THE BEST OF SCOTTISH BOOKS

Angela Hughes’s first book tells us of priceless gifts. My Heart’s Content is a deeply moving memoir, and here, for BooksfromScotland, she tells us of her story.

 

My Heart’s Content
By Angela Hughes
Published by Liminal Ink

 

It’s here again, that bells a-jingling, chestnuts a-roasting, snow a-falling, consumers a-spending, debts a-rising time of year. And I love it. Always have. Not the full on, shop-til-you-drop approach, but that feeling of optimism, of togetherness. Of peace and goodwill to all. The Dickens’ effect, or in my case the muppets’ interpretation of Dickens.

As a child Christmas was Top-of-the-Pops, new pyjamas, an array of grandparents, selection boxes and party games. Sleep became a bargaining tool, carrots reindeer fodder and tangerines appeared in the toe of my dad’s work socks. And then there were books, filled with worlds in which to lose myself. Books with chickens and skies that fell in; books with witches and wardrobes, with dogs called Timmy and girls called George. Stories of soft rains and the death of a butterfly that changed the trajectory of the world. Moors and doublespeak and Beat poets and …

In later years Christmas brought an awareness of those who were alone. Those who were ill, suffering, in despair. It also brought It’s a Wonderful Life and the idea of reflection and reconciliation, of personal transformation. All of which came into sharp focus in early December 2013, when I was listed for an emergency heart transplant.

In a reverse Grinch moment, I was told my existing heart was three times larger than it should be. For seventeen days I occupied the liminal space between life and death. In a weird twist I felt better than I had in years. Hooked to a drip to support my heart function, I was surrounded by medical staff who were never more than several seconds away from my bedside, should anything untoward happen. There were mornings when I would wake and for a moment forget that the only way for me to walk out of the hospital doors would be if a donor were found. In time. Someone with the same blood and tissue type as mine. Of a similar height and weight.

The stark reality: for me to live, someone else must die. And though I understood the two events were in no way related, how could I hope for life when the only circumstances in which that were possible involved the death of another?

At any other time of my life, including my numerous previous stays in hospital, I would reach for a book or a pen. Read or write. Neither was possible. The drugs brought uncontrollable trembling and concentration eluded me.

Instead my mind meandered beyond my hospital room. I imagined the reflections from fairy lights agitating the feet of last minute shoppers. Friends trading stories, fingers curled round glasses of wine. My family, together for Christmas, laughing despite themselves. They had wanted to come to the hospital. My refusal brought sadness, and a sense of relief.

Only Paul, my husband, would be with me.

The call came just before midnight on Christmas Eve. An offer, that’s how they referred to it. ‘You’ve got a wee offer,’ the nurse who woke me said. And I smiled and fell back to sleep.

On Christmas morning, after the blood tests and skin scrubbing, and before I signed my consent form with the word MORTALITY, capitalised and underlined, I opened presents with Paul. Among them, books. The gift of Patti Smith’s New York; a wistful summer on the Med. Short stories bound in bright orange from Lydia Davis. Slivers of life expertly captured by John Burnside and Alice Munro. A book of poetry from African poets, foraged from a second-hand book shop. Pages of possibilities. Each a glorious confirmation of another’s belief that my life wasn’t over. That I would be home one day. Gifts that said we know you. We know who you are, what you like. Gifts that said you’re important, you matter, we haven’t forgotten you. We believe. My own George Pratt moment (or George Bailey if you prefer the film version).

During my stay in hospital, one of the nurses leant me a copy of the memoir by Diana Sanders, a heart and lung transplant recipient. It wasn’t an easy read and I often felt the need to hold it away from me, to read it out of the corner of my eye. But its veracity and honesty resonated with me. If she could survive, so could I.

Post-transplant, with renewed clarity and a steadier hand, I wrote My Heart’s Content. It wasn’t the book I had in mind for my debut, nor was it easy to write. I was compelled. It felt urgent. Immediate. I wrote to make sense of what had happened. To raise awareness. An affirmation: this happened.

My original intention was to use my experience in fiction. Yet somewhere along the way, I decided to tell my story. Perhaps it felt too personal to fictionalise. Too difficult to stand back from. Or maybe because memoir seemed the perfect hybrid of fact and fiction; the ‘based on a true story’ narrative. As accurate a retelling as any can be after the fact. It’s something I’ve considered a lot recently, particularly since reading the brilliant Mayflies by Andrew O’Hagan.

Signed by Freight but never published, for a while after, the manuscript lay dormant on my computer, until another set of extraordinary circumstances prompted a discussion with Paul. ‘Let’s set up our own publishing company and put it ourselves’, he said. And so we did.

Of the many messages of encouragement, enthusiasm and positive feedback I’ve received, the one that brought the greatest satisfaction was from a fellow heart transplant recipient, just before Christmas last year. Two words: ‘Nailed it!’

It’s the magic of Christmas. And books.

I believe.

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Liminal Ink was formed just over a year ago. My Heart’s Content was our first release.

 

My Heart’s Content by Angela Hughes is published by Liminal Ink, priced

David Robinson discovers revelling in the wonder of the natural world is key to encouraging greater care of our planet as he reads these three excellent books.

 

The Vanishing Ice: Diaries of a Scottish Snow Hunter
By Iain Cameron
Published by Vertebrate Publishing

Extraction to Extinction: Rethinking Our Relationship with Earth’s Natural Resources
By David Howe
Published by Saraband

Mistletoe Winter
By Roy Dennis
Published by Saraband

 

The other day, I heard someone say that guilt and shame were the only things that would see us through the next 10,000 years.  Maybe that’s true. Without guilt at the polluted planet we’re bequeathing to our descendants, without shame at the speed with which we demolished its resources, maybe human beings don’t either have or deserve a future of hundred years, never mind anything longer.

Even so, I have my doubts. Because finger-wagging and fact-shaming probably won’t make us actually want to save the planet. For that, we need something more: fascination and wonder at the world around us, perhaps, or a passion to discover more about it. And while the three new Scottish books I’ve picked this month might not have all the answers, they at least point in the right direction.

Iain Cameron’s The Vanishing Ice explains his fascination with Scotland’s snow so well (crisply and evenly, I’m tempted to add) that he makes you share it. There’s something so wonderfully quixotic about searching out and recording our longest-lasting snows that intrigues even those of us who have never been anywhere near Garbh Choire Mor on Braeriach in search of Sphinx and Pinnacles – the two most reliable patches of summer and autumn white in what is invariably, in winter, Scotland’s snowiest corrie. Close up, in October or November (at any rate before the first snows of winter) Sphinx and Pinnacles are rather unimpressive to look at: neurotically small, and stained with ptarmigan poo, decayed mosses and grasses. And yet snow-hunting out of season can be a visually magnificent obsession too: who wouldn’t want to look up at the scalloped roof of a Ben Nevis  snow tunnel,  as exquisite as the ribbed vaulting of a medieval cathedral, shown in Murdo McLeod’s cover picture?

The odds are, of course, that you and I might never see such things. We mightn’t venture inside a snow cave because we don’t really belong that far up Ben Nevis that late in the year and even if we did, we’d worry about its roof crashing down on our heads. We don’t know enough about the Cairngorms to work out where, in the 1930s was the only snow visible every month of the year from a British train station’. And again, if we did, and if we were, like Cameron,  up there in the middle of a storm, with winds like being hit by a car, horizontal rain turning into swirling snow and the ever-present risk of rockfalls or 1000-foot tumbles, surely we’d call it a day rather than struggle onwards and upwards to check whether a particular piece of rock had any of last year’s snow on it before it got covered over with this year’s. Wouldn’t we?

In those circumstances, Cameron pushes on. Why? Because, he explains, ‘I had to count every last flurry of snow from the preceding winter before they were buried for another nine months or so’. Had to? Yes, because that’s what a true obsession is. In his case, it’s nothing to do with climbing (he is, apparently, not too good with heights, which to me makes him even more impressive). He wasn’t born halfway up a Scottish mountain, he works in building safety not in the wild outdoors, and when he bought his first book relevant to his new obsession (Scotland’s Winter Mountains by Martin Moran) he was not a geologist, meteorologist or any other kind of ologist but an apprentice Clydeside electrician.

Cameron is, however, both an authoritative and enjoyable guide to the rather niche subject of Scotland’s vanishing snows, whether for anyone set on checking out his map references or those of us armchair chionophiles (snow-lovers) who take them as read. There is an inevitable echo of Christopher Nicholson’s hauntingly elegiac Among The Summer Snows about the topic, although because Cameron’s mission is not fuelled by grief, it is inevitably less introspective. Or rather, there is a kind of grief, but it’s planetary, not personal. He admits that he feels sad when a patch of snow he had expected to find has already melted away: a ridiculous emotion, he realizes. (Or is it?.)

For the purposes of this column, though, I prefer to look instead at what sparked his obsession in the first place: the view north from his parents’ bedroom in the new house they’d just moved into when he was nine, the highest on an estate in Port Glasgow. One May morning in 1983, he looked across the Clyde at what looked like a white cloud or a strange and distant country but turned out to be the snow-covered top of Ben Lomond, Scotland’s most southerly Munro. There’s a photo of it in his book.

It all began there and then, not in a geography lesson at school or with anything he read, but with a sense of wonder. To the bemusement of his parents, he felt compelled to check snowfalls at Scotland’s ski resorts and, though a 13-year-old non-skier, rang the premium-rate phone lines to find out. He still can’t, he says, explain why he’s so fascinated with snow. I think he’s wrong and the book – unshowy, quietly heartfelt – is the proof.

To me, these initial moments of enchantment, when we can see a writer first shaping up to his subject, are fascinating. There’s another fine example in David Howe’s Extraction to Extinction.  He was seventeen, standing on Alderley Edge (these days, that plush part of Cheshire where Manchester’s top footballers live) and his teacher asked him to reimagine what everything in front of  him was like 250 million years ago, when it was a flood plain on the Tropic of Cancer. They then found some green and blue crystals in a rusty red rock. That’s malachite, the teacher said, pointing. What people used to smelt copper to make bronze – how they made arrowheads, brooches and tools before they’d learnt how to make iron. A seed was sown in his mind: geology became, for the first time, imaginable.

The book opens out into a highly readable study of well or (usually) badly we have made use of the Earth’s rocks and minerals, leavened with the kind of facts you really ought to know by now, such as where to go to see the world’s first concrete block of flats (25 rue Franklin, Paris from 1904) or that King Tut’s dagger was made from a meteorite, or that event just changing all the UK’s cars to electricity would eat up twice the world’s annual production of cobalt. He also has a pithy way with words: climate change, for example, is ‘what happens when we burn millions of years of fossilised sunlight in two lifetimes’. In every way looking beneath the surface, this is a  convincing guide to our depleted, overheated planet.

In Mistletoe Winter, a delightful collection of essays that neatly pairs with last year’s Cottongrass Summer, conservation legend Roy Dennis comes up with the ultimate image for our times: mountain hares and ptarmigan, both in their white winter coats and plumage, against our increasingly brown and snow-denuded peaks. This would be, he says, ‘another wake-up call from nature’, but Dennis is growing tired of their repetitiveness: far better, he argues, to remove the vote from anyone over 60  (‘older people have had their chance and failed’) and give it to 14-year-olds.

As he has already outlined in Restoring the Wild earlier this year, Dennis is staging his own rebellion against extinctions by reintroducing lost habitats and reintroducing species that used to live there – projects which started with his attempt to bring back sea eagles to Scotland while he was warden of the Fair Isle Observatory in 1960. These are, he says, hard times for capercaillie and woodcock: maybe the foxes, badgers and pine martens preying on them would have other things to worry about if we could, as he wishes, reintroduce the wolf, lynx and brown bear.  And even though the bearded vulture seen flying over the Peak District last summer – and the subject of one of the book’s 35 seasonally divided essays – isn’t native to our shores and never has been, you can practically hear him thinking Yes, but it should be. Wildlife may be in retreat, some species may be reaching the limits of their life on earth, but there’s a radical and invigorating optimism at the heart of Dennis’s work. If we really did heed the call of the wild, he suggests, then not only can threatened species be brought back from the brink, but so can we.

 

The Vanishing Ice: Diaries of a Scottish Snow Hunter, by Iain Cameron is published by Vertebrate Publishing, priced £20

Extraction to Extinction: Rethinking Our Relationship with Earth’s Natural Resources, by David Howe and Mistletoe Winter, by Roy Dennis, are both published by Saraband, priced £9.99.

Martin Painter has written a memoir of his birding passion, and about what it’s like being a birder in an age of natural decline. Here he shares his thoughts on pursuing this hobby while we tackle climate change.

