post-war plot complications. When Restless won the Costa Best Novel Prize in 2006 the judges noted that it “remained a page-turner despite the complexity of the wartime intrigue” and “reeked with riveting detail and authenticity”. This is true of Atkinson’s novel too, yet for all these similarities, the differences are enormous. Let’s look at them in greater detail.

Rather than follow the plot, let’s look in detail at that scene near the start of the book in Moretti’s cafe. In it, we can see how cleverly Atkinson sets about subverting the spy novel.

She is, like Muriel Spark, the queen of the flashback and the flash-forward, and this particular scene is a mixture of both: it reaches back far into the past, but foreshadows a key part of the plot. Why does Juliet go to Moretti’s that particular day in 1950? Not just because it’s nearby, but because to her it’s been a constant in a changing world. In the late 1930s, when her mother was dying in the Middlesex Hospital, the 17-year-old Juliet was a regular. The proprietor would always ask after her mother, not that he’d ever met her but because that was the Italians for you (“keener on their mothers than the British were”) and when he did, Juliet would answer “Very well thank you, Mr Moretti”.

There’s a strange-looking character in the cafe that day in 1950 who will figure later in the plot: technically, introducing him is the main point of the scene. Yet Atkinson tells you so much more. First of all, we see that even as a girl, Juliet was happy to invent her own reality (her mother was  actually dying, not “very well, thank you”).  Yet as she thinks back to Moretti and the cheese and toast and Viennese coffees he used to make, she fingers her pearls and remembers how he drowned on the SS Andora Star in 1940 alongside hundreds of other Italian PoWs. That, in turn, puts her in mind of other people she knew who died in the war, like the original owner of her pearl necklace, whose body she had helped to shift … “But best not to think about that. Thinking had always been her downfall.”

This is still, remember, very early on, and all in the same short scene. There’s not been a clue about whose body Juliet has taken the pearls from, not a hint as to why thinking has always been Juliet’s downfall. But the hooks are in, and they will get you reading the rest of the novel, and somehow they go in deeper because they are not as part of a simply revealed plot but one which has already hopped back 12 years,  provided a snippet of Juliet’s character (lying about her mother) and a small slice of humour (“Italians keener on their mothers”). The scene also shows Atkinson’s assurance with metaphors, Juliet’s fingered pearls making her realise that “everything was connected, a great web that stretched across time and history”: this same web also includes Moretti and the as yet unknown original owner of the pearl necklace.

Every time Atkinson makes a plot point, in other words, she is making  about three others at the same time – different kinds, but each adding to the overall richness of her narrative.  Although she writes in the third person, she turns it into an endlessly questioning interior monologue. Here, for example, is what Juliet makes of that odd-looking man in the cafe:

“There was a trollish look to him, as if he had been put together from leftovers. He could have been sent over from Booking [a department at the BBC, where Juliet works] to play one of the dispossessed. A hunched shoulder, eyes like pebbles … and pockmarked skin that looked as if it had been peppered by shot.  (Perhaps it had been). The wounds of war, Juliet thought, rather pleased with the way the words sounded in her head. It could be the title for a novel. Perhaps she should write one.”

Later on, we will learn more about how clearly words sound in Juliet’s head – especially the words of the Nazi sympathisers she has had to transcribe and which she then, as a spy, finds herself using. That’s when Atkinson’s novel is at both its cleverest and most dramatic – and one could indeed imagine a novelist of Boyd’s calibre handling such scenes equally well.

What even Boyd can’t match Atkinson for, though, are those earlier scenes when nothing is happening plot-wise but we are listening to the random questions babbling in Juliet’s mind. What kind of dogs do her colleagues in the BBC’s Schools Department most resemble? Or: “What was so wonderful about an ugly old man who kept painting himself all the time?” (Rembrandt, though she knows never to say so).  Even moments of tension can – here we go genre-subverting again –are often deflated with one of Juliet’s dafter thoughts.

Yet, before all of this becomes too whimsical, Atkinson will snatch you back to 1940 when the pro-Nazi aristocrats of the Right Club are reading in the newspapers about the Germans crossing the Meuse, and thinking that out is only a matter of time – days, not weeks –  before Britain will fall. She will tell a suspenseful spy story that is a model of its type, she will fuse it with a genuinely deep level of knowledge about the wartime MI5 and the post-war BBC, and she will make you laugh out loud too. Not for the first time, I’m in awe at her talent.

Transcription by Kate Atkinson is published by Doubleday on 6 September, priced £20.

‘Amber’
By Eilidh McCabe
Taken from With Their Best Clothes On: New Writing Scotland 36
Published by the Association for Scottish Literary Studies

 

She came in through the cat flap not long after you died and I knew she was you. I was in the living room, stretched out on the sofa, staring up at the plaster flowers on the cornicing overhead.
There was a clatter through in the kitchen. Henry had been asleep at my feet all evening, so he wasn’t the culprit. He raised his head and swivelled an ear in the direction of the noise.

I thought, ‘intruder.’ I thought, ‘fine, let them rob me.’ I thought, ‘let them clean the place out.’ I thought, ‘let them gut me like a fish.’ Then I forced myself to my feet, because I was meant to go and look when there was an unexplained sound in my home. I trailed out into the hall and pushed open the kitchen door.

At first I was almost disappointed that I wasn’t confronted with a balaclava-clad intruder, knife glinting in the moon-striped darkness. Instead, what stood before me was a mirror-eyed, red-furred thing. Frozen over the upturned bin, face turned towards me. I met her gaze, knowing as I did that it was a her, not just any her, but you. Then as I moved forward, very slowly, socks sliding over the grey linoleum, you moved back towards the door, silent as a glance, and were gone.

From the window, I caught the white tip of your brush fading into the gloom of the hedge. I watched to see if you would return, then headed back through to the living room, where Henry was licking his paw in dainty disinterest. The photos on the mantelpiece smiled at me, flanked by the porcelain shepherdess and the brass carriage clock. I picked up the shot of the three of us at a Christmas market in Vienna. You were holding Julie, like a rugby ball in her thick winter clothes. She looked up at you, a chunk of your terracotta-coloured hair clutched in her little fist, on its way to her mouth. Your yellow-brown eyes met the camera, pupils narrowed to pinpoints in the glare of the flash. It was you in the frame, but it had also been you in the kitchen just minutes before. And it was you in the ground.

*

The next afternoon I was lying in bed when the phone rang. I ignored it. I wanted to make it to dinner time before getting up. But the ringing went on for so long that I became used to it, then worried that it might stop. I stumbled downstairs to answer it. Julie.
‘I tried your mobile but it was off,’ she said.
‘To save the battery.’
‘But what’s the point in having a phone if it’s never on?’
‘So I can use it when I need it.’
A pause. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘it doesn’t matter. How are you?’
‘I’m grand, love. Adjusting, you know.’
‘Good.’
‘And you?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ Another pause. ‘I think a bit about her in the coffin. When she didn’t look like her.’
‘No, she didn’t.’
‘She wouldn’t have worn that, would she?’
‘No, I wouldn’t have thought so.’
‘It’s a strange tradition, don’t you think? To fill the body with embalming fluid and then have everyone come and look at it.’
I didn’t want her to go on. ‘Yes.’
‘So. When should I come round to sort through the stuff?’
‘Her stuff.’
‘Yeah.’
I thought about the long day stretched ahead of me with nothing to do and no one to talk to but Henry. ‘Today?’
‘I can’t. But tomorrow.’
‘Yes, okay.’
‘Are you sure you don’t want to come and stay with us? Or for me to stay there?’
I did want it. ‘No, Henry and I need our space.’
‘Right. See you tomorrow then. Before lunch.’
‘Yes.’
‘Turn your phone on.’
‘I might.’

After I hung up I looked at the wallpaper for a while. It was cream-coloured, textured with raised, soft, spongy stuff that swirled across it like clouds of white midges. I put my fingernail into the centre of one of the soft parts and pushed down. When I removed it a perfect semicircular indentation sliced the surface in two.

I caught sight of a dark form moving outside the window. David from next door was in the driveway, shovelling snow, bundled up in his puffy jacket, scarf and woollen hat with his thick padded gloves that made him look like a lobster. He realised I was looking and waved one of his big fabric claws at me. I waved back. Why was he shovelling my driveway? This had never happened before. Oh, yes. It was because I was old. Old and bereaved. The elderly neighbour who needed everything done for him. He and Emma would have discussed it:
‘I’m just going out to shovel the drive, love.’
‘Oh, could you do next door’s at the same time? He’ll not be able to do it himself. And his wife just dead, too.’
‘Of course. Poor old soul.’
You’re no spring chicken yourself, David, I wanted to say to him. Well into your fifties, at least. I should point it out. But it would be very useful to have a clear driveway.

*

That night I laid a bowl of cat food in front of the back door and shut Henry in the living room so he wouldn’t eat it. I went for rabbit flavour; the others were all a bit fishy, and I wasn’t sure how foxes felt about fishy things. Then I sat down at the kitchen table with my camera, facing the door, and waited. While I waited, I leafed through your copy of Tess of the D’Urbervilles from university, your small neat handwriting all over it. A trail of tiny pieces of yourself, left long before you even knew me.

I don’t know how long I sat there, my attention drifting between the printed text and those careful notes, made decades ago, when you were a different person. When you were still a person.