 

Birding in an Age of Extinctions
By Martin Painter
Published by Whittles Publishing

 

Birding and Climate Change

Climate change is a looming reality for all of us and threatens to disrupt our accustomed lifestyles – and those of all living forms – in numerous ways. Birders – like all nature lovers – find themselves in the thick of it. Along with the parallel crisis of biodiversity loss, also caused by human impacts, birders are re-assessing some of their assumptions and practices.

I like to lump birders roughly into two groups – patchwatchers and world listers. The former stick mostly to local haunts and habitats, tracking the lives of resident birds while looking out for the arrivals and departures of familiar migrant visitors and of unfamiliar, rare vagrants. Patchwatchers are the descendants of 19th Century amateur naturalists. Global listers, on the other hand, are more concerned about arrivals and departures at the airport, as they head for distant parts to add to their life lists. World listers are the descendants of 19^th Century trappers, shooters and bird skin or egg collectors – it’s all about discovery of the new, accumulation and the thrill of the search.

These two groups are not mutually exclusive – I am a birding member of both. My book, Birding in an Age of Extinctions, describes and reflects on my experiences as both a patchwatcher and a world birder. The impacts of climate change and of biodiversity loss as parallel threats to every kind of natural habitat, everywhere, have come increasingly to preoccupy my thoughts and actions as a birder. This is what I write about in my book

It’s not all bad news. Patchwatchers, wherever their home patch is, are keen observers of these impacts on local bird populations. They record declining numbers, changing migration patterns and new vagrants. Birding has always had a strong association with the conservation movement, right from the beginnings in the late 19th Century of the Audubon Society in the USA and the RSPB in the UK. Perhaps global listers have sometimes forsaken these roots with their obsessions, but recently the advent of eBird, where accumulated on-line birders’ lists assist with the tracking of bird populations, has been a public source of invaluable data points for conservation efforts.

World listers, meanwhile, have prompted an explosion in avian tourism and in the support that this provides for local conservation, particularly in developing countries. I have come across numerous examples of remnant populations of endangered birds that are being protected by local villagers, NGOs and park rangers, in readiness for our visits and for the dollars we bring. Somewhat darkly, I label this ‘extinction birding’ – we get to see vanishingly rare birds in stunning, near-pristine habitats with relative ease, because they are being preserved for our benefit, and a comfortable lodge has been built nearby.

In this way, avian tourism is a bright spot in the litany of recent human impacts on nature. But birders are not always a positive influence. While birding associations and the avian tourism industry are keenly aware of the need to tread carefully when visiting fragile habitats, sometimes the eagerness to get the tick can be over-intrusive. Some of the potential harms are side-effects of our otherwise well-intentioned activities, such as over-use of ‘playback’ and of handfeeding. Perhaps more of these remnant survivors of once abundant bird populations are better left alone in their protected enclaves.

My birding travels afforded me some magical, never-to-be-forgotten birdwatching moments, such as close-ups of dazzling, dancing Birds of Paradise on their New Guinea display grounds, and encounters in the Himalayan foothills with strutting Tragopans, their startling plumage and their haunting dawn calls. The travels in themselves were exciting, occasionally scary. I experienced not only the thrill of the quest, but also the wonder of exploring some off-track, unknown forest patches, as if I were a 19th Century explorer and collector.

But the realities of 21st Century contacts between humans and nature are very different. Our impacts can be devastating. In an era of rapidly accelerating, human-induced climate change, the elephant in the room for world birders is the carbon footprint they leave from their frequent flyer miles. Since I began birding, my awareness of the potential harm of carbon emissions from global travel has grown. So, I have cut back my ambitions and slowed down my quest for additions to my life list. My travels in one respect were a classic case of the kind of over-consumption that has helped get us to where we are with our impacts on the planet. Had I stuck to my patchwatching, I might feel less troubled.

As with most things, moderation is the key, and a sense of responsibility is needed. With these provisos, birders – including world birders – should keep birding. I reflect on days spent on Cambodia’s Northern Plains scattered with ruins of the ancient temples of Angkor, in remote villages reached with the help of a local bird tour company. We are being hosted and guided by local villagers, who are protecting the rare, critically endangered birdlife (such as majestic Giant Ibis, and spectacular Red-headed Vultures). The bird tour company has devoted much of its revenue to educating the local people on how to look after the birds and helping them set up the modest local tourist infrastructure from which they make money. Without both their efforts and my birder’s thirst for encounters with the wonders of nature, birdlife would be even more diminished.

 

Birding in an Age of Extinctions by Martin Painter is published by Whittles Publishing, priced £18.99.

 

 

Clifton Bain’s latest book is not only a guide to the most scenic peatlands in the country, but celebrates the conservation efforts for this vital and beautiful habitat.

 

Extracts from The Peatlands of Britain and Ireland
By Clifton Bain
Published by Sandstone Press

 

Often described as the Cinderella habitat, peatlands have long been considered worthless, even malevolent, or simply a resource to exploit. Yet they are immensely important to our well-being and can display great beauty. These enchanting, saturated, watery landscapes can at first appear rather muted, with wide vistas displaying only pastel shades of browns and greens, but closer inspection reveals a wealth of colour and pattern, rich in the spectacle and sounds of unusual wildlife. This natural state of a peatland contrasts with the blackened, bare, eroding expanses that have been damaged in an often-failed attempt to make peatlands profitable. Our shocking treatment of this wonderful part of our natural environment not only threatens wildlife but has left a legacy of degradation that now imposes great cost on society as we lose the natural benefit of peatlands.

Peatlands are characterised by waterlogged conditions that restrict decay and allow dead plant material to build up over time as peat. Blanketing our mountain tops and engulfing low-lying land, peat is one of our most abundant soils, not surprisingly in such a persistently wet country. Peatlands also pervade our culture, from the drama of Wuthering Heights and Sherlock Holmes’s canine mystery on Dartmoor to the aromatic basis for whisky and the modern use of peat in gardens. Widely known, but now practised by few, is the craft of turf cutting to provide fuel in remote rural areas.

Going back over millennia, the association of people with peatlands has been uniquely captured by their excellent preserving qualities that have allowed us to come face to face with the actual bodies of our ancestors as well as incredible cultural artefacts. One of my earliest associations with peat was from my father’s bookcase in the form of a small paperback book, The Bog People by P. V. Glob, with its captivating cover of the perfectly preserved Tollund Man who had lived over 2,000 years ago. The serene, calm face belied the fact that this individual had been hanged and placed in the bog as part of an Iron Age ritual.

The peatland story is one of contradictions. Often disregarded as wasteland, peatlands are immensely valuable. Visions of dangerous, boggy swamps with their derogatory associations contrast with the reality of colourful carpets of mosses bejewelled by clear pools of water and hemmed with delicate, white cotton-grass heads.

Over the centuries, the draining and clearing of our peatlands has been one of the most extensive acts of environmental destruction ever imposed on this country. Worldwide, the situation is just as desperate in many other hotspots of human population, where extensive peatlands in Europe, America and South East Asia have been drained and exploited. Global news coverage has shown the human suffering resulting from huge fires on drained peatlands in Indonesia and Russia extending over thousands of kilometres. The economic damage from these fires was estimated at several billion US dollars.

We are now beginning to understand the full costly consequences to society of our peatland legacy. Global leaders herald their importance and action is being taken to conserve them. Huge projects are underway to repair damaged peatlands and reinstate their watery conditions, to allow wildlife to thrive and help secure the benefits we can all derive from them.

With awareness of their international conservation importance there has been considerable investment by governments and environmental charities to provide protected sites with excellent visitor facilities, offering the opportunity to get into the heart of these wildlife treasuries.

 

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Peatlands’ true benefits

In our enlightened times, peatlands are seen as beneficial to society in their natural state, and we understand the costly consequences of past exploitation. Protecting peatlands from damaging development is not only preserving the past but also offering a positive future as a place to celebrate the uniqueness of rich wildlife and uninterrupted space. One of their main long-term rewards is in their natural ability to inspire, rejuvenate and re-energise people, just as they did for the ancient saints in Ireland. Across Europe, the opportunity to escape modern stresses and experience such an uplifting environment is becoming more and more challenging. With the world waking up to the importance of our peatlands, switching from exploitation to helping people enjoy the natural experience while conserving peatlands must surely be the right way to treat the goose that lays the golden eggs.

With climate change now a global priority, the role of peatlands and their behaviour as long-term carbon reservoirs has been increasingly scrutinised in recent years. There has long been a popular misconception that peatlands are damaging because they release methane, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes to climate change. However, we now understand that peatlands are a huge asset in storing vast amounts of carbon and locking it up on millennial timescales. Methane is produced deep in the peat as a byproduct of decay by bacteria that live in low-oxygen, waterlogged situations. In a healthy mire this methane is broken down by other bacteria in the oxygen-rich acrotelm before it can escape into the atmosphere. In damaged peatlands methane emissions may be reduced as oxygen penetrates the drying out peat, but there will be continued release from waterlogged drain-bottoms and peat cracks.

Flammable methane is often thought to be the source of the eerie lights referred to in folklore as ‘will-o’-the-wisp’, ‘fairy lights’, or ‘spunkie’ in the Scottish Highlands, though it may actually be another much less common gas based on the more reactive element phosphorus that is the true source. The names for these lights nevertheless all refer to some form of evil spirit holding a flaming torch or candle that draws travellers to their doom into the dangerous bog or fen.

Since methane forms in wet conditions, the draining of peatlands was thought to be a solution to halt the greenhouse gas emission. We now know that drainage results is a far greater problem through causing the release of large quantities of carbon dioxide as oxygen enters the system and allows aerobic decay of the peat. The loss of carbon dioxide in a drained bog far outweighs any reduction in methane loss and becomes a significant climate change problem.

Across the UK it is estimated that damaged peatlands release around twenty-three million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually – equivalent to over half of all the country’s annual greenhouse gas reduction achievements in recent years. In other words, it negates half of all the climate change efforts made in industry and households every year. With over three billion tonnes of carbon stored in peat deposits, we face serious consequences if peatlands are left in a deteriorating state. International climate change policy now recognises the importance of these natural carbon stores and encourages both protection and restoration to re-wet and rehabilitate the peatlands. In future, farmers could well be paid to maintain these carbon stores on behalf of the nation.

 

The Peatlands of Britain and Ireland by Clifton Bain published by Sandstone Press, priced £24.99.

Joan Eardley’s art was greatly inspired by the places dear to her. The latest book to celebrate her work focusses on the landscapes of Catterline, where she lived until the end of her life. Here, Patrick Elliott pays tribute to the spirit behind her work.

 

Joan Eardley: Land & Sea – A Life in Catterline
By Patrick Elliott
Published by the National Galleries of Scotland

 

The artist Joan Eardley would have been 100 this year, but her life was cut short in 1963, at the age of forty-two. She liked the countryside, but not the wilderness. Sublime Highland peaks and picturesque lochs held no interest for her; she responded instead to downtrodden working environments, particularly places where tight-knit communities held on in the face of modernity. Her favourite haunts, where she made most of her work, were the narrow Victorian streets of Townhead in the centre of Glasgow and the fishing village of Catterline on Scotland’s east coast, just south of Aberdeen – the focus of this book.

Eardley first visited Catterline in 1951, when she toured the area by car. A thriving fishing village in Victorian times, it had been bypassed by the railway and was too small for the bigger fishing boats, so fell into steep decline in the twentieth century. The young left and many of the cottages were abandoned. But the village spoke directly to Eardley’s interest in human resilience; the old and dilapidated were always, she said, more interesting than the new. A friend bought the old custom’s watchhouse for £40 and Eardley stayed there regularly until 1954, when she found a cottage of her own: No.1 South Row. She rented it for £1 a year. It had no electricity, gas or running water, a bare earth floor, no ceiling and hardly any furniture. It suited her perfectly. She eventually bought the cottage in January 1963, unaware of the cancer that would take her life just a few months later.

Catterline provided her with all the subject matter she needed. The fields right behind the cottage offered an ever-changing source for her landscape paintings. The crops changed each year, from barley to corn, oats to grass – and the weather changed constantly too. Many of her landscapes were painted less than thirty paces from her front door. As she remarked in a letter: ‘It’s a lovely spot as no one comes near and I can always work away undisturbed … But every day and every week it looks a bit different – flowers come and go, and the colour grows – so it seems silly to shift about. I just leave my painting table out there, and my easel and palette.’[1]

Surprisingly, in the first five years she spent in the village, she seldom painted the sea. Rather than look out over the magnificent, crescent-shaped bay, she focussed her attention on the cottages. It was partly because she was used to painting tenement buildings in Glasgow, so she could adopt a similar formula in the village, and partly because she found the sea too difficult to paint at first. For a realist artist, whose training was based on analytical drawing, the churning, restless form of the raging sea must have seemed daunting. She approached it gradually; only in the last few years of her life did it become her central preoccupation. She painted the fields in the summer months and the raging sea in the winter. If she were in Glasgow and heard that gales were brewing in the North Sea, she would head over to Catterline on the train. She worked in all weathers, even using an anchor to moor her easel to the ground. You can still see the tight clamp marks at the edges of many of her sea paintings.

It is often remarked that in Glasgow Eardley painted the street children, and in Catterline she painted the fields and the sea, as if they were entirely different things. In fact, her Catterline paintings, like her Glasgow paintings, are rooted in the community. That was the main point of the book: to show that the village and the villagers were essential to her work. I was lucky to interview a number of people who grew up in Catterline and who remembered her; and chanced upon heaps of unpublished letters which tell of her daily routine – what she read, the music she listened to, village small-talk, long winter evenings sat by the fire. She painted the fields which had been sewn and harvested, the boats and nets which were used by the dwindling number of fishermen. Although she did not paint the people of Catterline, their working materials and their cottages and crops act as analogues for their lives. Stooks of corn and old nets can serve pictorial ends, but, in Eardley’s work, they also speak of resilience in the face of change.

 

Joan Eardley: Land & Sea – A Life in Catterline by Patrick Elliott is published by the National Galleries of Scotland, priced £24.99

Joan Eardley & Catterline is on display at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art (Modern One): Joan Eardley & Catterline | National Galleries of Scotland

 

[1] Joan Eardley Archive, National Galleries of Scotland Archive, A09/6

404 Ink’s Inkling series of pocket non-fiction books cover a range of brilliant subjects with fun and insight. The latest in the series takes a look at how popular culture and the apocalypse intersect.

 

The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters
By Katie Goh
Published by 404 Ink

 

The End explores our obsession with the end of the world in culture. What sparked your own interest in the end of the world, and the apocalypse as a concept? 

Since I was a kid, I’ve been obsessed with the apocalypse. I used to have this recurring nightmare as a child where I would step on a crack in the pavement and set off a nuclear explosion, so I’ve always had quite an apocalyptic mindset and been worried about my own complicity with the end of the world. I grew up as a teenager in the 2000s, when the end of the world seemed to be everywhere, from pop culture, to politics, to economics, to technology, to the climate crisis. I think growing up in that specific context has also made apocalyptic doomsaying part of my everyday life and cultural awareness.  

  

What drew you to write about the topic in more depth? 

I first wrote about my – and society’s – obsession with the apocalypse for The Skinny magazine in January 2020. Then, a few months later, it felt like the end of the world actually did happen with COVID and lockdown. People were talking about the pandemic like it was a movie, and so many people (myself included) turned to art for answers, like the film Contagion or the book Severance. I thought that was fascinating: why are we turning to fictional disasters at a time of real disaster? Surely we would want more utopian escapism?  

When 404 Ink did their callout for the book pitches, I thought the COVID context could be a really fascinating jumping off point to explore the relationship between fictional and real disasters which has existed long before this specific pandemic.  

  

Why do you think we – as individuals, and society – are drawn to the end of the world? 

At the most basic level, we’re human. We want to survive, and when the world is looking more and more apocalyptic, I think we want to hypothesize about our species’ survival. The end of the world is always actually about the start of a new world, and every single post-apocalyptic story, from The Bible’s Book of Revelation to Station Eleven, features survivors as their main characters. I think as our world, right now, feels increasingly unbearable, there’s an apocalyptic desire to say ‘game over, let’s start fresh.’ 

  

What does that offer viewers and readers? 

I think it gives us perspective. The best apocalyptic and disaster stories take what’s happening right now and places it in a new context. For example, Squid Game is about the personal debt crisis in South Korea, as well as capitalism, reality television and individualism, but the TV show distills all these ideas into a dystopian ‘what if’ scenario. Having that distance, we’re able to explore these big political, economical and social ideas through characters, plot and theme, and I think that helps us to think about our own world with more clarity.  

  

What is your favourite kind of fictional disaster and why? 

I’m a big fan of the asteroid disaster. I think it’s the cruellest disaster scenario because, unlike other types of disasters, it’s not usually man-made and there’s nothing you can do about it (unless you’re Bruce Willis). I think that nihilistic apocalypse allows storytellers to really get at human nature: what are people really like when they have no plan b? I also think asteroid disasters are incredible metaphors. In the book, I explore Lars von Trier’s film, Melancholia, which is a disaster movie about depression. I don’t think a disaster is ever really just a disaster in art, usually it’s representing something else and I love that von Trier makes the end of the world feel intensely intimate and personal.  

  

How did the topic evolve as the world faced a pandemic? 

The idea for The End definitely crystallized with COVID, but I didn’t want to just write a book about COVID that would age badly. Instead the pandemic gives the reader a way in to think about disasters and grounds the book in real life to explore more existential ideas, like why are we so obsessed with imagining the death of humanity? I definitely think COVID has made people think more about social inequalities and injustice as the pandemic exacerbated the huge gap between the rich and the poor across the globe. That’s something I was especially interested in exploring in the book, particularly looking at dystopian fiction that similarly uses a crisis to uncover social inequalities that are so often normalized.  

  

You write in depth about the climate crisis in regards to the end of the world – how do you think culture does in addressing the crisis through an apocalyptic lens? 

I think in general culture hasn’t fully reckoned with the climate crisis yet – both in real life as an industry that is contributing to the crisis, and as a means of telling stories. You have big Hollywood movies like San Andreas, Geostorm and superhero movies which use imagery that we’ve come to associate with the climate crisis (earthquakes, ice shelves crashing into the sea, faminine, masses of climate refugees), but that imagery is severed from the reality of the climate crisis. It’s used to invoke the fear and anxiety that’s associated with the crisis, but without the real world consequences. I think it’s unfair to totally put the blame on filmmakers, but I think there needs to be a reckoning with how these blockbuster movies are creating a sense of passivity around disaster through numbing audiences to climate crisis imagery.  

However, I think there are increasingly more storytellers who are interested, not in recreating the climate crisis on screen, but in exploring the complicated emotions around the crisis. For example, Annihilation is a film and book very much about climate grief but explored through personal grief and a strange, uncanny landscape.  

  

You note that climate as a disaster is so large that films, for example, often struggle to capture the gravity of it. What would be your top reads and watches that do something interesting in regards to climate? 

Annihilation is definitely one. And Jeff VanderMeer’s novels, generally, are incredible post-apocalyptic stories about our relationship to the environment. I think novels are really becoming the realm of nuanced fiction about the climate crisis. I would recommend Lydia Millet’s A Children’s Bible, Jenny Offil’s Weather, Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and Jessie Greengrass’s The High House. There are hundreds of non-fiction books about the climate crisis, but I think fiction can really explore the emotions of living through this crisis – which can be as powerful as fact.  

I’m a bit skeptical of climate crisis documentaries which I think can sometimes do more harm than good at numbing people to the horrors of the crisis, but a recent film I found fascinating was A Living Proof by the Scottish filmmaker Emily Munro. Comprising archive footage, the film looks at Scotland’s relationship to the environment across decades and it really highlights how circular our conversations around the climate crisis have been over time.  

  

What are your top tier apocalyptic recommendations? (Books, films, TV, etc) 

I’ll pick a recommendation from the four chapters of The End: for a pandemic disaster, the novel Severance which explores globalisation and capitalism through the zombie apocalypse; for a climate disaster, The Day After Tomorrow because I love that silly movie and I think it really did make people sit up about climate change when it was released; for an extraterrestrial disaster, Arrival (or the short story the movie is based on: Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang), which is about aliens and determinism; and for a social disaster, The Parable of the Sower which is one of the most powerful (and hopeful) dystopian novels I’ve ever read.  

 

The End: Surviving the World Through Imagined Disasters by Katie Goh is published by 404 Ink, priced £7.50

Science fiction novels play with the very many possibilities of how our world – and other worlds – can change. In the futuristic Earth that Jamie Mollart has created in his latest novel, natural resources are dwindling, the waters have risen, and hibernation is deemed a possible solution.

 

Extract taken from Kings of a Dead World
By Jamie Mollart
Published by Sandstone Press

 

Nobody talks. They keep their eyes on the ground in front of them. I understand. It’s hard to bring yourself around anyway and after The Sleep you are initially left with a desire to be insular. The limited time people are Awake tends to make people shy away from idle chit-chat to begin with. Too much to do when you first Wake. Not enough time and too much to do.

This is one of the things I miss, sitting around and talking. When I lived in London, in the days before the waters rose when it was still the capital, I used to spend hours strolling along the South Bank; sitting outside Gordon’s wine bar with a bottle of red wine that seemed to go on and on. Gordon’s is gone now. The Houses of Parliament. St Paul’s. Buckingham Palace. All of them swallowed by the murky waters of the Thames as it spread out across the country.

A scream startles me back to the present. A woman hits the pavement in front of me, her head bouncing off the tarmac. A cut opens on her forehead and her blood spreads out across her face, dripping on the pavement where it is soaked up by the dust. She pushes herself up to her knees and shakes her head. Drops of blood to land at my feet and she turns back to the Mart and begins shouting, her words quick, high-pitched, angry, indecipherable.

In her right hand she clutches a plastic bag, swings it around her head and launches it at the window. Powdered milk explodes from within it, showering the queue in white dust. Shock holds people still, then a solitary man shouts at her, telling her to watch it, calling her a bitch. She’s crying now, through her sobs shouting, ‘It’s not enough, it’s not enough, I can’t feed them all, it’s not enough!’ Then she realises what she’s done and falls to her knees to try to scrape the food back into the tatters of the plastic bag.

A young man in the queue realises what is happening and quickly squats down and pockets a carton of food that has escaped from her bag. Instinct makes me want to stop him. The camera on the wall tells me otherwise.

The man in front of me sees him too, though, and confronts him. ‘Oi you little fucker, give it back to her, it’s hard enough without you stealing what she’s got.’

I feel a flash of shame.

The young man sneers at him, scoffs and turns away. The older man taps him on the shoulder, but is ignored, so he punches him in the back of the head. I hear the crack as the young man’s face hits the wall. He drops to the floor.

The camera above my head whirrs, and I look up at it as it focusses on the older man. Immediately I realise my mistake, raise both hands and step away from them. I make sure it’s obvious this is nothing to do with me.

My body tenses. The adrenaline of remembered violence pumps through me. When I was younger, this was how I dealt with things. Memory pulls my fists tight, my shoulders straight, readies my body for impact and retaliation. I feel alive.

I’m awake now. Too awake, I have to suppress it. The camera has to see a tired old man, scared of the violence he sees in front of him, not thrilled by it. I force my shoulders to relax. I lower my head. I stretch my hands out, hold them flat against my legs. I concentrate on slowing my heartbeat down.

The younger man is on his feet now, his face a mess. His eyes are pure anger. He grabs the older man by the throat, and punches him twice in quick succession, once in the stomach, once above his eye. They wheel around holding one another, too close to hit each other, just careening about. The queue moves around them as one, like a flock of birds. Aware of the camera, no-one wants to appear involved, to step in and stop it, so they concentrate instead on keeping out of the fray whilst trying to maintain their position in the queue.

All the time, the woman is on her hands and knees scraping white powder into a tattered plastic bag.

Suddenly the street is full of sirens and blue lights. A Black Maria is beside us. The doors slide open and five Peelers jump out, clad in riot gear. For a second I feel sorry for them having to be called out like this so soon after Waking, but then they are upon the fighting men with sticks and boots and fists and all of my sympathy is gone.

Within seconds it’s over. Both men and the woman are gone. With a purr of electric motor the Black Maria is gone and the only evidence any of this ever happened is the blood in white powder and a smear across the wall where the young man’s face made contact. The queue silently reforms. No-one jostles for position. Where people were lost in their own worlds they now look around, joined in a collective fear.

Slowly the queue inches forward again. I step over the blood on the pavement. My feet leave prints in the powder.

Eventually I am at the door. A bored security guard in a uniform that looks too big for him scans my ID and lets me in.

Inside the Mart, the lights are dimmer. Images of Rip Van are plastered on the walls, cardboard cut outs of him hang down on wire hooks above every aisle. Piped music, calming and nondescript, fills the stale, recycled air.

I check the obligatory Chronos clock that hangs in the centre of the ceiling. I’ve been gone much longer than I would have liked. I can’t imagine that she’s still Asleep. The Tranqs will have left her body by now. Please Chronos, I don’t ask you much, but please keep Rose safe. Please let everything be OK when I return.

Quick, Ben, you need to be quick now. I am practised. Every shopping trip as far back as I can remember has been like this: the frustration of the queue then the rush to get what I need and get back. This I can still do.