A noise made me look up and there you were, a long ginger thing unfolding yourself through the cat flap. You didn’t even wait for your hind legs to come through before you lowered your head and began gobbling the food on the plate. I reached for my camera slowly, very slowly, but not slowly enough, and you looked up and met me with your golden stare. Then you lowered your head again. I lifted the camera: snap, snap, snap. Trapping you. When you’d finished eating, you came forward into the room and started nosing round the bin. I leaned forward and snapped, just as you looked up and departed. But I didn’t care. I had got my shot.

*

The next morning I wrapped up warm and stepped out into the bright, cold air. I made my way down my snow-free drive and out towards the high street, where the pharmacy had a one-hour photo development service.

When Julie arrived I was sorting through the photos, laying them out side by side on the table. There was the star shot in the centre: amber eyes meeting the camera head-on. I placed the photo on the mantelpiece next to the one of you in Vienna. The resemblance was uncanny.

I heard her ring and got up to answer the door. She greeted me with a stiff hug.
‘How you doing, Dad?’
‘I’m well, pet. And you?’
‘Bearing up. Got some bits and bobs here left over from yesterday’s dinner—’ she raised a plastic bag with the faint outline of Tupperware showing through it, ‘just in case you won’t have time to make yourself anything this evening.’
‘Lovely, thanks. I’ve been eating well though.’ In fact I’d had cereal for dinner every night that week.
‘That’s good. Well, let’s go and get this done.’

*

We laid out your clothes on the bed and Julie chose what she wanted. There were a few dresses that would fit her, from before she was born. She folded them carefully and put them aside. I imagined they had been out of fashion for so long they had come back in, and would once again be suitable for a young woman like her.

‘Charity shop?’ she said, holding up a pair of pristine black heels, and behind her I saw you collapsing onto the bed and kicking them off, rubbing the back of your ankles, saying, ‘Last time I try to look smart for work. It’s not like anybody notices anyway.’
‘Charity shop,’ I said, and sat down in the spot where you’d just been.

At some point I realised Julie was crying. I hadn’t seen her cry at all, not even at the funeral. She probably didn’t feel comfortable crying in front of me. You had always been the one who dealt with that kind of thing. The emotional side. I stood up, walked over and stroked her shoulder, feeling like I was in a country where I didn’t know the language.

She was holding a fine silver chain with a bright shard of amber strung on it.
‘She wore this all the time,’ she said. ‘I would hold it while I was falling asleep.’
‘Yes, and wrap her hair around your fingers. Necklace in one hand, hair in the other. I’m surprised you remember. You were very small then.’
‘I remember more than you might think.’

*

We stopped for lunch and I cooked for the first time in what seemed like an eternity. ‘Cooking’ was a bit of an exaggeration, though – beans on toast, with cheese grated on top. My culinary skills never were up to much.

When I came through to the living room with the two plates of food, Julie was at the mantelpiece holding the new photo of you.
‘This fox came into the house?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Incredible!’ she said. ‘Has it come in more than once?’
‘Yes. I think Henry’s food attracts it.’
‘It’s beautiful.’
‘Yes.’
‘Not mangy, like a lot of city foxes.’
‘No, it’s very well presented.’
‘You should be careful with Henry though. They can kill cats.’
Of course you would never kill Henry, because you loved him as much as I did. But I just said, ‘Yes.’

*

Later, I ate Julie’s leftover pasta standing up in the kitchen, not bothering to reheat it. Plates were piled high in the sink and there was dark grease caked onto the surrounding tiles. How did you clean tiles anyway? Was there special tile-cleaning stuff? Forty years in this house and it had never occurred to me that tiles were a thing that needed to be cleaned. It always just got done.

When I was finished I sat down at the table with the camera, Tess, and a pen and pad for taking notes on your notes. I copied down my favourites verbatim, trying to replicate the curve of your letters as closely as possible. ‘Hypocrisy!’ said one of them, simply, next to an extended chunk of dialogue by Angel. You’d always been that way. Direct.

I must have fallen asleep, because when I woke up you were sniffing at my foot. Instinctively, I reached forward to caress your fur. Before my fingers even connected, your little triangular head flashed forward and snapped at my hand. I pulled back. Too late: the blood was dripping freely onto the floor, and you were gone, the cat flap swinging back and forth in your wake.

I stood up and ran my hand under the tap, watching the pink mixture of blood and water swirl away down the plughole. I closed my eyes and saw you sitting on the edge of the bed not long after Julie was born, your waist still thick, your tummy settling in a flap that came down from your broad hips, snatching the duvet around yourself as soon as you sensed me looking. ‘Why do you keep pushing me?’ you said.

Under the water, my wound was visible: two clear puncture marks and a row of deep dents between. But as soon as I removed my hand from the stream, the punctures filled up with blood, which overflowed onto my skin and obscured its own source.

*

I woke up in the middle of the night with the bite pounding beneath its plaster. There was ibuprofen under the bathroom sink. I stumbled up to get it, the sudden whiteness of the light when I pulled the string making my eyes ache. Two pills would do the trick. I washed them down with tap water slurped from my cupped hands.

The sun hadn’t fully risen when the wound started throbbing again. I brought it close to my face to inspect it in the weak light, peeling back the plaster. The area around it was red and raised, the punctures glistening with a translucent fluid. Definitely infected. I lay still, enjoying the hot rhythm of the pain. Then I turned over towards your side of the bed and the familiar back of your head, speckled white and grey with hair cut short as an animal’s fur. I reached out towards it and you flinched away. I closed my eyes and opened them and your hair was long and red, flowing over your pillow and encroaching on mine. You shuffled backwards into my arms, nestling against me so close that if I opened my mouth your hair would fill it.

Again I closed my eyes and then Henry was there, rubbing his stripy face against mine, leaving a faintly fishy trail where his damp nose and the corners of his mouth met my skin.

I pulled him under the covers and pressed him against my chest, but he was restless. He wanted his breakfast. I envied his appetite.

On the kitchen table downstairs was the spread I had laid out for you that time, just the once. A long shot. Toast, cake, three types of jam, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries, yoghurt, honey, orange juice. More food than we could possibly eat. And you, silent in front of your heaped plate, not touching it.
‘How can I make you happy?’ I asked.
You looked up at me. ‘You can be somebody else.’

The food vanished. A set of muddy little footprints was dotted all over the kitchen floor; leading first from the cat flap to the bin, then to the table, then back to the door again.

I brought the pictures through from the living room. With my good hand, I spread them on the table, moved them around. The many sets of amber eyes shifted in front of me. All those times you said you’d leave. And then you did. But now you’d come back more beautiful than ever.

There were many hours to pass before your evening visit. The bite on my hand ached a warning to be careful this time, to be patient. To be different. And I would.

 

‘Amber’ by Eilidh McCabe is taken from With Their Best Clothes On: New Writing Scotland 36, published by ASLS, and is £9.95.

What is prayer? Treading the sands of the Syrian desert and the shores of Saulkrasti, hiking across the Qadisha Valley and the ancient paths of Karyes, Johannes Hartl searches for answers. Through the stories of individuals, encounters and movements, Hartl explores approaches to prayer, calling us to draw near to a God who listens, loves, and longs to speak with us.

 

Extract from Heart Fire
By Johannes Hartl
Published by Muddy Pearl

Croatia, August 1994

My eyes sweep over the unfathomable reaches of the gleaming sea. I am sitting on a hotel beach in Croatia and my heart is filled with longing. Outwardly, my appearance is colourful, with long hair and brightly-coloured clothes, but inwardly, I am so stirred by my first experiences in prayer that I am on a painful search for more of God.

In these days on the beach I read a chapter that will shape my views on God and worship forever. I don’t understand a lot of it at the time. Even the chapter title – ‘He Who Reigns’ sounds really strange. The last sections of Romano Guardini’s The Lord deal with Jesus Christ in the depictions of his sovereignty and power in the Revelation of St. John. Not exactly light reading. But that does not bother me.

But now Romano Guardini opens up something like a 3D picture for me. Jesus’ speech from the throne, and before him twenty-four elders, also enthroned. A scene full of majesty and solemn peace. There they sit, kings before the one great King. But the natural reaction of those who sit enthroned before the One Ruler is to worship. Not because they must. Yet before the majesty and beauty of the Lord, everything that would be great and magnificent anywhere else becomes insignificant. They cast their crowns down. What a wonderful statement!

This picture and Guardini’s simple explanation have never faded from my mind. Everything starts, stands and falls with the art of seeing. Seeing the beauty of creation. The beauty of art. The beauty of a person. And ultimately, to see ever more clearly the beauty of the source of all of this other, created beauty. The beauty of the eternal God. And then the beauty of this one, unique person. The beauty of the man in whom God, in his fullness, became visible. Learning to see Jesus Christ. In his majesty, and his humiliation on the cross. Again and again this seeing produces the only appropriate reaction from the created: praise, homage, worship – prayer.

Sukosan, Croatia, August 2013

It’s summer again, and a year has passed in which I haven’t thought about anything as much as about what it means to love, what it means to pray in spirit and in truth and what it means to encounter the other and myself in reality.

Once again I am staring out across the sea, even if the view is less spectacular. I try to be fully present before God, before myself. All at once, like a ripe apple falling into my lap, I decide that, today, I want to be fully present. Not just in my morning prayer time, although I especially need to be present when I pray; only there do I learn to catch my breath and not lose myself, to not miss God’s presence in being. But it does not stop there. The small decision, but a major one for me, to just be there in these days on the beach. To be wholly present for my wife and my four children.­­­

It doesn’t feel special, starting the day this way. Nevertheless, the pink flowers on the side of the road seem pinker than before, the underbrush of thyme and bamboo seems thicker in the quiet of the Croatian morning. And then? The road to the baker. Breakfast in the loud, overflowing life of a young family. Playing card games. Reading stories, for hours. Paddling a rubber raft. Washing dishes. Reading another story. And quite consciously for these days: no media. No iPhone. No books, and no thought processes running in the back of my mind on how I could plan something major: just being there. Being there, with all the beauty of this abundant life and everything that gets on my nerves.