I grab only the essentials powdered milk, eggs, vegetable supplements, bottles of water. I am careful, adding up as I go along, but when I get to the checkout I realise I have overspent and have to leave some of the shopping with the cashier. She is even more bored than the security guard.

I would never be able to do what they do. The early Wake Ups and being here to face the scorn of everyone else are not worth the pitiful few extra Creds they get. The cashier doesn’t even look at me as she scans my ID card. I try not to register how few Creds are left on it as they flash up on my display and concentrate instead on packing efficiently so I don’t have too many bags to carry. I fit it all in four. Four bags to last us the month. It will be tight.

Outside, a kid is pouring water over the powder and blood mess and trying to sweep it out into the street, but the water is turning the powder back into milk and the mess is just getting bigger and thicker.

I step over it and hurriedly retrace my steps. While I’ve been at the Mart the sweepers have been and the drifts of rubbish are gone. Lights are on in most of the apartment blocks and someone is playing loud hip-hop music which spills out from an open window and bounces out across the square.

Back in our apartment block I pray as I press the lift button and am both surprised and relieved as the button lights up and I hear the motor whirr. While I wait, I put the bags at my feet and watch as the blood floods back into the creases the handles have made in my skin.

The lift arrives, doors shuddering open. The lights inside flicker on and off, then off again and the interior is black dark. I hesitate, think about the stairs and, pushing my bags with my feet, enter the darkness. The doors shut and I climb. Above the door, crimson numbers mark my ascent. Between floors four and five the lights spark on for a second and I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the mirrored walls. I’m shocked at how thin I look, how old, how tired. A ghost of a man.

I pause at the front door. Rest my forehead against the metal and pray to Chronos everything is OK inside. Hold my breath as I push my ID card into the key slot.

The door clicks open and I work my way inside, pushing it with my toe. I place the bags on the floor and close the door behind me. The hallway is fine, from what I can see of the kitchen that’s fine too. I can hear the TV, volume low. She’s Awake.

It allows me to hope, it gives me something to cling onto. I walk down the corridor and enter the lounge, pasting a smile onto my face.

 

Kings of a Dead World by Jamie Mollart is published by Sandstone Press, priced £14.99.

Selva Almada’s powerful writing continues her novel Brickmakers, which looks at the troubled, violent lives of those who live and work in dusty, rural Argentina getting closer to ruin.

 

Extract taken from Brickmakers
By Selva Almada
Published by Charco Press

 

The Mirandas’ finances weren’t doing so great either. Elvio Miranda was a good brickmaker, maybe the best in town, shored up by his family history in the trade, but he was another man who liked to do things his way and didn’t keep up with the work. He preferred training his racing dogs to shovelling soil all day long and carting it to the pisadero. Every so often he’d hire some young guy to help, but since he didn’t keep up with the wages, either, the helpers all left in the end.

If they had enough to eat, it was only because Estela took charge of the household finances and started doing people’s sewing.

When she was a teenager, Señora Nena, her godmother, sent her to study dressmaking, and though she hadn’t made more than a couple of dresses – there was no need, she worked and her godmother never let her want for anything – she’d gone back to it later, helping with the costumes for the carnival dancers. She’d always been an enterprising woman, and though she let Miranda convince her to quit her job as a secretary when they married, on seeing the way things were going, she sent for the Singer from her unmarried days and put signs up in the local stores offering basic sewing services.

Señora Nena had told her that money worries could spoil even the best of marriages, and Estela, who had married for love and meant it to last, refused to let that happen to them. Elvio Miranda may have been useless, but she adored him, he was the father of her child and the man she hoped to grow old with: if he wasn’t going to earn any money, she’d make sure they had at least enough to get by.

Without Miranda’s addictions, which she indulged as if the man were a child, they’d have been better off: from alterations, hemming and mending, Estela quickly moved on to making clothes, and soon she was sewing her first wedding dress. It wasn’t that Miranda asked her for money or took any from her in secret, but rather she, not wanting her husband to feel like less of a man, always slipped something into his pockets to tide him over.

 

*

Marciano lifts one arm – the effort is agony – and strokes his father’s cheek, his stubble; he tries to reach his hair, which is longer than before, wavy and brown, but his arm falls back and hits the ground with a thud, like an old lady fainting at a funeral. He looks so young, his father. As if no time had passed.

‘Dad, remember when we went hunting in Entre Ríos?’

Miranda laughs.

‘’Course. In Antonio’s pickup.’

Marciano had loved it, it was like The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, the thick vegetation on either side of the river, the muggy heat, the insects. They’d taken a little motorboat and followed the water as it wound its way between the small islands.

He was eleven. The following year, in just a few months, in fact, his father would die. But at the time, his dad was full of life. Miranda had longer hair then and a longer beard, too, and the steam that came from the banks, or from the river itself, from the sun that beat down on the riverbed and warmed up the silt, the steam in the atmosphere, dampened his hair, stuck it to his head and face. He smiled and gazed into the distance. Antonio did, too. The older men didn’t speak and neither did Marciano. As if the landscape had left them breathless. All you could hear was the noise of the engine and the water the boat was slicing through.

Eventually they stopped and got out, wading through the water, then Antonio and his father pulled the boat up the little sandy beach and they made a fire. Night was beginning to fall, but where they were, with so many trees, it was already dark.

That evening they ate a rice stew. The men stayed up chatting till late, swapping stories from hunts gone by, their own and other people’s, comparing notes on how to catch a capybara.

Marciano lay on a mat and listened for a while, wanting to learn, to memorize all the stories so he could boast to his friends, until the men’s voices began to fade, merging with the rustling plants and the water, the squawks of nocturnal birds, the sound of a snapped twig now and then under an animal’s feet.

‘Remember when I said I wanted to go and live there?’

Miranda says nothing. He’s gazing into the distance, like that time on the boat, but he doesn’t smile.

‘Remember, Dad?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Me wanting to go and live in Entre Ríos…’

‘Oh, yeah, you going to? But you’re not looking too well, son…’

‘No, Dad.’

He wanted to live in a place like that. With all that green, all that water; even the birds were more beautiful than here, with brighter feathers, more colourful beaks. Here everything’s hard, dry, spiky, covered in dust. People were probably friendlier there, even. Here it’s different, here all anyone knows is violence and force.

 

Brickmakers by Selva Almada is published by Charco Press, priced £9.99.

Secrets of the Last Merfolk is set in Dunlyre, based on the real-life seaside village of Dunure on Scotland’s stunning west coast. Many of the novel’s action scenes  take place in the chilly waters of the Firth of Clyde. Here, author Lindsay Littleson writes of how important this landscape is to her.

 

Secrets of the Last Merfolk
By Lindsay Littleson
Published by Floris Books

 

At the beginning of Secrets of the Last Merfolk, Finn is furious when he finds out his dad is in Dunlyre to work on a harbour development project, rather than on the holiday he’d been promised. He meets Sage, whose mums are environmental activists, determined to stop the harbour development. Their parents might be on opposing sides, but when Finn sees swimmers in the freezing sea and Sage hears strange singing, the two children begin to work together to investigate the mystery, and they discover merfolk in the Firth!

Despite being in constant danger from a terrifying enemy, the merfolk take their responsibilities very seriously.

‘When we merfolk realised we could live forever, we wondered what we should do with our time. We chose to live our lives caring for the creatures of the shore and the sea.’

However, they despair of the harm humans are doing to the marine environment.

‘They take too many fish from the seas and the dolphins go hungry. They dump rubbish so the seals must swim in dirty water.’

The theme of environmental conservation is of central importance to the story. My brother’s a keen scuba diver and described his dives in the Firth of Clyde. Being as accurate as possible was important to me, even though I was describing fantasy scenes.

The deeper they went, the dimmer and greener the light gleamed, and the stranger the environment became. As Finn swam through a strange, swaying forest of seaweed, he passed spiky pink sea urchins and scuttling hermit crabs. Spotlit in the torch beam, he saw the pale, drifting tentacles of a cluster of anemones.

 Sadly, humans have caused terrible damage to the Firth of Clyde. Once, cod, skate and enormous shoals of herring swam in its waters. But a combination of over-fishing and the lifting of a ban on bottom trawling caused stocks of fish to decline alarmingly, and the fishermen began catching shellfish instead. Dredging methods caused further damage, until by the early 2000s the Firth of Clyde was described as becoming a ‘marine desert’.

Lately, some action has been taken to improve the situation, most notably in the waters around Arran. COAST is a  community organisation working for the protection and restoration of the marine environment and their work is making a difference to restoring the biodiversity of the Firth.

We can all play our part, by supporting charities like COAST, by taking part in beach clean-ups and by ensuring that we always take our litter home.

This review of Secrets of the Last Merfolk sums up beautifully what I was trying to achieve when I wrote the novel.

‘Secrets of the Last Merfolk is exciting and action packed, and one of our favourite reads of the year. While it explores and embraces legend, it is also a reminder that we should appreciate our reality – and value the enchanting landscapes, wildlife, and people, that we do have.’

 

Secrets of the Last Merfolk by Lindsay Littleson is published by Floris Books, priced £7.99.

In his book, Phillip Edwards writes beautifully of intimate moments with the birds, the landscape and the weather of the saltmarshes in the west of England. His love of this area shines through in every page.

 

Extract taken from At the Very End of the Road
By Phillip Edwards
Published by Whittles

 

Slowly the wind diminishes. Clouds begin to break. Greyness sloughs from the landscape. Sunlight paints colours in dazzling saturation – skeletal trees russet-brown, river leaden, saltmarsh neon-green, lagoons deep ultramarine, reeds bleached ochre, the mud a rich umber. The sea turns steely-blue. Flocks of shelduck shine against the wet silvery shore. A flock of dunlin land along the edge of the dark tide. Their white bodies gleam like a string of pearls on a jeweller’s brown  display cushion. Abruptly they levitate again, misting the air, almost motionless, drifting on the wind, passing high over the point to the river, then slowly precipitating into denser sinuous lines that oscillate and dive, disappearing against the dark backdrop of the fields and trees of the far bank, before rising again like wisps of smoke, away to decorate some other stretch of shore. From the sorcery of the sky, a rainbow blooms over the eastern hills. Short and squat, swallowed by the dark clouds above, it refuses to be extinguished and its truncated form glows brightly in its moment of glory before succumbing to the inevitable, to be devoured by the cloud. Yet the rainbow is not done, and as the showers and light shift again, sharpening still further the colours of the land, another rises phoenix-like in its place, flaring into a full arch, polished by the rain, glowing for its ephemeral moment of prismatic perfection, then withering slowly as it too fades into the trails of the storm. Seaward, still far out in the bay, those chameleons of light, the kittiwakes, are now dark grey against the ice-blue sky and shining sea as they journey back to the open ocean.

The top of a neap tide is turning; the mud that has remained above the brown waves is full of waders busy feeding or standing roosting, the sea sprinkled white with shelduck. Tension suddenly courses through the flocks, heads turning, necks craning. A peregrine sweeps around the point pushing a wave of wigeon seaward. She is a female, hatched this year but now large and heavy and sleek, gleaming bronze in the low late autumn light, muscles rippling rhythmically as they power her wings. Waders spasm upward, the beach clearing in a moment as if some giant unseen broom has pushed away unwanted dust from a floor. She swings low across the beach, spreading her wings and tail, arcing lazily upwards over the sea, her dark-streaked white underparts glinting briefly in the sun. Wings sleeked once more, she dives back along the water’s edge, gaining rapidly on a great black-backed gull, its white plumage still muddied with immature feathers as if it has spent too long dipped in the dirty sea. She rapidly overhauls the lumbering gull but slows as she passes over it, slipping easily to one side as the gull turns its heavy beak and lunges at her, as if irritated by the impudence of her proximity. She turns away and replicates the entire manoeuvre, hanging briefly over the gull with just enough distance to evade the danger held within the swipe of its beak. She retires once more. When she comes again, she does so from a different trajectory, flatter, slower, her wings more bowed and ballooning, enveloping the air beneath them. The gull ignores her this time with utter disdain, bored like a parent with a fractious child, for it is secure now in the knowledge that its much smaller tormentor is not hunting but simply using it for target practice, learning how to approach in different ways at different speeds and different angles. Twice more she comes in slowly and just above the gull, hanging briefly over it at the perigee of her orbit, then angling away. By the final time, the gull has moved too far from the point, and she heads back low along the now empty beach and lands on the opalescent mud. She preens.

Ten minutes later she lifts into the light wind and heads seaward. Shelducks paddle heavily through the waves to avoid her. She swings slowly into wind and closes over one, coming to the point of a stall directly above it, talons extended. She drops gently. The shelduck crash-dives in a shower of spray as if surprised to have been picked as a target, and the peregrine bends away, flapping leisurely, gaining height smoothly. She turns again, wings fully outstretched, and curves back in a shallow glide. The shelduck flock is now fully alert and scatters quickly ahead of her approach, but she is fast and comes quickly above another one, adjusting her attitude rapidly to hang just above it. It too dives to avoid her unwanted attention. But this time she stays on the cusp of a hover, waiting for its re-emergence nearby, angling quickly back towards it, then sharply upwards as the terrified shelduck dives again. She climbs steadily to a hundred feet, shakes herself in flight, sending rolls of ruffled feathers down her body like a dog shaking water from its coat, and glides back towards the mud, practising the same hovering manoeuvre briefly over a startled cormorant drying its unwaterproofed wings at the edge of the shore, as if she just cannot resist.

She rests and preens for another ten minutes and watches nine grey plovers that have the temerity to land and feed nearby. Then she opens her wings and flickers seawards again, but this time with purpose. She remains low, ignoring the shelduck flocks even as she cuts a swathe through them, intent instead on the flocks of wigeon swimming slightly further out. She angles in across the wind and comes to a hover, stationary on motionless wings angled finely enough to let the wind hold her momentarily, legs extended. The flock scatters in a storm of spray. Ducks that never dive, dive.

Anything to avoid the horror. The peregrine rises and banks steeply on a tight axis and approaches again, slowly and from a shallower angle, closer to the water, her silhouette now less distinctive to the wigeon but her presence just as terrifying. And this time all the morning’s practising generates the outcome she was trying to elicit: the wigeon panic and take flight. Instantaneously she climbs on straining wings, forcing the air away behind her as she wrenches herself upward. The wigeon flock coalesces, tightening even as it leaves the water, the white on the males’ upper wings flashing like distress beacons in the weak sunshine. Briefly, the flock diverges from the rising falcon, but as she rolls out of her climb and dives, that distance closes like a rifle’s recoil. She plunges through the flock, black talons grasping, then slows and turns but holds no prey. The wigeon have jinked away at the very last moment and now the gap between flock and falcon widens progressively. She returns shoreward, her loose flight seemingly carrying an air of dejection that failure inevitably accrues, yet only through failure comes knowledge and while her youth means she still has much to learn, the morning’s experience indicates that she learns fast. She will go hungry today, but that will only sharpen her schooling. The wigeon will soon face a formidable adversary.

 

At the Very End of the Road by Phillip Edwards is published by Whittles, priced £16.99

 

Bella Caledonia is a website that publishes essays, articles and reviews on Scottish political, social and cultural issues. Founder and editor Mike Small has put together an anthology of memorable contributions, and we share Mairi McFadyen’s essay here.

 

Essay taken from Bella Caledonia: An Anthology
Edited by Mike Small
Published by Leamington Books

 

The Art of Living Together
Mairi McFadyen

 

This month I was at The Ceilidh Place in Ullapool for the annual adult Fèis Rois gathering, a three-day festival of tuition in traditional music, song, dance, Gaelic language and culture alongside fringe events, gigs and late-night cèilidh sessions in pubs all over the north west’s cultural capital. There is such a spirit of community here. For many, this is a chance not only to meet friends old and new, but to learn from the great tradition bearers – such as fiddler Aonghas Grant or Gaelic singers Rona Lightfoot and Cathy Ann MacPhee.

This year the Fèis also welcomed a group of singers and musicians from Brittany, who threw a fest noz into the mix; two blind music students from the National Academy of Music in Bucharest and a young musician who is working hard to raise awareness of autism. Music has such an incredible power to connect, to bring people together. The whole weekend was a life-affirming and hopeful reminder of what is important to hold on to in the face of it all.With the relentless daily news cycle headlining the triple crisis of climate change, mass extinction and inequality alongside escalating trends of populism, isolation, alienation, uncertainty and disconnection, creating spaces for connection and conviviality is more vital now than ever.

A particularly special moment was the performance of the ‘Kin and the Community’ project Sgeulachd Phàdruig Mhoireasdain – one in a series of short films bringing to life audio archive recordings alongside newly composed music as a soundtrack to a life story. In this instance, we learned of the life of musician Pàdruig Morrison’s own grandfather, Peter (Pàdruig) Morrison, a man who survived the first world war and lived as a crofter in Grimsay, North Uist.The audience witnessed past and present fuse together as Pàdruig and friends accompanied his forebears in real time, unlocking layers of memory and meaning and inviting us to reflect on who we are and where we come from. Inspired by and created under the guidance of fiddler and composer Duncan Chisholm, this work of creative ethnology is a moving reminder of what it is to be human.

We live in a society that has forgotten to value what it is to be human, in a world where far too many people get left behind. Our economy cares not for localities, cultures, ways of life or the cohesion of kin and community.The pervasive growth-at-all-costs model – upheld by all of the main political parties and mainstream media – is so narrowly focused on the pursuit of profit, productivity and measuring GDP that it fails to count the damage it wreaks on the environment or the health, well-being and dignity of its citizens.

What can we do to resist and reclaim our lives, our communities, our planet?

 

Reclaiming the Commons

Across the globe, the commons movement is growing and reclaiming hopeful alternatives to the dispiriting status quo of market economics, challenging the deep pathologies of contemporary capitalism and suggesting cooperative, egalitarian and participatory alternatives.

Deeply rooted in human history, it is difficult to settle on a single definition of the commons that covers its broad potential for social, economic, cultural and political change. The commons includes natural resources – land, water, air, forests, food, minerals, energy. It also encompasses our cultural inheritance – the traditions, practices and shared knowledge that make society possible and life meaningful. Commoning is the lived expression of conviviality, understood as the ‘art of living together’ (con-vivere). Put most simply, perhaps, the commons is that which we all share that should be nurtured in the present and passed on, undiminished, to future generations.

The movement to name and reclaim the commons has roots in the struggle of English commoners against the ‘enclosures’ of the 15th, 16^th & 17th centuries by the rising class of gentry who expropriated common land for their private use; and later, in both Lowland and Highland Scotland, the dispossession of the Clearances. These enclosures severed a deep connection to the land and destroyed local cultures, paving the way for the industrialisation, colonisation and globalisation of the modern world.

In the 21st century, it is not just land and resources that have been enclosed by capitalism, but almost all aspects of life itself. The modern tendency towards turning relationships into services, commons into commodities, human into machine has been described by commons scholar David Bollier as ‘the great invisible tragedy of our time.’ The ‘new enclosure’ can be seen in the patenting of genes, lifeforms, medicines and seed crops, the use of copyright to lock up creativity and culture, academic knowledge behind paywalls and attempts to transform the open internet into a closed, proprietary marketplace, shrinking the public domain of ideas, among many other examples.

The endgame of this process is the enclosure of the mind and the cooption of dissent.The absolute triumph of this system is demonstrated by the fact that so many of us have lost the ability to imagine our way out. As Naomi Klein has written, we are ‘locked in, politically, physically and culturally’ to the world that capital has made. We are up against the formidable capacity of global capitalist and colonial systems of power to enclose our sense of the possible.

 

Connection and Conviviality

Despite the rapid encroachment by capitalism on the commons, much of what we value in terms of quality of life is still created outside the spaces of economic exchange, through the voluntary association of friends, neighbours and citizens. Convivial co-operation is very much alive in scattered enclaves and in communities – in the home, the library, local clubs, community gardens, community land trusts, or simply in an open-mic night, cèilidh or pub session. These are the places and spaces where the impulse and catalyst to strike and kindle sparks of change, creativity and transformation are to be found.

The carrying stream of traditional music is a cultural commons. Every song, pipe march, slow air, jig or reel has its own story to tell, connected to the language, histories and memories of people, places and lives lived. At its heart, traditional music is a shared activity, a community practice, drawing on wells of deep communal and collective memory, passing from previous generations to the curiosity, ingenuity and dexterity of the next. The tradition has been created by many hands; first in the minds of individuals, but often reshaped – altered simply through the human process of forgetfulness or given new life by those with a desire to innovate. There is the spirit of the commons too among those who are generous with their passion and talents, willing to share and pass on their knowledge through playing and teaching.

This music does not represent some parochial caricature of a bygone age, but rather a living, breathing culture that is as contemporary today as it ever was. Rooted in place, it has a life force and an energy that demands to be reshaped, to continue, to be passed on.

Traditional music has always resisted mainstream commodification, despite the success of the ‘creative industries’ in packaging this music as an export brand for global consumption. While the brand-driven individualism of neoliberal economics demands of all artists to be professional entrepreneurs – and while some may enjoy or benefit from this situation in financial terms – many more sit precariously and uncomfortably within such a dehumanising ideology.

It is important to name it too: the neoliberal ideology and discourse of the creative industries belongs to the same story of economic growth, and is therefore enmeshed and implicated in the wider process of climate breakdown. It’s all connected.

This is not an argument to get rid of money or markets; neither is this an argument for an economics of scarcity or against regeneration. This is an argument for transforming and releasing ourselves from the grip and structures of contemporary neoliberal capitalism-as-we-know-it. Our very survival as a species depends on it.

Capitalism moves fast. We need time to slow down, reflect, remember, resist and make space for what really matters. When we slow down, our experience of being human swells. Our sense of possibility augments and swells with it. Paulo Freire wrote that it is our vocation to become more fully human. What he means by this is that we must move from existing as human objects to be acted upon towards becoming subjects who think and act with critical consciousness, liberating our imaginations and transforming the world.

We might think of reclaiming the commons as reclaiming our past and our future, reclaiming what it means to be human, to be alive. If, somehow, we are able to come together to confront and overcome the desperate challenges that lie ahead, we might just find a world far richer in possibilities than the one we leave behind.

 

Bella Caledonia: An Anthology edited by Mike Small is published by Leamington Books, priced £9.99.

Deborah Bird Rose was a world-renowned anthropologist and leading figure in environmental humanities. Shimmer was her much-anticipated final book and reflects on her etho-ethnographical fieldwork with flying fox scientists, conservationists and Australian Aboriginal communities.

 

Extract taken from Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril
By Deborah Bird Rose
Published by Edinburgh University Press

 

The fact is that we will never know what it is like to be flying-fox, or a tree. As the ecologist Frank Egler famously, and wisely, put it: ‘ecosystems may not only be more complex than we think, they may be more complex than we can think’. What is true of ecosystems is true at other scales. Flying-foxes individually are more complex than we think, and complex in ways beyond our thought. Their ethos includes their many social skills and cultural repertoires. And yet we also share glimpses of worlds, actions and connectivities. The mutualisms that sustain all of us are not obscure, and new information is always emerging.

Responsibilities: One of the most devastating effects of the animal-human binary has been the rejection of the idea that we have ethical responsibilities towards other creatures. Although in recent years this binary increasingly has been undermined in favour of connectivities across borders of difference, there is still a strong social/political ‘common sense’ position that puts human interests above all others.

And yet, the call into responsibility is not dependent on the specifics of any given creature, its species, its usefulness, its cuteness; rather it is enough to know that the call is there. But at the same time, responses must always be appropriate to the needs of others, as best we can understand them. In writing, thinking and working across the boundaries of species we find ourselves face to face with both mystery and familiarity. Others are not replicas of us, and at times the gap is incommensurable. And yet, we are all kin within the family of life on Earth. This insight into kinship was the ‘real scandal’ of Darwin’s work; it reveals the connectivities that the animal-human binary sought to conceal. When we live ethically, we become participants in flows of mutual life-giving. Ethics arising in the actual conditions of life cannot be abstract and universal, nor can they constitute a closed system. By the same logic, ethical writing requires openness both to the peril and to the joy of others. There are words of alarm – necessary and passionate, aiming to amplify ethical claims. Equally there is praise and celebration – for the lives of others, their passion and their gifts. Even as I raise my voice against violence, I focus my study on the beauty of flying-foxes’ ways of living: their high-flying verve, their joyful labour awash in pollen and nectar, their travels and attachments to home place, and their intensely social lives.

Multispecies ethnography: New understandings of connectivity enable new fields of research and writing that embrace affirmations of participation. One of the great anthropologists of the Anthropocene, Anna Tsing, evokes the excitement of this gripping moment:

There is a new science studies afoot . . . and its key characteristic is multispecies love. Unlike earlier forms of science studies . . . it allows something new: passionate immersion in the lives of the nonhumans being studied. Once such immersion was allowed only to natural scientists, and mainly on the condition that the love didn’t show. The critical intervention is that it allows learnedness in natural science and all the tools of the arts to convey passionate connection.