This simple and self-evident attitude towards life seems almost strange. And yet I get tears in my eyes the next morning when I resume my place between the bushes. I get tears of gratitude for an imperfect, but abundant life; for the gift of my children and my wife. I get tears of gratitude for the gifts of earth, air and being. The relationship with my children, and my joy in them, becomes deeper in these days. How much I can learn from them! They were already where I want to go! They can play for hours, be happy with what is: they can be. Awed, thankful, sometimes angry and loud, but always authentic, always themselves. The thankful, open-handed attitude toward life that characterizes play is like the simplicity and joy into which God wants to increasingly free the intercessor. The beauty of play. The purpose-free character of pure being. Nowhere is this more visible than when we’re praying, or when children are playing. The beauty of life that occurred to a loving God. To one who prays, the world becomes ever deeper and God ever greater.

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Heart Fire: Adventuring into a Life of Prayer by Johannes Hartl is published by Muddy Pearl priced £14.99.

Extract from Memory and Straw
by Angus Peter Campbell
Published by Luath Press

 

Extract from Chapter 1

The clearest lesson I learned during my research was that features on faces are earned, not given. The age lines, the wrinkles, the curve of the mouth, the light – or darkness – in the eyes. These are the consequences of lived lives, not just the DNA. Hurt, pain and joy experienced are all etched there, as if Rembrandt had suddenly caught the moment when joy or sorrow had called.

I stripped naked and looked at myself in the mirror: the slight middle-aged paunch, the stoop of the shoulders, the face that reminded me of a boy I knew once upon a time.

I probably broke some unwritten rule that you never complicate your research with your personal life, but one day as I was idling at the computer I entered my father and my mother’s name, and the day disappeared leafing through their history. Or at least the history that was recorded there, for like all histories, most lay unrecorded. Like those gaps which Emma saw between the leaves, I suppose.

The Internet is such a recent phenomenon, but nevertheless it has already harvested the work of centuries, so it wasn’t that difficult to scour genealogical and historic sites. The photographs were particularly fascinating: the further back I went the more difficult it was, of course, to find images of my own ancestors, but there were so many historical society sites that it was easy enough to get a sense of the times and places they lived in.

Old men with beards and old women with long black skirts outside little stone houses. Sometimes children playing in black and white, with toy wooden boats or prams. Horses and dogs and carts carrying luggage. Hundreds of faces looking down as the ship left the quay. I showed some of the material to Emma that evening. She didn’t seem greatly interested.

‘Isn’t that what people of a certain age do for a hobby? Start finding their roots?’
‘Well, I never really fancied stamp-collecting.’
I told her a bit about my family tree.
‘You should go to a séance. You could meet them there,’ she said.

What fascinated me immediately were the objects my ancestors had. Ploughs and hand-made saws, clay pots and spindles: things you could see in such fine detail once you digitised the old photographs. Sometime later, on one of Grandfather Magnus’s shelves I found a family photograph of my great-grandmother’s cottage with a bogle leaning against the thatched roof. The bogle was the slim stem of a dead fir, devoid of branches except at the top which was dressed, like a scarecrow, with a white cap and an old jacket. It was set on the ground leaning against the wall and roof overnight, and shifted every morning from one side of the doorway to the other to protect the house and the inmates from harm by the witch.

It was magic. Images were totems which brought blessings or curses. You could sail to success or starvation. I studied the photograph of the people on the emigrant ship for ages. There were of all ages, from babes on the breast to old women in shawls. None of the faces wore masks – fear and hope, sadness and joy were etched on all the faces. I realised that making masks for care work was essentially about tracing these emotions into the contours. The more I understood these emotions, the more effective these masks would be. More people would buy and use them.

I decided to make a test case of myself. To discover how my face worked – what had left it the shape it was, with all the anxieties and hopes that made it more than a fixed mask. The face that I was, beyond DNA, uniquely sprung from all the faces that had been. I travelled. Read. Remembered. Visited ruins and homes. Talked to relatives. Found Grampa’s notes in his old shed, studied the local papers in the Inverness Archive Library, met Ruairidh on the old bridge that takes you to Tomnahurich. Borrowed, plagiarised, and invented things.

‘Will you come with me?’ I asked Emma. But she had her reasons.
‘I’m working on a new composition. And there’s a deadline, Gav. You know that.’
‘The real answer is that you don’t want to go.’

These are the stories I rescued out of the infinity that opened up before me, beginning with my great-great-grandmother, Elizabeth.

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Memory and Straw by Angus Peter Campbell is published by Luath Press. The paperback edition is out in July 2018 priced £8.99.

Canals are for leisurely, timeless exploring during any season and this updated guide is  an essential companion. The book also features side trips including this one to Kirkintilloch.

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Extract from Canals across Scotland
By Hamish Brown
Published by Whittles Publishing

Kirkintilloch is more or less in the middle of the long summit pound. In 1836 about a quarter of a million passengers were carried city to city, commercial craft passed constantly, even the herring fleet might hurry through from Clyde to Forth in pursuit of the ‘silver darlings’. The bridge area has been attractively landscaped. By turning right down the Cowgate you can find most of the town’s services. The next chapter takes the canal on from Kirki right into the heart of Glasgow, but a bit about the town first. Kirkintillock’s name, anciently, was Caerpentaloch, the fort at the head of the ridge. Note the 1893 fountain with the motto over it: Ca’ canny but ca’ awa’ (‘Be careful but carry on’). The centre is modern but has some character; walk to the Cross at the far end to visit the Auld Kirk (1644) Museum containing award-winning displays on the town’s major past industries: coal mining, iron works, shipbuilding and weaving. The Lion Foundry made the red telephone boxes which were known all over the world, now sadly phased out and the works forced to close as a result.

The Barony Chambers next door dates to 1815, when it replaced the old tollbooth. The top floor had a school, the middle floor acted as town hall and court room, and below lay the gaol. The steeple’s clock was known as the ‘four-faced liar’, as each face tended to show a different time. The museum can supply a leaflet/map of the Peel Park. Behind the Auld Kirk are war memorial gates leading into Peel Park, where there is a fountain and bandstand (as at Kilsyth), a good view to the Campsies, an excavated section of Wall foundation and the site of a castle motte. Walk down the park left to Union Street and then left back to the Cowgate. There’s another red church (St Ninian’s Roman Catholic) beside Peel Park. Kirkintilloch, like Kilsyth, has plenty of churches, sharing the same history of religious revivals in the 18th and 19th centuries. South of the canal lies Townhead; the only interest there is a couple of pubs/restaurants.

Kirkintilloch developed as a result of the canal coming. There were two shipyards, and industries developed as they could use the canal for transport; Glasgow was able to trade with eastern Europe via the canal. Maryhill (Kelvinlock then) had the first registered Temperance Society in 1827, and Kirkintilloch was also a dry town for 47 years, between 1921 and 1968. Records still show that many of the accidents on the canal had alcohol to blame – drunk in charge of a scow, screw or gabbart perhaps! Something like three million tons of goods and 200,000 passengers were being carried annually in mid-Victorian times.

From late Victorian times until World War II, cruising on the canal was popular (an alternative to sailing ‘doon the watter’). The famous ‘Queens’ regularly ran to the basin at Craigmarloch (Kilsyth) with its tearoom and putting green. A band and singing enlivened the evening run home to Glasgow. This is the image which lingers, rather than the reality of the canals being for 200 years as vital for industrial transportation as are the motorways today.

Robert the Bruce gave Kirkintilloch’s castle and lands to the Flemings, but they rebuilt the castle at Cumbernauld as their base. Edward I seized the castle at Kirkintilloch, but Bishop Wishart paused in his building work on Glasgow Cathedral to help dislodge the English forces. Bonnie Prince Charlie’s army passed through Kirkintilloch on the way to the Battle of Falkirk. A shot was fired after the troops, who had to be placated to stop them sacking the town. The library has a treasured burgh ‘Court Book’ (1658–94) which contains a range of historical information. In those days it was a crime in Kirki to be unemployed.

Kirkintilloch was early involved in railways as well as canals, a line being built from the mines at Monkland in 1826 (for horse-drawn wagons) to take coal by the canal to Edinburgh. Lines proliferated, and in 1840 another went by Slamannan to the Union Canal at Causewayend. North of Kirkintilloch the line skirted the Campsies, so you could travel by train to Aberfoyle, Balloch and Stirling – all lines which have gone now. Kirkintilloch had one remarkable visitor in 1785: the Italian balloonist Vicenzo Lunardi took off from central Glasgow watched by a crowd estimated at 100,000. He landed north of Kirkintilloch, which practically emptied as people streamed out to see this marvel. A few kilometres from Lunardi’s touch-down site is Antermony, where a more remarkable traveller was born in 1691. John Bell, a doctor, went to serve the Czar Peter I in 1714. From there he went to Persia (Iran) and later right across Russia to China –a 16-month journey. After further journeys in Turkey and Persia he became a merchant in Constantinople. He returned to Antermony about 1746, and wrote a book about his adventures. An unusual canal visitor in 1952 was the midget submarine XE IX, which spent the night in the Townhead, J & J Hay boatyard, since gone. (The puffer Vital Spark of the TV series was one built in the yard.)

Probably the town’s most famous son was Tom Johnston – journalist, historian, politician, Secretary of State for Scotland, creator of the Highland hydro industry, and Chairman of the Scottish Council of the Forestry Commission and the Scottish Tourist Board (among other things). He was also a consummate politician and a member of Churchill’s wartime cabinet. It was the war that led to his appointment as surely the best (some would say only) Secretary of State for Scotland, and out of the war, with shortages and difficulties, the Hydro Board was created to tap the Highland water for power, a fairly assured renewable energy resource. Kirkintilloch is another place where water is fed into the canal to keep it operational, this time coming from the Johnstone, Woodend, Lochend and Bishops Lochs, well to the south.

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Canals Across Scotland by Hamish Brown is published by Whittles Publishing and is available now in paperback priced at £16.99 or Ebook at £10.99.

In parallel with their story runs that of sixteenth-century cousins Mateo and Francisco, survivors from the ill-fated Spanish Armada who find safe passage to the island.There, one of them falls in love with the laird’s daughter. The precious gold posy (poesy) ring he gives her is found centuries later. Are its haunting engraved mottoes, un temps viendra and vous et nul autre, somehow significant now for Daisy and Cal?

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Extract from The Posy Ring
By Catherine Czerkawska
Published by Saraband

When the solicitor’s letter came, she had been doubtful at first, wondering if it was a hoax. She had called her father. He was playing at some festival down south. It’s what he does. One of the grand old men of folk. That’s what they call him, although he doesn’t think of himself as particularly old and he isn’t. Perhaps it’s just that he seems to have been performing, playing the fiddle, for years.

‘I’m a baby boomer,’ he says, grinning. ‘We don’t get old.’

The young fans like him, give him the kind of respect that would have amused him when he was a young musician himself. Now he tolerates it. He has always been a kindly man. His music matters more to him than almost anything else. Except for Jessica May. Except for his daughter. After his wife died, he had sold the van, moved to Glasgow for a while, rented a flat so that Daisy could go to school. He had taken whatever work he could find and he had been reasonably successful. When the landlord decided to sell the tiny West End flat, he had managed to buy it so that Daisy would always have somewhere to call home. There had been gigs in pubs, session music, private tutoring. One year – a good year – he had played for a television advertisement and as well as the mortgage, that had bought Daisy new clothes, a bike, a school skiing trip. He played the fiddle, people said, as though he had sold his soul to the devil. Perhaps he had. He still does. But everyone knows the devil has all the best tunes.

She had read the letter aloud to him over the phone. There was a long silence. He sighed.

‘Auchenblae,’ he said. ‘It means Flowerfield, I think. In Gaelic.’

‘Yes. The house. My grandmother died and, Dad, she left the house to me. Viola’s left everything to me. I had no idea. No idea it was hers. You never said a word. Never told me where Mum used to live. Gone away, you said. Lost touch. Why didn’t you tell me, Dad? I could have found her. Could have visited her. Could have got to know her.’ She could hear the resentment in her voice and tried to moderate it. He had never been less than caring where she was concerned. He must have had his reasons.

‘I didn’t know she was still alive. I didn’t see how she could be, really. She must have been a great age.’

‘She was. But that day. That day when we walked up the hill. That day when we made the wish. She would have been alive then. Viola. She would have been there then.’

‘Maybe. Probably. Yes.’

‘You wouldn’t let me stop. You never told me you even knew the place. Why?’

‘To tell you the truth, I was afraid, Daisy. I was afraid.’

‘Of what, for goodness sake?’

‘Of losing you.’

‘How could you have lost me?’

‘Your mother was so ill. But she wouldn’t give in. I thought, if Viola knew, she would have wanted you. And back then, she might have got you. Your mother was dying, Daisy. I knew that. They wouldn’t have left you with me. Not if Viola had stepped in.’

‘I don’t see what difference that would have made. She was only my grandmother. You were my dad. Nobody could have kept us apart.’

‘I think they could have. I was a bit of a mess. After your mother died. And even before.’

‘You weren’t.’

‘Oh, I was. I was, you know. But I’m glad I never let you see it. Glad you never knew. She might have got you. You didn’t know her. I never knew her well. Jess wouldn’t have it. But Viola was a strong-minded woman. Like your mother. Once she set her heart on something, nothing would stop her. And that was just like your mother. I was so frightened of losing you. I’d lost your mother. I couldn’t lose you as well.’

Daisy paused. She could barely take it in. ‘So why did we go back at all? Why did we risk it?’

‘Desperation. I’d have tried anything. I remembered the hill and the Clootie Tree. Your mother talked about it. She asked me if I would go. How could I refuse?’

‘The wish,’ she said, after a while. ‘Did you ever think the wish would work?’

‘No. Not really. I knew it wouldn’t work. Except…’ He hesitated.

‘What?’

‘Because I knew it wouldn’t work, because I knew how ill your mother really was, I kind of made another wish. A different one. It was a supplementary wish, if you like. I thought I might be allowed one more. In the circumstances. One for luck. That’s the way magic works, isn’t it? Tricky.’

‘What kind of wish?’ She was intrigued now, in spite of her shock, her anger. Besides, she loved him. Could never stop loving him.

‘Not for myself. Or for your mother. Just for you.’

‘And did it work? Did that one come true?’

‘You tell me. Are you happy? Happy enough, anyway?’

‘Of course I’m happy. You made sure of that.’

He had too. He had given her as much security as his wandering soul could manage. He had given her unstinting love and support. An education. Self-respect. What more could she ask?

‘Sometimes these things take time,’ he said.T

The phone crackled a little. He would be somewhere in a sea of mud, with his new van and his old fiddle. There would be a new woman too. There always was. He was still an attractive man. Although in that respect, he had waited until Daisy grew up, waited until she had gone to university. She could hear music in the background. The thin sounds of a whistle. A bodhrán. A woman singing.

‘Sometimes they take years.’

‘What do?’

‘Spells,’ he said. ‘Wishes. Sometimes they take years to come true.’

 

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The Posy Ring by Catherine Czerkawska is published by Saraband and available now priced £8.99.

 

Nothing says summer more than a wedding, anniversary, or friends to stay, so the Waverley authentic tartan cloth Guest Book (size 15.2cm x 22.7cm) with 192 pages is perfect for capturing the moment with messages, doodles, and photos for a lasting record of your event.

Bound in Kinloch Anderson Thistle tartan cloth, with cream-coloured paper 120gsm FSC, this elegant product celebrates the thistle with two shades of dark purple, dark green, turquoise, burgundy and charcoal.

The Guest Book is suitable for all events, at any time.

Published by Waverley Books it is priced at £20.00.

 

Perhaps you’re planning a family trip to visit some of Scotland’s world famous sites and monuments. Or maybe you’ll be joining Nessie hunters, Kelpie spotters, campers and cyclists in the great Scottish outdoors as you venture further afield. How soon after you’ve started the engine will the kids be asking ‘Are we there yet?’ Cue Kelpies HQ to the rescue with a stack of brand new bumper boredom-busting, all-engrossing books; the perfect antidote to those long journeys this summer.

A Super Scotland Activity Book

The companion to A Super Scotland Sticker Book is the latest instalment in the Kelpies World range of fun and engaging Scottish activity books for children takes young readers on a whirlwind tour of Scotland and Scottish culture. From dot to dot and spot the difference, to colouring in and word searches, the new activity book can help teach kids about Scottish food, animals and even Scots words. Readers can walk the corridors of Edinburgh Castle, visit the pandas in Edinburgh Zoo and climb aboard Glasgow’s Tall Ship in the Clyde. They can plot their way round Glasgow and get up close and personal with one of George Square’s majestic lions. And the book looks far beyond the cities too, taking readers to Loch Ness in the Trossachs, up around the North Coast 500 and even as far as Skara Brae.

 

Discover more about Barcelona-based illustrator Susana Gurrea in our #FlorisDesign interview here.

 

 

 

 

The Treasure of the Loch Ness Monster

Nessie hunters on a pilgrimage to Loch Ness can whet their appetite with this new monster story inspired by local folklore. Children can join Ishbel and Kenneth as they set sail across the loch in search of hidden treasure under Urquhart Castle. Will they find the fabled treasure or something more ancient living in the depths of the loch? This stunning picture book from award-winning author Lari Don features Nataša Ilinčić’s atmospheric illustrations of the Scottish Highlands.

 

 

Young monster spotters can enter our Map My Monster art competition to win a bundle of signed books! Visit our blog to find out how to enter.

 

 

 

 

Mary, Queen of Scots: Escape from Lochleven Castle

For those heading east to Perth and Kinross journey back in time with our latest Traditional Scottish Tale. The true story of the daring escape of Mary, Queen of Scots from the island castle in Loch Leven will captivate young readers as they feel the tension of Mary’s imprisonment and the excitement of her escape plans, gaining insight into this fascinating period of Scottish history.

 

Museum Mystery Squad and the Case of the Roman Riddle

The Squad are back in the latest Roman-related case as they investigate ancient treasure, mystery mosaics and suspicious centurions. Perfect for amateur sleuths, this fun series charts the many baffling and bewildering cases a junior detective squad must solve when faced with mysterious happenings at their local museum. Mike Nicholson, teamed with Mike Phillips’ animated illustrations, blow the (metaphorical) cobwebs off the museum glass and reveal the hidden potential for adventure, excitement and discovery that lies in every museum. Packed with fun quizzes and activities to test your knowledge between the chapters, these books will engage from the first page to the last.

 

Teachers looking for a fun way to introduce the Romans to their class can check out our Roman Riddle Features for Teachers Resources.