Deeply attentive to the lives of nonhumans, this new research is committed to engaging with diversity amongst humans as well. Multispecies ethnography, articulated initially by Eben Kirksey and Stefan Helmreich, is only possible because so many boundaries are now understood to be porous. Wide-ranging, open and inclusive modes of research cultivate arts of attentiveness. Multispecies research brings us into encounter with ‘a lively world in which being is always becoming, [and] becoming is always becoming-with’.

You are not alone: The West’s former view that all that was not human was simply mindless matter seems barely credible anymore. And yet, a huge shift is required when we consider that our human lives are situated in vast realms of sentience. The Australian Aboriginal philosopher Mary Graham states that one of the basic premises of the Aboriginal worldview is: ‘You are not alone in the world.’ And herein lies a powerful, perhaps alarming, challenge. In the midst of all this sentience, there is no hiding. The consequences of human action are not borne by mindless machines but by living beings, many of whom are conscious of their own lives and of the lives of others. And so, given that almost all the factors driving two Australian flying-foxes to the edge of extinction are biocultural (and include human and nonhuman actions), we bear responsibilities that are witnessed not only by other humans but by other living (and perhaps non-living) beings as well. We are called, therefore, into participation and intra-action. It is true that, for better or worse, we always participate in life’s flow.

 

Shimmer: Flying Fox Exuberance in Worlds of Peril by Deborah Bird Rose is published by Edinburgh University Press, priced £14.99.

Mark Mechan’s Welly Boot Broth is a warm, charming picture book showing the fun and imagination in growing your own vegetables. We caught up with Mark to chat to him about his book.

 

Welly Boot Broth
By Mark Mechan
Published by Waverley Books

 

Congratulations on the publication of Welly Boot Broth – it’s such a lovely book. Can you tell us a little bit about it?

Thank you very much. It’s the story of a little boy, Elliot, whose Dad encourages him to ‘grow his own broth’ by planting vegetables in their garden. We follow Elliot as he ‘helps’ to dig, sow, weed … and fend off pests which are many fold in the garden. Elliot meanwhile indulges his love of digging deep holes, and letting his imagination run away with what he finds. The book is less ‘how to garden’ and more ‘give it a go and see what can happen or go wrong’. My publisher Waverley Books were as keen as I was to retain the flavour of Scottishness that had characterised my first book, Tumshie.

I used to come home from primary school for my lunch — often a bowl of tinned tomato, (which by the way is still the ultimate comfort food), with rolled up balls of doughy white bread dropped into it … bliss. But mum also made the most delicious home-made broths: chicken soup, lentil soup, vegetable broth. So I’m trying not to be judgemental (and god knows I still eat a lot of unhealthy stuff myself), but when you’re responsible for putting decent food in your own kids’ mouths, you start to weigh up other responsibilities. So, that first spread showing a frowning Dad opening a tin of tomato soup for Elliot hopefully will chime with parents who might find themselves in that tricky area between wanting to provide something wholesome for their kids, and finding literally anything at all that they will eat.

 

The book has a light touch theme about sustainable living and the wonder of growing your own veg. Do you think it’s important to teach kids as well as entertain them?

Oh yes, and of course the trick is – as you say – to do it with a light touch. Growing your own can teach food comes from, patience and nurture, the ability to think and plan long term, and the rewards of creating something from almost nothing.  I feel that kids instinctively know if they’re being preached at and I want to try to avoid being too heavy handed. This story and Tumshie both come from personal experience, something my family and I have done, rather than an idea or a message that I wanted to mould a story around.

The other thing is that I just wanted to get across how much fun gardening can be. It’s a long game, waiting for your hard work at the start of the year to bear fruit (or veg) months later. For very small kids that’s not really engaging – it’s like waiting months for Christmas to finally arrive.  But the enjoyment for wee ones is in the digging, getting dirty, finding worms, sowing seeds; then the daily caring for their wee plot — and the thrill of seeing the first sprouting shoots is really something exciting (well, I think so…). And eventually pulling a carrot from the ground, smelling it, tasting it – is even more exciting.

 

You have worked in publishing for a long time designing book jackets. What made you decide to enter the world of children’s picture books?

When our first two kids Charlie and Lily were really wee, I toyed with the idea of creating a book just for them. I insisted that we had a troll living under the floorboards of our house, and I thought it would be a fun project to create a story book around that. But young parents don’t really have that much time to burn, so I let that one slide. By the time our third, Elliot, was at school, our daily walk to his school gates would be chit-chat about what he would be dressing as for Halloween (which involved him coming up with outlandish ideas and me setting myself the challenge of whether they could feasibly be made out of corrugated cardboard). Between the two of us we cooked up the idea of a book, starring Elliot of course (and ‘Dad’, a younger version of me), about traditional Scottish Halloween — the centrepiece of which for me had always been the Turnip Lantern. I would complain to Elliot how no-one seemed to carve a tumshie any more, and that costumes were always bought rather than cobbled together at home. My bent for nostalgia sparked the book into life, although by the time I had pitched the idea to Waverley, created it, and Tumshie was finally published, Elliot was halfway through high school. So — a long gestation period. A bit like growing vegetables.

 

How do you approach illustration? What are you keen to get across visually?

What I try to do most is to create a depth of texture and colour that feels natural. It’s one of the reasons I use charcoal to draw with. The strokes are full of accidental richness that is hard to replicate in any other way. Meaning, I could have drawn it all digitally but that is just not so much fun. A charcoal sketch also tends to build up a little microclimate of smudges, fingerprints, rubbings out … ghosts of previous strokes that weren’t quite right. It brings the drawing a character that I really enjoy. Much of that texture isn’t always apparent in the final printed version, but the truth of the work is in its creation as much as its final appearance.

I’m pretty eclectic when it comes to design and illustration, but for my picture books I‘ve stuck to traditional drawings with charcoal on paper, which are scanned and then coloured digitally. I’ll draw the elements separately — people, backgrounds, objects — and combining them digitally to create the spread helps me retain a flexibility of composition that I wouldn’t otherwise have.

I’m from a generation that crossed the borderline between ‘traditional’ art techniques and the beginning of digital illustration. I was studying drawing and painting at Duncan of Jordanstone in Dundee when Photoshop was born, and moved into graphic design as a career when it was already becoming the industry standard for publishing houses using desktop publishing. So I’ll never lose my love of drawing on paper, the immediacy of it, and the physicality of it. Digital drawing and painting is incredibly fun, diverse and almost infinitely flexible, which I love too, so I’m happy to have a foot in both camps.

 

Thankfully, there are no wellies in the soup in the book! What’s your favourite soup to make and eat?

I love to make a proper borscht, which takes me two days — involving the roasting of beef bones for the bone broth. I like the earthniness of the beetroot, and the tang of the sour cream to finish it. But the soup that I’m most frequently asked to make is a mushroom soup, from a Rose Elliot recipe. It’s creamy, with a spike of paprika and a cheeky dash of sherry. I’ve never grown mushrooms though, so that soup didn’t make it into Welly Boot Broth.

 

Are you a keen gardener yourself?

Yes I love gardening, though I’m no expert. I remember my Grandpa popping pea pods for me in his allotment — Anderson shelter an’ all —and so I always raise peas in my garden now. They are so much fun to watch grow. I was very lucky to have inherited a garden with a vegetable plot from the woman who lived in my house before we bought it, about 20 years ago. (Mrs Kerr in Welly Boot Broth was named after her – my own private tribute). I spent this past summer digging a pond, landscaping and planting flowers which my wife Alison would constantly mail order for me. And I still have some veg in the ground to be pulled. Soup yet to be made!

 

What other illustrated books have caught your eye recently?

I can’t stop poring over mid-century children’s books that I find online. Graphically they amaze and inspire me. More recently though a book that I’ve picked up amongst the hundreds of stunning-looking books on show is the illustrated version of The House by the Lake by Thomas Harding. It’s illustrated by Britta Teckentraup. It’s such a beautiful book, and the layering of the house’s history is reflected in her gorgeous artwork.

 

Welly Boot Broth by Mark Mechan is published by Waverley Books, priced £7.99.

 

 

Martin Moran lived life in the mountains to the full. He climbed and guided in the Alps, Norway, the Himalayas, and in the mountains of Scotland, and his memoir describes his climbing experiences with a deep awe and respect.

 

Extract taken from Higher Ground: A Mountain Guide’s Life
By Martin Moran
Published by Sandstone Press

 

‘Only a hill; but all of life to me
Up there between the sunset and the sea.’
Geoffrey Winthrop Young

 

I never especially wanted to be a mountain guide, but it was the hills that opened my soul to the wonders of existence. By the age of eight they had become a major part of my dreams and imaginings. I was born into an aspirational household that was making the post-war transition from working to middle-class status. Neither of my parents had the least inkling towards outdoor adventure. My mother was a dreamer, but was tied by the conventions of a housewife’s life. My father was provider and disciplinarian with scant time to spare from his career as financial accountant to a company in Wallsend on North Tyneside. Like so many of their generation both Mum and Dad sacrificed personal indulgence to give my brother and me the best possible starts in life, but their greatest contribution to my cause was unwitting.

Both parents had distaste for the conventional seaside holiday of the 1960s, and instead we were taken on touring trips in the Lake District and Scottish Highlands. My eyes were first opened to the hills through the back windows of a Vauxhall Victor. On Kirkstone Pass I saw grim crags rearing up into the mists on Red Screes. In Glen Lyon I marvelled at pencilled torrents which plunged from hidden heights. I urgently needed to find out what was where, to define and contain the world, and so became obsessed with maps. I accumulated a collection of Ordnance Survey One Inch sheets and became a devotee of Wainwright’s guidebooks. The strange Gaelic names of the Highlands – Sgurr nan Clach Geala, An Teallach, Bidean nam Bian – evoked a mix of fear and enticement.

Soon I was scampering up hillocks and hummocks during Sunday picnics in the Cheviot Hills. Langlee Crags and Humbleton Hill briefly meant all the world to me, but by now I had found the mountain bookshelf in North Shields library and my horizon widened. On a family drive to Devon the billowing masses of summer cumulus became my own Himalaya, every cloud cap a new and unfathomable summit, and with excitement came fear. One night in bed my imagination passed from the hills to the whole of the Earth and up to the sky. The stars stretched into a yawning and terrible abyss. Suddenly I sensed the ultimate truth and in a spasm of panic rushed downstairs to the arms of my mother. I now knew that a search for the absolute was futile, but I was not deterred from the quest. From fell-walks and camps to rock faces and bivouacs, the hills gave me solace and inspiration through my teenage years. All else in life seemed dull by compare and I won revelations of a life beyond the plain.

*

By December 1978 I was married and living in Sheffield. So far the magic of Scottish winter mountaineering had eluded me. I was steeped in the works of Bill Murray and the legends of Tom Patey, Jimmy Marshall and Robin Smith. The sublime experiences described by Murray in Mountaineering in Scotland convinced me that it was in this genre that the true force lay. Yet my previous trips north had all ended in storm or retreat through want of courage.

Lacking a ready partner I resolved to make a weekend visit to the Cairngorms alone and absconded from a tedious accountancy audit in the early afternoon. We owned a seventeen-year-old Ford Anglia, inherited from my late grandfather. I dropped Joy, my wife, with her family in Durham and drove north through torrential rain, battling self-doubt and loneliness. The 350-mile journey seemed interminable but the rain petered out to be replaced by snow showers, which fired mesmerising volleys of white daggers across the headlight beams. On the climb from Glen Shee to the Cairnwell thick banks of powder snow defeated the car. I parked and bedded down on the back seat, my mood morose but still determined.

A snow-plough appeared at 7.00 am and, tucking in behind, I surmounted the pass in triumph. My perseverance had paid off. Remembering the joys of a summer crossing as a fifteen-year-old Scout I was drawn to the Cairn Toul-Braeriach massif. The hike up Glen Dee was a soulless trudge and the hills were shrouded behind the veils of falling snow, but I kept my head down and climbed Cairn Toul from Corrour bothy without a stop. On the summit the visibility was less than twenty-five metres, so I took a direct descent past Lochan Uaine and cramponned delicately down the frozen water-slide of its outflow stream. Just before darkness I found the squat stone-clad Garbh Choire bothy, and settled in for the sixteen-hour night. Tomorrow’s likely outcome would be another dull trudge back to the car and yet another disappointment, but at least I was secure and warm.

In such expectancy I overslept my alarm by an hour. The bothy door opened to a morning of absolute clarity. The mountains shone under a white blanket of fresh snow. I couldn’t get packed quick enough. The snow was dry and aerated making the 600m climb to Braeriach an exhausting struggle, but what recompense there was in the views of the snow-plastered corrie walls around me. On reaching the summit, my sight ranged westward across the upper Spey valley to the white rump of Ben Nevis, which sailed on the skyline sixty miles away.