 

 

 

Wee Granny’s Magic Bag and the Pirates

Climb aboard the ferry to Arran, or in this case a pirate ship, in the latest adventure from the hugely popular Wee Granny’s Magic Bag series! Join Wee Granny as she sets sail on the big blue sea, picnics on the beach and helps a band of pirates hunt for buried treasure. A perfect read for any family heading to the Scottish seaside this summer, the book is a tartan-Jolly Rodger mash-up with plenty of fun for pirates and landlubbers alike.

For more location-based Kelpies books check out our interactive map.

Marian Womack’s stories explore place and landscape at different stages of decay, positioning them as fighting grounds for death and renewal. From dystopian Andalusia to Scotland or the Norfolk countryside, they bring together monstrous insects, ghostly lovers, soon-to-be extinct species, unexpected birds, and interstellar explorers, to form a coherent narrative about loss and absence.

 

Lost Objects
By Marian Womack
Published by Luna Press

 

Here, Marian shares her thoughts on the incoming collection:

“These stories have been with me a long time, and it is difficult to see them go out into the wider world. They are not entirely mine, I guess. Orange Dogs, Love(Ghost)Story and Frozen Planet were workshopped in Clarion; Black Isle or The Ravisher, The Thief, grew in meaning under the attentive gaze of skilful editors. Some are found-poems in prose, like Marvels do not oftimes occur, which is based on real events and reproduces, as respectfully as possible, the actual impressions of those who lived through them. Kingfisher is the most personal story I have ever written; and it refers to a particular set of anxieties many of us share. I’d like to thank the Luna Press team for the final editorial magic-dust that has smoothed off the last spiky places. Any fault in the book is entirely mine; they have been nothing but patient and caring with the project.

So, these stories owe a lot to many different people. As I said in the acknowledgements, a writer is in no way an island. But still, they talk deeply about my experience of always being perceived, or looked at, from the wayside. The stories talk about landscape, about place, but all of them looked at askance, from the wrong angle. This feeling has been a constant one for me, as a woman abroad, and has only accentuated itself over the years: ever more, perhaps, since the Brexit vote. Many of us live with a heightened sense of standing apart. It is always difficult being yourself in another language, in another place. External assumptions weigh heavily on your sense of self, and are almost unshakable. I am not interested in setting all my stories in my native Andalusia, a place in any case also deeply foreign to me now. I think many of us feel that way now, as if we are looking at life from the outside. We are a displaced generation, a generation of loss and absences, trying desperately to hang on to ever-fewer certainties.

This is a collection of short stories written over a number of years, which also indicates my developing interest in man’s impact on the environment, and what a possible future might look like, what our landscape, our sense of place, may transform itself into, sometimes with monstrous results. But if they look at the world from a particular place of loss and displacement, they observe the future with a certain degree of suspicion. I hope I have managed to convey the profound sense of sadness and bewilderment with which many of us look upon our actions, on the world we will leave for those who come after us.”

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Lost Objects, by Spanish writer Marian Womack, is now officially in pre-order until its Tuesday 3 July release date. It is published by Luna Press.

Rip it up: The story of Scottish pop is the book accompanying the exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland from 22 June to 25 November 2018. It explores the influential musical culture of Scotland over more than half a century, from Lonnie Donegan to Calvin Harris.

Excerpt from Rip it up: The story of Scottish pop
By Vic Galloway
Published by National Museums Scotland Enterprises Ltd – Publishing

 

From Chapter 3

Recorded music has only existed for the relatively short period of about 160 years, and the gramophone disc for even less. Folk today have lived their entire lives surrounded by recorded music in one shape or form. As we enter a new era when almost all music ever recorded can be digitally streamed via the internet – as simple as turning on a water tap – it is interesting to look at our relationship with the physical artefacts themselves and the ways in which we acquire our music.

Merchandise has always been central to pop for artists and fans alike. T-shirts, scarves, badges, posters, programmes – and of course the records themselves – are essential to keep the wheels of industry turning. Nothing proves a fan’s dedication more than a full set of band memorabilia. It can be tribal and identity driven, but it also commemorates well-loved artists in a fun and financially lucrative way. The revenue allows musicians to create their art, to tour the world and live their lives. Today’s fans have ring-tones, computer apps and interactive games to entice them, with personal ‘meet and greet’ opportunities, back-stage passes and signing sessions making the interface between artist and audience closer than ever. It’s perhaps a bit more complicated than acquiring a tartan scarf or button badge.

The song itself is hugely personal. It can reflect or represent a specific time in our lives, success or failure, hardship or joy, heartbreak or true love. Many of us keep a record of those memories and emotions, times and places – hence music collections become such an intimate chronicle of our lives. As well as the music, some of us are even attached to the formats themselves. Since the dawn of pop, as technology has advanced and consumer habits changed, we’ve enjoyed our favourite songs on vinyl, cassette tape, compact disc, digital download and now as streams. Although a more niche concern, vinyl is experiencing a renaissance these days, probably due to the sound quality, tactile nature of the object and sheer nostalgia. As collectors spend enormous sums globally on original vinyl, pressing plants are once again booming with rekindled demand.

Record shops have also played a major role in sustaining local music scenes throughout the years and are more than merely outlets for flogging merchandise. Though many of these communities have since moved online, shops have always been at the forefront of each new musical movement, endorsing and nurturing musicians as well as educating the public. The spaces themselves become crucibles for like-minded souls, networking musicians and local gig promotion. Before the internet the only genuine portals of music discovery were the music press, radio, and going to the local shop. Although chainstores like HMV, Virgin, Our Price, Tower and Fopp have served the public well, it was, and still is, the independent outlets that offer a more personal and unique experience. These shops stock the weird and wonderful, opening a window into another world for the customer, casual browser and curious teenager. Leafing through the dusty racks, looking at the poster-strewn walls, eavesdropping on hipster conversations at the counter, are essential for any avid music fan.

Not many outlets have developed a reputation beyond their lifetime, but Bruce’s Record shops have. Perhaps it was the era, attention to detail, dedication to the local scene, or the memorable red bags stating ‘I Found It At Bruce’s’. Opened in 1967 in Falkirk by the budding entrepreneur Bruce Findlay and his brother Brian, the Edinburgh branch of Bruce’s Records arrived in 1969 and became a hub for those interested in the new sights, sounds and scenes. Bruce’s shops spread across Scotland, inspiring others to do something similar until well into the 1980s. Like gig venues and bands themselves, Bruce’s and the shops that followed would become trusted institutions and pillars of the underground community.

There are still record shops across the world, albeit in dwindling numbers with increasingly small margins. As a music-mad nation, Scotland is no different. Each town, city or decent-sized metropolis has a shop to shout about. As many have fallen by the wayside, honorary mentions must go to Avalanche and Ripping in Edinburgh, John Smith’s, 23rd Precinct and Missing in Glasgow, Chalmers & Joy in Dundee, One Up in Aberdeen, Imperial Music in Inverness and Sleeves in Kirkcaldy.

All were wonderful ‘bricks and mortar’ establishments that couldn’t quite surf the digital wave, pay the rent and keep the records in the racks. Some have survived, thankfully, and new ones are appearing. Scotland’s oldest record outlet, Concorde Records in Perth, has recently celebrated fifty years of business. Groucho’s in Dundee is over forty and still going strong with new, second-hand product and concert ticket sales. And Edinburgh’s Vinyl Villains has recently reached its thirty-fifth birthday.

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Rip it up by Vic Galloway published by NMS Enterprises – Publishing will be available from 22 June 2018 priced at £14.99.

In this excerpt from his latest book, doctor and writer Gavin Francis talks about how to be alive is to be in perpetual metamorphosis.

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Transformation

 

‘From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and
most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’
Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species.

 

There’s a park near my medical office lined with cherry trees and elms that undergo beautiful annual transformations. If there’s time on my commute I’ll stop at a bench and watch them for a few moments. Winter brings storms, and the last few years have seen several of the tallest elms blown over. When they fall down, tearing up their roots, deep coffin-sized gashes open in the earth. Around Easter the branches thicken with a green so enchanting I see why some imagine it as the colour of heaven. The blossoming of the cherry trees in spring strews the grass with petals, and to take a stroll beneath their branches is to be fêted in pink. The summer air feels ripe and dense – barbecues are lit and babies play on rugs in the shade; acrobats teeter over ropes strung between the tree trunks. But my favourite season is autumn, when the sky feels high, the air pellucid and brittle, and heaps of crimson, auburn and gold gather around my feet. I’ve been appreciating this park for around twenty-five years – it’s adjacent to the medical school where I trained.

Aged eighteen, in the first year of training, I walked through drifts of those leaves to a biochemistry class that I’ve never forgotten – a lecture where I had something approaching a revelation of the intricacy, the interconnectedness, even the wonder of life. It had an inauspicious beginning: projected on the wall was a complex diagram of the haemoglobin molecule. The tutor explained that the chemical which binds oxygen into red blood cells, known as a ‘porphyrin ring’, was essential both to the haemoglobin of blood and the chlorophyll that traps the sun’s energy in leaves. Thanks to porphyrins, she said, life on earth as we know it is possible. Up on the wall, the molecular structure resembled a four-leafed clover, with porphyrin leaves interlocked in an architecture of almost Gothic complexity. Cradled at the core of each of the four leaves was a lava-red atom of iron.

When oxygen binds to the heart of each leaf, she explained, it reddens like an autumn maple; when oxygen is released, it darkens to purple. So far, so biochemical. ‘But this isn’t a static process,’ the tutor added, ‘it’s dynamic and alive.’ The binding of oxygen transforms its cradle; the stress of that transformation pulls a tiny atomic lever which bends the cradles of the other three, encouraging the take-up of more oxygen. This was the first revelation of the elegance of biochemistry, as startling as it should have been obvious: from chlorophyll to haemoglobin, molecules cooperate with one another in order to sustain life.

Watching the diagram, I tried to imagine billions of molecules of my own haemoglobin, their shapes shifting as they gathered oxygen in my lungs with each breath. Then the beating of my heart pushing on rivers of blood to my brain, my muscles, my liver, where the same shift would occur in reverse. It seemed a transformation as vital and as perennial as the annual growth and fall of leaves, implausible, somehow, that it could be happening moment to moment throughout my body. ‘The more the tissues need oxygen the more acid they become,’ she went on; ‘that acidity deforms haemoglobin into releasing oxygen exactly in proportion to how much it’s needed.’ This was the second revelation of the morning: blood is exquisitely calibrated to meet varying oxygen requirements across the body. She began explaining the ways in which foetal haemoglobin is subtly enhanced to draw oxygen across the placenta from the mother, but I was already so caught up in the first two realisations that I hardly heard her.

I felt the air charge with reverence, the unfolding of a kind of joy: that such balance existed among the tumult of body chemistry seemed strangely beautiful, though at the same time inevitable.

Transformation is one of the most ancient and resonant themes in literature and art: two thousand years ago in the Metamorphoses, the Latin poet Ovid painted nature and mankind as a seething maelstrom where all matter, animate and inanimate, was caught up in cycles of change ‘like pliant wax which, stamped with new designs, does not remain as it was, or keep the same shape … everything is in a state of flux, and comes into being as a transient appearance’. Ovid closed his poem with a declaration of the fraternity of life, and a passionate plea to treat all beings with compassion. That compassion too is at the heart of clinical practice – medicine could be described as the alliance of science with kindness. This book is a celebration of dynamism and transformation in human life, both as a way of thinking about the body, and as a universal truth.

The great cavalcade of the cosmos is in evolution around us: the universe is expanding, the gyre of the galaxy spinning, the earth wheels through its orbit and the moon gets more distant with every year. A tilt in our planet’s axis gives us the swing of the seasons; more than a trillion tides have already rinsed earth’s shores. The churn of plate tectonics is renewing the crust of the earth. ‘Nothing stays the same for long’ is a truism that, depending on your perspective, is either a curse or a consolation. ‘You can’t step into the same river twice’, said Heraclitus – because our bodies are ceaselessly renewed, even as each river’s waters are renewed.

To be alive is to be in perpetual metamorphosis. The borders of our selves are porous – shaped and recomposed by elements of our environment. River water was once sea spray; next year it could flow in your neighbour’s blood. The water in your brain once fell as rain on ancient landscapes, and surged in the swell of long-gone oceans. From this perspective, the body is itself a flowing stream, or burning fire: no two of its moments are ever the same. In growth and in recovery, in adapting and in ageing, our bodies ineludibly change form – and with sleep, memory and learning, so do our minds. From the crises that may overwhelm us to the transitions between conception and the grave; from the neural flows that weave consciousness to the changes that can be effected through our own willpower and determination, we embody change.

The word ‘patient’ means ‘sufferer’, and to practise medicine is to seek to ease human suffering. Much of my work as a physician takes advantage of those changes that aid us, and tries to slow those that would constrain us. As a writer, I’m interested in change as a metaphor that has preoccupied poets, artists and thinkers for millennia, and as a doctor, I’m interested in the same theme because to practise medicine is to seek positive change, however modest, in the minds and the bodies of my patients.

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Shapeshifters: On Medicine & Human Change by Gavin Francis published by Profile Books is available now priced £16.99.

Maggie loves monsters, but she is bored of her toy monsters and would much prefer a real one to play with. Perhaps on her trip around Scotland she’ll find one! Using her trusty binoculars, Maggie discovers an abundance of Scottish wildlife – a highland coo, a grey seal and even a golden eagle – but they are not the monster she’s searching for. Eventually Maggie spots the perfect monsters to play with, but it’s not quite what she expected …

Maggie’s Monsters by Coo Clayton and Alison Soye is published by Black and White Publishing on 26 June 2018 priced £6.99.

In A History of Scotland’s Landscapes, Fiona Watson looks at how our past has shaped the Scottish landscape we know today.

Extract from A History of Scotland’s Landscapes
By Fiona Watson with Piers Dixon
Published by Historic Environment Scotland

As the Romantic Movement grew, devotees often sought out foreign or remote landscapes. And there can have been few more Romantic travelling companions than Samuel Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth, who came to Scotland in 1803, paying homage to two Scottish literary giants in the Romantic tradition at the beginning and end of their tour. Robert Burns had, unfortunately, died seven years earlier, and Dorothy had to work hard to keep her prejudices in check when she visited his house in Dumfries where his wife and children still lived. You will not be surprised to learn that she thought: ‘It has a mean appearance … dirty about the doors, as almost all Scotch houses are.’

Nevertheless, she was heartened, on entering the parlour, to see ‘on one side of the fire was a mahogany desk, opposite to the window a clock, and over the desk a picture from the “Cotter’s Saturday Night”, which Burns mentions in one of his letters having received as a present’. It presumably came as a considerable relief that: ‘The house was cleanly and neat in the inside, the stairs of stone, scoured white’. In the end, though, she was not impressed with Dumfries, ‘which is no agreeable place to them who do not love the bustle of a town that seems to be rising up to wealth’. She could not help but pity ‘poor Burns and his moving about on that unpoetic ground’. I can only imagine that the bard would have been bemused by such a sentiment.

A month later, she and her brother arrived in Melrose, where they were met by Walter Scott. Scott was still in the early stages of his literary career, but he liked to entertain poets and writers. His usefulness to the Wordsworths lay in his avowed knowledge of the area – ‘we scarcely passed a house for which he had not some story’.

He joined them as often as he could, in between his duties as local sheriff, treating them on at least two occasions to recitations of parts of The Lay of the Last Minstrel, though Dorothy refrained from saying whether or not she liked it. Nevertheless, when they did finally part a few days later on a high hill near Hawick, she admitted that: ‘We wished we could have gone with Mr Scott into some of the more remote dales of this country, where in almost every house he can find a home and a hearty welcome.’

As the nineteenth century progressed, tourism – until recently the preserve of a small, and reasonably hardy, elite – began to open up to ever greater numbers. Even the working classes might venture a short distance – from Glasgow to the Clyde resorts, for example, or from Edinburgh along the coast to Portobello – but these precious moments of freedom were not spent seeking out alarming, gloomy scenery or sublimely assembled vistas. As a letter written in 1881 by Mary Allison, wife of a Glasgow storekeeper, poignantly illustrates, holidays were counted in days, not weeks, were often spent with family, and permitted the glorious luxury of sleeping in (till 8 o’clock!).

While rising incomes and more free time played their part, new modes of transport were crucial in making holidays feasible for almost all sections of society. Unlike in England, where it was the railways that proved decisive, steamships also played a vital part in helping the Scottish tourist to get quickly and comparatively comfortably to his or her destination.

But Scotland was attractive to visitors from much further afield too, especially once Sir Walter Scott had, almost single-handedly (with help from James Macpherson), made the Highlands and its dramatic scenery Romantic. The young Queen Victoria was an avid reader of his novels and spent two weeks in her autumn kingdom in the autumn of 1842. She was not disappointed, noting in her diary on her return to the south that ‘The English coast seemed terribly flat.’ She had become particularly attached to the Highlands, missing its ‘fine hills’, but swore there was more to it than just lovely scenery; ‘there was a quiet, a retirement, a wildness, a liberty, and a solitude that had such a charm for us’. By June 1852, she and Prince Albert had become the delighted owners of the Balmoral estate.

Where Victoria led, it was incumbent on the rich and powerful – whether of old or new money – to follow. Scotland played its hand expertly and the money flowed in as southern aristocrats and wealthy industrialists turned to fishing, hunting and shooting with determined fervour. Harking back to an ancient pastime, these Victorian hunters with their uniform tweeds, caps and plus fours, were giving many northern estates a new lease of life.

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A History of Scotland’s Landscapes is out now, published by Historic Environment Scotland, priced £30. All photographs in the above excerpt are taken from the book, copyright HES.

Extract from Tweed Dales: Journeys and Evocations Exploring History, Folklore and Stories
from the Heart of the Scottish Borders
by Donald Smith and Elspeth Turner
Published by Luath Press

 

Journey 4: Galawater, Wedale and Lauderdale

North of the Tweed we travel up the Gala Water and down the Leader Water. The two rivers are hemmed in by hills to the west and east and so most travellers used, as now, these river valleys and the hills between them. Routes ran close to and beneath today’s roads or walking paths. The drove roads for cattle and the Herring Road from the coast, crisscrossed the hills to connect with them.

The numerous Celtic British hill enclosures, Roman fortlets and camps, and the tower houses that later lined these routes indicate that defence of this narrow corridor mattered greatly to whichever overlord had control. The need for military defence waned after the Union of the Crowns in 1603, disappearing with the Union of the Parliaments in 1707, but even before then life on this side of the Tweed was generally more peaceable than to the south – not least in the centuries after David, Earl of Northumbria, was crowned David I of Scotland in 1124.