Anxious to squeeze every moment of pleasure out of this precious day, I ploughed down to the Pools of Dee in the jaws of the Lairig Ghru, straight up the east side, and on to Ben Macdui. Already the sun was slipping from my grasp. I pounded over the summit and descended towards the Luibeg Burn. Midday’s glare faded to a pale pink alpenglow, which flushed the high tops for a magical half-hour until the heavens turned to indigo, leaving only the western horizons with a fringe of light. The immensity of the vision moved me close to tears. A blanket of freezing fog gathered in the glen as I jogged down the icy track. Once more I saw the Universe for what it is, infinite and pitiless; I could feel the sting of death in the barren frost, and yet was utterly happy. The paradox is inexplicable. Back at Linn of Dee the Ford Anglia’s engine fired first time and a wind of elation carried me home.

 

Higher Ground: A Mountain Guide’s Life by Martin Moran is published by Sandstone Press, priced £11.99.

This month leaders from around the world landed on our shores for COP26 and with the eyes of the earth upon us, our thoughts, more than ever, turned to the importance of celebrating and protecting the natural world.

At Floris Books HQ they believe that it’s vital to plant the seed early and love shaking their pompoms to champion their books that do just that. In this rousing roundup, we share the best of their inspiring and beautiful picture books which help encourage wee ones to grow a love and appreciation for nature.

 

FROM SUNNY, SUSTAINABLE DAYS

 Spin a Scarf of Sunshine – Dawn Casey and Stila Lim

Nari lives on a small farm with hens and bees and apple trees, and cares for a little lamb of her own. The seasons turn and Nari’s lamb grows into a fine sheep with a fleece that is ready to shear. Nari and her family use traditional skills to transform the fleece into a cosy scarf, as they shear, spin, dye and knit. But as Nari grows older her beloved scarf becomes tattered – it is ready to be recycled into compost for the farm with the help of some friendly worms.

Stila Lim’s luminous illustrations will inspire children and adults alike to explore the simple beauty around them and connect them to the idea of sustainable living and knowing where our clothing comes from.

Listen to author Dawn Casey read an extract.

Learn how to knit your own wee lamb on our blog!

 

TO ILLUMINATING, EVOCATIVE NIGHTS

The Night Walk – Marie Dorléans

Mama opened our bedroom door. “Come on, you two,” she whispered. “We need to go now, to get there on time.”

Excited, the sleepy family step outside into a beautiful summer evening. They’ve entered a night-time world, quiet and shadowy, filled with fresh smells and amazing sights. Is this what they miss when they’re asleep?

Translated from French, the original edition of this book won the prestigious Prix Landerneau in the best children’s picture book category. It shares the dreamy story of a family’s exciting journey through the night. Beautiful and evocative, this stunning book celebrates the importance of family time and the awe-inspiring power of the natural world.

Check out the video trailer here.

 

AND MESMORISING STARRY SKIES

 The Depth of the Lake and the Height of the Sky – Kim Jihyun

Finally, and without a single word uttered, Kim Jihyun’s wordless wonder The Depth of the Lake and the Height of the Sky tells the heartfelt and uplifting story of a child’s independent discovery of the natural world.

A boy and his dog set off from his grandparents’ home in the countryside to explore. At each bend in the trail the boy discovers something astounding, from towering trees to a still, silent lake. He can’t resist diving down, down into the cool water and greeting the fish below. Then later, when boy and dog have been warmed by the gentle sunshine, they wander back, contentedly, to their family. But before they go to sleep, nature gives them one last dazzling show: they look up, up to a night sky awash with stars.

Take a sneak peek inside the book and marvel at some of the incredible illustrations.

 

Eager from more? Discover all of the beautiful Floris picture books here.

The Biggest Footprint is a fascinating and gorgeous book for children. By ‘smooshing’ all the humans on earth into one giant, Rob and Tom Sears show how our actions affect the planet and what we can do to make sure we can restore our earth to a more natural state, and not treat it as a resource to plunder. It will make you laugh and think, and we couldn’t wait to show you some of its wonderful pages.

 

The Biggest Footprint
By Rob & Tom Sears
Published by Canongate Books

 

 

The Biggest Footprint by Rob & Tom Sears is published by Canongate Books, priced £14.99.

At this time of year, it’s usual to see a celeb memoir or two high in the bestseller list. David Robinson reads two that are well worth a spot on your lists to Santa.

 

 

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat: My Autobiography
By Brian Cox
Published by Quercus

Baggage: Tales from A Packed Life
By Alan Cumming
Published by Canongate

 

HOW do you become a star? How do you fascinate, cast an eclipsing spell, persuade the audience that whatever you are making up is really true? Is it all just a matter of getting the biggest, showiest, roles at the right time? Can it be taught and if so how?

These questions lie at the heart of two memoirs published this month – by, as it happens, two Scots who best know the answers.  Losing self-consciousness is, Alan Cumming and Brian Cox concur, the key to great acting.  Yet as both their books show, their childhoods gave them an awful lot to be self-conscious about.

For Cox, growing up in Dundee’s Brown Constable Street was carefree until he was eight. His debt-laden father’s death plunged the family into poverty and his mother into mental illness (she was hospitalised for over a year when he was ten). Yet Cox has been a star for so long, and been interviewed so often, that much of this is already widely known. So what does his memoir, Putting the Rabbit in the Hat, tell us that isn’t?

First of all, because he clearly hasn’t used a ghostwriter, we get a sense of how his mind works. This is no bland chronological, punch-pulling narrative, and instead hops back and forth across decades. The chapter on his schooldays, for example, leaps ahead to 2010 to make a good point about the naturalness of child actors, then we’re back to Cox daydreaming his way through secondary modern in 1960, and to his love of comics, in particular the  Classics Illustrated series. Within a few lines, we’re fast-forwarded to 1997, when he’s filming The Boxer in Northern Ireland and watching its star, Daniel Day-Lewis, carry method acting to extremes. Why? Because twenty years later Day-Lewis gave up acting to become a cobbler and the Classics Illustrated version of A Tale of Two Cities reminded him of that.

This may be convoluted, but it rings true: big themes (here, method acting) often are triggered by the smallest details, and sometimes these can be fascinating. His parents met, he explains, because both their fathers died around the same time. In 1927, that meant three months of wearing a black armband and not socialising. If you wanted to go to a dance, for example, you had to leave town (Dundee) and go to a distant dancehall (Montrose)  – which is what they both did, and where they first met.

Yet none of this gets in the way of Cox showing the key turning points in his life, like when he first watched Nicol Williamson at Dundee Rep and discovered the meaning of ‘theatrical presence’ and how a good actor ‘can displace the air’. He’d already got a hint of what was possible from cinema: Spencer Tracey, his mother’s favourite actor, was  his too.  Studying acting at LAMDA in the early 1960s, a host of other greats soon followed: Olivier, O’Toole, Glenda Jackson, Maggie Smith. All the time, he was watching and learning, catching them in rehearsal as well as performance, just as (fast forward again) he has spent the pandemic months catching up on indie cinema.

He was also working out a lot of things for himself. Brown Constable Street had given him a strong personality, but he had to stop it getting in the way of his acting. School didn’t instil an ability to focus, so he had to learn it. Fulton Mackay, a mentor and friend, taught him not to aim at stardom: just being a good actor was ambition enough. From Michael Elliot and Lindsey Anderson, he learnt how much a good director – one who digs deep into the text rather than fussing about lighting or camera angles – can bring to a production. Anderson, in particular, taught him stillness, how to let the audience come to him rather than demanding its attention – all encapsulated in his classic note: ‘Brian, don’t just do something, stand there.’

Put all of that together, and you can see why Cox is the kind of actor he is.  Shakespeare, he says, is spot-on in Hamlet’s advice to the players: holding the mirror up to nature means just that: instead of muddying the text with what he calls ‘front foot acting’, actors should just be its conduit. Acting should be about expiation, about allowing the stage magic hinted at in the book’s title to happen: what it’s emphatically not about is surface show.

Cox doesn’t mince his words here. No matter the megawattage of the star involved, if he doesn’t believe in a performance, he’ll say so. Johnny Depp? Overrated. Tarantino? Meretricious. Kevin Spacey? A great talent, but stupid. Michael Caton-Jones? Doesn’t care enough about the script. Ed Norton? ‘A nice lad but a bit of a pain in the arse’. Gary Oldman’s Darkest Hour? ‘A shallow, crowd-pleasing farrago’. Oldman’s portrayal of Churchill, of course, won him the Oscar in 2017, while Cox’s own ‘more honest’ and ‘better researched’  Churchill that same year did not.

Normally, I would put Cox’s reaction down to sour grapes, but he makes a plausible case for his own film being better. And because of the candour he shows him in other judgments (not least his self-criticism over his failings as a father and husband), I’m inclined to believe him. Actorly forthrightness on such a scale is, frankly, rather refreshing. Where else, for example, can you expect to come across a chapter which opens like this: ‘To explain what I mean about “doing a schtick”, it’s worth looking at the example of Sir Ian McKellen’?

For all his many triumphs – not least, right now, his towering, Golden Globe-winning lead role as media mogul Logan Roy in Succession  – he admits that he never has found closure (‘and never will’) over his father’s death. This is something echoed in the very title of Alan Cumming’s book Baggage. The triumphant ending of his 2014 memoir Not My Father’s Son, which seemed to exorcise the ghost of his abusive father was, Cumming now implies, a  cop-out. ‘I am a survivor,’ he writes, ‘but not cured’: even at the moments of his greatest triumph, he has felt unhappy and confused, and he still thinks about his father almost as much as he ever did.

The book’s message, he says, is ‘Don’t buy into the Hollywood ending’: damage done in childhood will always be there as ‘a residual virus’: one has just to learn to live with it. And yet, as he charts his career from the collapse of his first marriage to contentment and freedom in his second, from his Broadway-conquering emcee in Cabaret to his starry, fully-packed life today, he makes the Hollywood ending sound completely credible. If his first book showed him confronting his bullying father, in Baggage he not only stands his ground against Stanley Kubrick (‘who found me intriguing because of it’) but also co-leads an actors’ mini-rebellion against  X2 director Bryan Singer. It may not be happy ever after, but it sounds close enough …

Then again, two anecdotes from Baggage made me wonder just how accurately art can ever mirror life. While staying  with Gore Vidal – a boor when drunk, apparently – he hears him confess that he never was really in love with his school classmate Jimmy Trimble, no matter what he wrote in his memoir Palimpsest. And then there’s Cumming’s Liza Minelli story.

He’d watched one of Minelli’s one-woman shows in New York, in which she told a story about how, when she was 16, she’d invited both her mother (Judy Garland) and godmother to see her perform, even though it was only a ten-second dance solo and miles away. The two women turned up, watched the show,  and were in tears afterwards. Neither had a hankie, so Garland got out her powder puff and they dabbed their faces with it. Going backstage, they told Liza what they’d done, and then gave her the powder puff, still stained with her own and Liza’s godmother’s tears.  ‘And I still have that powder puff to this day,’ Minelli told the crowd, to cheers and applause.

After the end of that show, Cumming asked her whether that story was true.

‘No darling!’ she replied. ‘None of that ever happened!’

‘And that, ladies and gentlemen,’ he concludes, ‘is show business.’

 

 

Putting the Rabbit in the Hat: My Autobiography by Brian Cox is published by Quercus, priced £20.

Baggage: Tales from A Packed Life by Alan Cumming is published by Canongate, priced £18.99

 

 

As we gear up for Halloween this week, BooksfromScotland took the time to speak to Alice Tarbuck, author of A Spell in the Wild, about her book and about everyday magic.

 

A Spell in the Wild
By Alice Tarbuck
Published by Two Roads

 

Your book A Spell in the Wild is having its paperback release this month. How have you enjoyed its reception with readers since its hardback release last year?

Perhaps the most surprising and wonderful thing has been the number of people who have read the book chapter-by-chapter, and followed through the whole year with it. I think that’s genuinely incredible, to think that people have used the book as a monthly comfort – I’ve had so many people reach out to tell me about the ways that following along with it has changed how they interact with nature in the world.

 

A Spell in the Wild is part-memoir, part-primer, part-history on magic and witchcraft. What precipitated your decision in writing the book?

The book naturally synthesised out of my doctoral research, and my love of academic research more generally, my private practice, and my experiences of the world – it felt natural to combine all three into something that I hoped would change and broaden the conversation around magic, witchcraft and the esoteric – something with robust research that nevertheless didn’t require you to be any sort of ‘expert’ to access the world you already live in!

 

It’s very interesting that in the introduction to the book that tell the readers you didn’t think to consider yourself a modern witch until someone pointed it out to you. Why do you think that was the case?