For most of this time Wedale and Lauderdale folk shared the hills with thousands of sheep belonging to one or other of the Border Abbeys. Until the abbey lands passed into private hands after the Reformation, relatively little land was held by non-monastic tenants. At some distance from the border with England there was also less threat from marauding armies. While the reiving dynasties south of the Tweed were stealing cattle from one another and carrying out cross border raids, the people of Lauderdale gained an early reputation for settling disputes through the courts. That is not to say that life in Wedale and Lauderdale was uneventful or that all conflicts were resolved bloodlessly. There were battles and family feuds, but these were usually sparked by political events and religious differences.

Things were less peaceful before the arrival of monastic flocks. In the 7th century, the Anglo-Saxon Northumbrians wrested control of the lands between the Tweed and the Firth of Forth from the Celtic British. Physical and diplomatic tussles for control continued until a mid-10th century deal was struck. This merged several kingdoms to create England, relinquished the lands north of the Tweed to the Scots, and reduced the Kingdom of Northumbria to an earldom. By the time David was crowned King of Scotland, the border had settled along the Cheviots and the eastern end of the Tweed.

So, for nearly five centuries, the people who lived in Wedale and Lauderdale were either on the edge of the Kingdom of Northumbria or outside it. This may explain why Anglo Saxon influence on place names and settlement patterns here is minimal and why English replaced Cymric, the language of the Celtic British, more slowly than south of the Tweed. The area was also until the 19th century more sparsely populated than lands to the south. These continuities may explain why a Galashiels accent is still distinguishable from accents heard in nearby Selkirk, Melrose and Peebles.

Travel in and out of these parts was not undertaken lightly before toll-funded turnpike roads and bridges connected Edinburgh with Carlisle and Jedburgh in the late 18th century. Roman Dere Street was repaired periodically to serve as a military route, but generally roads were rough tracks and frequently impassable. And there was the added challenge of getting across the Tweed. There were few bridges and in fact, for a long time, none between Peebles and Kelso. And so, for millennia, these dales grew men for fighting, cattle and, latterly, sheep. Although the abbeys sowed the seeds of the textile industry that transformed the central Borders in the 19th century, government policies to reduce reliance on imported goods and maximise exports created the conditions for growth. Skilled textile workers were enticed from abroad with promises of tax breaks and special privileges, and steps were taken to stimulate and protect domestic production (for example by insisting Scots had by law to be buried in a shroud of Scottish linen). By the 1770s, the country had a sizeable textile industry. The mechanisation of spinning and weaving processes over the next 50 years revolutionised production and transformed the small, unremarkable burgh of Galashiels into a dynamic industrial town exporting high quality cloth across the globe.

This meteoric rise was lent some serendipitous aid by literary neighbours, Sir Walter Scott and James Hogg. They popularised the distinctive shepherd’s check pattern and later tartan. The association of woven woollen cloth with the area was further strengthened through the misreading by a clerk of ‘tweel’ (an alternative term for twill) as ‘tweed’. Whether this came about as a consequence of bad handwriting or poor eyesight is unknown but the name stuck! By the mid-19th century, a sparsely populated area, largely bypassed by the 18th century agricultural advances, became one of the most dynamic in Scotland. Road improvements and the coming of the railway provided a further boost.

Although later agricultural changes and ups-and-downs in the textile industry led to many people leaving in the 19th century, more came than left. However, the 20th century wars, a decline in demand for the products of the mills and the closure of the railway for 46 years, brought challenging times to the Leader and Gala Water valleys. After a bumpy ride through the second half of the 20th century, the area is back on the rails metaphorically, and, with the reopening of the Waverley railway line to Tweedbank in 2015, literally.

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Tweed Dales: Journeys and Evocations Exploring History, Folklore and Stories from the Heart of the Scottish Borders by Donald Smith and Elspeth Turner is out now published by Luath Press priced £12.99

Bob Orrell, author of Halcyon in the Hebrides writes about his most memorable summer cruise ever.

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A Memorable Cruise

I would never claim that ‘West is Best’ but many articles about Scotland start with a line or two from a poem by Robert Burns, praising the Highlands. But when I was a keeper at Ardnamurchan Lighthouse, the most westerly point of the mainland, I discovered that the Bard had a rival. Known far and wide as the ‘Robbie Burns of the Highlands’, Angus Mackintyre was the manager of the bank in Tobermory and, though his witty poems could raise a laugh or a tear, and he regularly went into raptures about the beauty of Scotland, his poetry had an uncanny way of associating the warmth of a Scottish summer with the warmth of the Scottish people. To me, though, he was the person who understood my keen interest in sailing and the sea, and he used to say, ‘There is only one way to enjoy the west and the islands during the summer, and that’s by boat. Put a ‘bit aside’ each month for your dream boat and you’ll achieve it.’

And so I did, although it was not by the route either of us had in mind. It took several years and I had various occupations before I got there. With the help of a friend I acquired a share in her 32ft gaff yawl and we explored the lochs of the Clyde and the anchorages of Mull, Loch Sunart, Eigg, Rum and Canna. It was a shock when she decided she had other business interests and put the boat up for sale, and it seemed I would lose it, but before it went to a new owner I was given the opportunity to use it for a journey I had dreamed of all my life, to sail alone and explore the Hebrides, as far out as the St Kilda group if possible.

Loaded down with food, cans of fuel, Admiralty charts and Pilot books of almost every inch of the Hebrides and the St Kilda group, I cast off the gaff yawl Halcyon from Fairlie Marina on the Clyde and steered for the Isle of Arran. By this time Angus had long passed on to entertain the Gaelic-speaking community in heaven; but looking down from his cloud he maybe saw that amongst all the sailing directions on a shelf above the chart table there was a copy of his book ‘The Compleat Angus,’ and was so pleased he organised what turned out to be one of the best Scottish Summers for a long time. Admittedly, with no wind it was hopeless sailing weather, and rounding the Mull of Kintyre – Scotland’s notorious Cape Horn – the sea was so flat and motionless it was almost an invitation to get out and have a leg stretch walking alongside the boat. Occasionally a cool wind rose from nowhere and stirred the sea, but it soon fell away and out came the sun.

There wasn’t a cloud to be seen as I motored past Gigha, through the Sound of Islay and the Torren Rocks to Iona and Staffa. Passing close to the lonely Treshnish Isles, floating like jewels on an azure sea, it was so hot it was as if the surf could not make the effort to break against the rocks and lay lifeless. Steering past Coll, bound for Canna and a passage across the Sea of the Hebrides to Barra, the scene could have been anywhere in the Mediterranean except that the islands were an indication I was still in Scotland; they were a lush green instead of being parched brown.

With BBC Radio Scotland forecasting that the good weather was to continue I worked my way slowly from Barra up the east coast of the Hebrides, keeping my fingers crossed in the hope that I could get through the Sound of Harris and out to St Kilda. I did go through the Sound, but a heavy swell was thundering in from the west and, abandoning my hope of reaching St Kilda, I had to be content with visiting the little islands of Taransay, Scarp and a few isolated sea lochs. Very few yachts explore the west side of the Hebrides, but the crews of those that do will feel a true sense of achievement.

North of Harris, the many lochs are a yachtsman’s dream and a stay over in the fine harbour and town of Stornoway must not be missed. I crossed the Minch to Loch Ewe with its renowned garden, then followed to coast to gorgeous Loch Torridon and across to anchor in, and spend a few days exploring, the lovely isle of Rona. After a brief few days when it had hidden behind clouds, the warm sun re-appeared and the view of the inner isles was truly sparkling.

Reluctantly leaving Rona and going via Ardnamurchan Point and the Sound of Mull, the Crinan Canal and Loch Fyne to my mooring at Fairlie Marina, I completed over 1,000 sea miles and had the most enjoyable and most memorable Scottish summer cruise ever.

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Halcyon in the Hebrides by Bob Orrell is published by Whittles Publishing and available now in paperback at £16.99 or Ebook at £10.99.

 

Transfixed into thinking like an artist by David Hockney’s Untitled, 992, David Robinson wonders what book opens out its own creation as perfectly as that artwork? In Kirsty Gunn’s new novel Caroline’s Bikini, a novel about writing, he discovers the nearest thing in fiction to watching Hockney’s cactus materialise in front of him.

David Robinson Reviews: Caroline’s Bikini
By Kirsty Gunn
Published by Faber & Faber

One Friday afternoon a couple of weeks ago, in England’s May heatwave, I visited the new David Hockney Gallery at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall. His early drawings of the city we both grew up in made me feel nostalgic, his dreamy Californian swimming pools and East Yorkshire landscapes were equally enchanting. But there was one painting that I couldn’t move away from.

Untitled, 992 is actually a relatively undistinguished Hockney from 2011, a still life of a cactus in a small plant pot placed in a purple mug in the middle of a wooden table. What transfixed me was that, on the screen in front of me, it was changing: the still life was becoming alive. The rim of the plant pot caught the light and turned silver, the handle of the mug darkened into shade, the spikes of the cactus were dotted into existence, lines of wood grain suddenly materialised, the plant pot dulled first into earthenware brown and then reddened into plastic. Each stroke of the brush – or more likely, because this was an example of Hockney’s iPad art, each touch of his fingers – changed the picture, each mark an attempt to capture the moment of seeing. As each of Hockney’s decisions appeared on the screen, they tested themselves against my mind too: wasn’t that silver light a bit too obvious, the grain of the wood too red, the green of the cactus too luminous? I’m not an artist, but suddenly I was thinking like one.

What, I wondered, was the nearest thing that fiction could offer to that small epiphany in a Bradford gallery? What book opened out its own creation as perfectly as Untitled 992?

Fiction about fiction gets a bad rap. We’ll lap it up if there’s a writer-narrator with a chunkily plot-rich life like Logan Mountstuart in William Boyd’s wonderful Any Human Heart. We’ll shower awards (and, come the film version, Oscars) on novels like Michael Cunningham’s The Hours which mix scenes of an actual Famous Writer at Work with parallel fictions. Search out the absurdity of the writer’s life and add a twist of a satire on campus life – Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, in other words –  and readers will love you for it. But writers writing fiction about writing? Nah, we tend to think. Too limiting  Too unimaginative. Too much of a cop-out.

Actually, I’ve only just discovered the nearest thing in fiction to watching Hockney’s cactus materialise in front of me, and it’s just the opposite of that.

Kirsty Gunn’s latest novel, Caroline’s Bikini, is indeed all about writing. If you’re expecting a conventional predictable novel, you’ll realise you’ve come to the wrong place as soon as you read its sub-title: “An arrangement of a novel with an introduction and some further material by Kirsty Gunn”. The novel is ostensibly by  Emily Stuart, a freelance copywriter/cataloguer/reviewer/short story writer living in London. Her childhood friend Evan, now a middle-aged banker, has returned to Britain from America and fallen in unrequited love with Caroline, his landlady in Richmond. He wants Emily to write the story about that love. The two friends meet in a series of achingly trendy metropolitan gin bars, and Emily’s book starts to take shape.

But is it, in fact, going to be a novel? Maybe it might be an essay, a meditation on courtly love, that peculiarly way early medieval man found to put women on poetic pedestals; there are indeed parallels between that and Evan’s feelings for Caroline. At this stage in Emily’s book, everything is still provisional. She worries about it, aware that it might need major modifications, like Hockney changing the colour of the cactus plant pot. One thing’s for sure: if it doesn’t capture some sort of emotional reality it will end up as much of a failure as a still life that doesn’t capture light.

Yet to get emotional reality, Emily needs detail, texture, speech to flesh out Evan’s infatuation with Caroline. She wants to explain it, to understand what fascinates him about her. But Evan, tongue-tied in front of his landlady, doesn’t have the words for any of that, or rather the ones that he does have are words other people have used, and wildly overblown, like myths or bad poetry.

And here, Gunn implies, we slam straight into one of the key problems with the pre-modernist novel, which is what, even now, most of us still expect a novel to be. In it, fiction usually double-crosses reality. For example, Emily needs to know, with some degree of precision, what the inside of Caroline’s house looks like; all Evan comes up with it that it’s “fancy” so she starts using her imagination. She wants to know how Caroline talks to him, so she can at least use the odd adverb; he can’t remember.  Even when he does come up with his own description of his commute, the words he uses sound more like John Cheever’s than his own.

So far, so Hockney: as Emily and Evan drink their way round London’s gin-joints – invariably described with comic brio – Emily’s experiments with words (what works, whether real dialogue is good enough etc) appear and disappear like iPad finger-painting on a screen. If Hockney makes you think like a painter, Gunn makes you think like a writer: Emily’s doubts about whether her book has enough “ballast” perfectly convey a novelist’s doubts about the impossibility of her craft. The real skill of Gunn’s novel, however, lies in the way in which it takes the reader off in  completely different directions.

I should explain. As well as satirising London’s moneyed elite (the kind who hold swimming pool parties), Gunn has constructed a 60-page afterword which contextualises the novel “by Emily” which we have just read. If you’ve missed all those references to courtly love, and to Evan wasting away as knights tended to do in what was, after all, the way the West first attempted to put romantic love into words, she offers chapter and verse on, for example, Petrarch and Laura.  If you want more background on the childhood friendship between Emily and Evan, and that between their two families, or how both of them use words, those bases – and many more – are covered too.

Much of this superstructure – and indeed the book’s very title, seems designed to back up the story of whether Evan will ever discover the secrets of Caroline’s bikini. Yet Gunn has been carefully laying out another trail all along. I’m not saying you won’t guess where it will lead, but even if you do, this book is written with such wit and panache that you won’t mind. Its magic is simple but powerful: you might think you’ve been looking at a potted cactus, but it turns out that really you’ve been watching an apple tree all along, maybe even a small orchard. And not even Hockney can do that.

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Caroline’s Bikini by Kirsty Gunn (Faber & Faber) is available now priced at £14.99.

This poem is from Ken Cockburn’s new collection of poetry.

 

Summer Grasses
By Ken Cockburn (from Floating the Woods)
Published by Luath Press

 

at Killerton we walked in silence
past dandelions already gone to seed
and summer grasses

at Knightshayes we walked in silence
through memories of the buzzing airman’s crash
while blue dragonflies skimmed the fountain

at Lanhydrock we walked in silence
through formal Victorian gardens
and the newly mown graveyard

at Clovelly we walked in silence
through a greenwood
to a stony beach

at Overbeck’s we walked in silence
high above the blue bay
on the afternoon of the longest day

at Castle Drogo we walked in silence
past dismantled parapets
into the orchard

at Stourhead we walked in silence
through ‘The Shades’
and descended to the lake

at Croft Castle we walked in silence
from a welcome frustrated by war
to a doubly unwelcome return

at Dunham Massey we walked in silence
along the towpath to the Rope and Anchor
where the horses were commandeered

at the Hardmans’ House we walked in silence
through the cathedral’s complexities
and the bombed-out church, open to angelic skies

at Penrhyn Castle we walked in silence
away from cyclopean gothic
into unforgiving heat

at Nostell Priory we walked in silence
to the ha-ha where the music
carried, just

at Attingham Park we walked in silence
beneath the motto of the deserving rich
to Eada’s only church

at Chirk Castle we walked in silence
past a rustic Orpheus
and a blindfold nymph

at Dudmaston we walked in silence
under apple-boughs
where kids were fighting over windfalls

at Ormesby Hall we walked in silence
from shell-shocked refugees
to prosperous suburbia

at Osterley Park we walked in silence
past Adam’s transparent portico
and the Army Service Corps Mechanical Transport Depot

at Ightham Mote we walked in silence
on a right-of-way across private land
to a saintless church of the Commonwealth

at Ashridge we walked in silence
on land scarred with practice trenches
remnant deer glimpsed in the woods

at Whipsnade we walked in silence
between holly-hedge and mesh-fence
to a porch of oaks and a nave of limes

at Nymans we walked in silence
until it was broken by
a proprietorial thank you

at Bateman’s we walked in silence
to a memorial naming the dead
who kept dying long after the war was over

at the White Cliffs of Dover we walked in silence
past holm oaks and seakale
relishing life at the edge

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Floating the Woods by Ken Cockburn is published by Luath Press and is available now priced £8.99.

From an inspirational resource for those who want to discover more about the thousands of miles of Scotland’s spectacular coastline, this extract features two of the smaller islands.

 

Extract from A Handbook of Scotland’s Coasts
taken from a chapter on Island Jaunts
by Fi Martynoga
Published by Saraband

 

Inchcolm

If you tire of Edinburgh in the summer, it is possible to transport yourself to another world within two hours. It’s a small one but so full of interest you will not spend much time looking back over the water at the city.

Lying in the Firth of Forth, this island is almost as delightful as Iona but much less well known or visited. Its abbey, founded in the 12th century on a site already used by Culdee hermits, was dedicated to Saint Columba. Like Iona, it has been the burial place of kings and other nobles, and of large numbers of Danish soldiers. A ‘hogback’ stone, now preserved in the visitors’ centre, is probably a memorial to one of their leaders. It was Sweyn Forkbeard, King of the Danes, who paid handsomely for the privilege of committing their bones to an island grave, where neither dogs nor wolves might exhume them.

What is remarkable about the abbey is the survival of many of its buildings, intact, and even with roofs. The octagonal chapter house, the cloisters with refectory and dormitory above them, and part of the church can all be seen, almost as if the Reformation never happened. Being offshore, they avoided the excesses of reforming mobs, and the place remained partly used as a residence, the rest of it being allowed to slide into ruin. Its charm is in this state of decay, which allows the historical imagination full play, and also in its situation. The greensward and scatter of trees of this tiny island are compelling: so near to Edinburgh, yet worlds apart. You get to Inchcolm on a boat from South Queensferry, cruising along the Forth. It takes less than an hour and gives you an hour and a half to explore. There are First and Second World War fortifications, the former Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) building being the gift shop run by Historic Scotland, which has the custody of the buildings. Fulmars, gulls and terns breed successfully on the island, as it lacks terrestrial predators like stoats and hedgehogs.

 

Raasay

Raasay, off the east coast of Skye and accessible by car ferry from Sconser, is an island with a distinctive skyline. Its flat-topped hill, Dun Caan, is like a miniature of one of MacLeod’s Tables on Skye. Early travellers walked round the island in a day, but as it is 14 miles long and three wide, they can’t have had much time to enjoy the place. Raasay House was formerly a gentleman’s residence visited by James Boswell and Samuel Johnson in 1773. The latter found “nothing but civility, elegance and plenty”. In the last 40 years it has seen dereliction, revival, community buy-out, and fire, but it’s now been totally refurbished as holiday accommodation with an outdoor centre, a café, bar and restaurant. Tourism is the primary earner in this place that used to rely on its mineral wealth, fishing in the deep waters that surround it, and crofting. On a day trip you can taste some of the island’s pleasures. Raasay House is just north of the principal village, Inverarish, where the ferry docks. Several special things linger in my memory from my first visit. On its battery you can see the old cannon and the stone mermaids from the island’s heyday. Nearby is a fine Pictish stone.

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A Handbook of Scotland’s Coasts by Fi Martynoga is published by Saraband and is available now priced £12.99.