I think often we are still encouraged to believe that witchcraft is an exclusive, initiatory practice, which only certain people can participate in, and only after long training. It turns out of course that this isn’t true at all, but I am very aware that many people still see this model in culture. Its one of the reasons that, with Claire Askew, I teach witchcraft courses – to show people that this knowledge is accessible, its okay, its allowed.

 

Autumn has arrived now. What kind of practices will you be following in this seasonal change?

Some are very small – more soups and stews, fairy lights, but its also gearing up for Samhain, or Hallowe’en, which is considered ‘the witches’ new year’, so I take that seriously in terms of letting things go from my life that I wish to be rid of, and letting things in that I want to invite.

 

What do you recommend as practices, as engagements with the natural world, for those who are starting out?

I recommend just opening your eyes to the world – picking up fallen leaves, noticing when the moon is full (an app can help with that) and even just taking more nature photos – whatever opens your eyes!

 

There’s a practicality in your book, a recognition of what’s possible in any and all environments, to root magic in the everyday. Why is that important to you?

As someone with a chronic illness, and who is aware of how climate crisis affects our planet, and as someone who has grown up in a city, I think its easy when starting out to feel really alienated from the witchcraft of pristine landscapes so often put forward in books of the sort – I wanted to re-situate witchcraft, as occurring where we actually are!

 

Can you tell us anything about your current writing projects? What else can readers look forward to?

I’m currently working on my first poetry collection!

 

What have been your favourite books to read this year? What are you looking forward to reading next?

I’m currently enjoying reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman – better late than never, and can’t wait to read Nina Mingya Powell’s Small Bodies of Water.

 

A Spell in the Wild by Alice Tarbuck is published by Two Roads, priced £9.99.

Graeme Macrae Burnet’s Case Study has been one of the most anticipated novels of the year, and with good reason – we thoroughly recommend you get a copy as soon as possible! We caught up with Graeme to talk about the books that have inspired him and his work.

 

Case Study
By Graeme Macrae Burnet
Published by Saraband

 

The book as . . . memory. What is your first memory of books and reading?

I think it’s of a picture book, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Wildlife or something like. On one page was a full colour photograph of the wide open mouth of a snake. This terrified me and I remember throwing the book across the room. But I kept sneaking back to take another peek.

 

The book as . . . your work. Tell us about your latest book Case Study. What did you want to explore in writing this book?

Well, the only things I set out to explore when I’m writing a novel are the characters and the milieu. In the case of Case Study the central character is a rather unworldly young woman who believes that a radical psychotherapist named Collins Braithwaite has driven her sister to suicide, so she presents herself as a client to Braithwaite under an assumed identity. Collins Braithwaite is a charismatic, somewhat monstrous figure, who inhabits the London counter-cultural scene of 1960s London.

 

The book as . . . inspiration. What is your favourite book that has informed how you see yourself?

In preparation for writing Case Study, I re-read R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self. It’s a book that I find tremendously insightful, in particular in relation to the way we present different personas (or false selves as he would have it) to the world. I recognise a lot of myself in the behaviours he describes.

 

 The book as . . . object. What is your favourite beautiful book?

I’m very fond of my hardback edition of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis. I love the simplicity and poetry of her almost childlike black and white drawings. It’s definitely the book I’ve most often given as a gift.

 

The book as . . . rebellion. What is your favourite book that felt like it revealed a secret truth to you?

John Newsinger’s The Blood Never Dried, which describes a number of unsavoury episodes in Britain’s colonial past. It was published in 2006, but in an era of increasing jingoism and nostalgia it feels like a very necessary book.

 

The book as . . . a destination. What is your favourite book set in a place unknown to you?

St Petersburg drips from its every page of Crime and Punishment. I’ve never been there, but I feel that I’ve walked the every street that Raskolnikov walks, crammed myself into his tiny attic room and got sozzled in its grotty bars.

 

The book as . . . technology. What has been your favourite reading experience off the page?

I think reading Sorley MacLean’s poem Hallaig* on the plaque near the eponymous cleared village on Raasay is a pretty moving experience.

* in Seamus Heaney’s translation

 

The book as . . . the future. What are you looking forward to reading next?

A couple of things. I have a proof copy of Catherine Simpson’s new book One Body. I loved her memoir When I Had a Little Sister. She has the ability to write about the saddest things while always retaining a sense of humour. Also a book I picked up solely on the basis of its brilliant title: The Standardization of Demoralization Procedures by Jennifer Hoffman.

 

Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet is published by Saraband, priced £14.99.

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles is a magical first: a science-fiction verse-novel written in the Orkney dialect – packed full of treats, and beautiful on the page. Here, we introduce two of its characters: Astrid, uneasy about coming home, and Darling, a martian who wants to discover more about place and people.

 

Extracts taken from Deep Wheel Orcadia
By Harry Josephine Giles
Published by Picador

 

Astrid an Darling settle in

Astrid aets wi her fock. “Thoo’ll wirk?”
speirs Inga ower the protein soup.
“A’m here tae draa,” says Astrid. “Tae work
at me art. A’m needan ideas fae haem.”

“Yass,” says Inga, “grand that. Thoo’ll tak
a job or twa fae the rotas forbye.”
Øyvind touches Astrid’s airm.
“Hid’s grand thoo’re haem. Thir plenty time.”

Halfweys roond the staetion, Darling,
breeksed wi sailan, pangit wi hopp,
sits i’the Hoose wi a plaet o maet.
Eynar teuk it tae her, sportan

a apron an a smile. Sheu tryd
tae speir him aboot his fock an the staetion:
he nodded an brustled back tae the bar.
Sheu waatches the fock an aets her maet.

Astrid spaeks aboot the journey,
aboot whit her pals in Mars is deuan.
The wirds is lood in thir peedie quaaters.
Inga an Øyvind’s speuns rudge.

Darling notts a plan on her slaet
o whit sheu waants tae see; she hopps
a smoosie body will ask whit sheu’s deuan.
Naebody deus. Sheu dights her plaet.

Eftir, the both o thaim lie i thir bunks
on conter airms o the Wheel, birlan,
askin thirsels if thir maed a mistaek,
askin thirsels whit wey is a haem

 

Astrid and Darling settle in

Astrid eats with her folk. “Will you work?” asks Inga over the protein soup. “I’m here to draw,” says Astrid. “To work on my art. I wantneed ideas from home.”

“Yes,” says Inga, “that’s goodbig. And you’ll take a job or two from the rotas as well.” Øyvind touches Astrid’s arm. “It’s goodbig that you’re home. There’s plenty of time.”

Halfway around the station, Darling, knackered from sailing, fullbursting with hope, sits in the House with a plate of foodmeat. Eynar brought it to her, sporting an apron and a smile. She tried to ask him about his people and the station: he nodded and bustlecrackled back to the bar. She watched the people and ate her foodmeat.

Astrid speaks about the journey, about what her friends on Mars are doing. The words are loud in their little rooms. Inga and Øyvind’s spoons gratehackrattle.

Darling notes down a plan on her slate of what she wants to see; she hopes a nosy personbody will ask what she’s doing. Nobody does. She cleanwipes her plate.

Later, both of them lie in their bedbunks on oppositeopposing arms of the Wheel, whirlrushdancespinning, asking themselves if they’ve made a mistake, asking themselves whathowwherewhy a home is.

 

Astrid sketches Orcadia

Sheu trails a finger ower her slaet i’the curve
o her planet, than wi a canny swirl bleums
hids swaalls o yallo an corkalit. Wi shairp
stroks, the airms o Central Staetion skoot
atwart the screen, an peedie tigs an picks
mairk oot the eydent piers o Meginwick
i’the corner o her careful composietion.

An lukkan oot the peedie vizzie-bell,
doon the taing o Hellay, airm o the kirk,
the dammer o the Deep Wheel surroondan her,
Astrid feels hersel faa, an lift, an faa.
Liv oot, sheu dights the natralism fae
her slaet, an stairts ower again, abstrack,
wi only the nirt o the thowt o coman haem

an odd gittan seean that peedie odds:
black lines fer the starns, blue dubs
fer the tides, green aircs fer the grand skail
o wheels an airms an bolas gaithered roond Central.
Mindan her lessons fae college, sheu follows sense
intae shape, an shape intae color, an noo sheu’s closer
tae the grace ootbye, but closser maks more o a ranyie.

Again her dightan liv. Again a blenk.
Astrid steeks her een an haads the device
tae her chest, sam as her braethan wir liftan Orcadia
tae the surface. But the screen bides skarpy,
an the view bides stamagastan, an Astrid
settles back tae waatch an braethe an mynd,
her fingers restan jeust abeun the slaet.

 

Astrid sketches Orcadia

She trails a finger over her slate in the curve of her planet, then with a skilledwisemagicalcautious swirl blooms its swellwaves of yellow and scarlet dye. With sharp strokes, the arms of Central Station jutthrust acrossover the screen, and little taptwitchteases and tapchaptakes mark out the constantindustrious piers of Meginwick in the corner of her careful composition.

And looking out of the little viewsurveystudyaiming-bubblebell, down the promontory of Hellay, arm of the church, the shockstunconfusion of the Deep Wheel surrounding her, Astrid feels herself fall, and lift, and fall. Palm flat, she cleanwipes the naturalism from her slate, and begins again, abstract, with only the crumbknot of the thought of coming home and growing strangedifferent from seeing so little difference. Black lines for the stars, blue poolpuddlemuds for the seatimetides, green arcs for the goodbig scatterspreadspill of wheels and arms and bolas gathered round Central. Rememberknowreflectwilling her lessons from college, she follows sense into shape, and shape into colour, and now she’s closer to the graceglory outside, but closer makes more of a writhingpain.

Again her cleanwiping palm. Again a blankblink. Astrid shutdarkens her eyes and holds the device to her chest, as if breathing was lifting Orcadia to the surface. But the screen waitstaylives barethinbarren, and the view waitstaylives bewildershockoverwhelming, so Astrid settles back to watch and breathe and rememberknowreflectwill, her fingers resting just above the slate.

 

The pieces Darling’s been

Fer her coman o age she asked o her faithers
a week’s resiedential on Aald Eart.
Nae Ball, nae press confrence, nae giftid
Executiveship, nae ship, even,
tho aa her brithers wis taen the sleekest
o sublight racers. Thay naeraboot
imploded, but sheu wis inherieted airts
an negotiated the week as traed
fer a simmer wirkan at senior manajment.
Mars simmers is ower lang.

That wis the stairt o her travaigan.
Foo wi the guff o fifty square mile
o aald equatorial rainforest, no
landscaepid ava, sheu kent
sheu wadno gang haem, but see as gret
a lot o the seiven starns as sheu coud.
Sheu peyed a ecogaird tae mairk her
on the wrang manifest, an fleed. She saa
the Natralist munka-hooses on Phobos,
whar papar refused ony maet treated

wi more as fire, praeched wershy beauty.
Sheu saa a demonstraetion station
o sepratist Angles: bred, snod,
rich, blond, an weel-airmed.
Her faithers’ credited wirds – first barman,
than teely, than dortan – trackid her
fae Europan federal mines tae stentless
pairties orbitan Wolf. Thay wir even
bowt bulletin time on the ansible network.
At lang an at lent sheu tint thir trackers

on the unregistered Autonomist traeder
whar, awey, sheu teuk her new name
an body an face, whar sheu teuk time
tae cheuss an recover, at teuk her here
tae Orcadia, the innermosst Nordren staetion,
aence the edge, aence the centre,
pangit an empty yet, wi Darling,
eftir peyan her rodd ower that
grand a piece o space, lukkan
fer a peedie piece tae listen an leuk.

 

The placesdistancepartwhiles Darling’s been

For her coming of age she asked from her fathers a week’s residential on Old Earth. No Ball, no press conference, no gifted Executiveship, no ship, even, though all of her brothers had taken the sleekest in sublightspeed racers. They almost imploded, but she had inherited skilldirectiongrift and negotiated the week in return for a summer working in senior management. Mars summers are very long.

This was the start of her roamingramblingtravels. Drunkmadfull on the stinkpuffsnortnonsense of fifty square miles of old equatorial rainforest, not landscaped at all, she knew she wouldn’t go home, but see as much of the seven stars as she could. She paid an environmental quarantine agent to mark her down on the wrong manifest, and flew. She saw the Naturalist monasteries on Phobos, where holies refused any foodmeat treated with more than fire, preached thinwatery beauty. She saw a demonstration station of separatist Angles: trainbreddrilled, cleantrimabsolute, rich, blond, and well-armed. Her fathers’ moneyrespected words – first ragefrothseething, then pleadwheedling, then sulkforsaking – tracked her from federal mines on Europa to unrestrainedendless parties orbiting Wolf. They had even bought time for a bulletin on the ansible network. At long last and after much effort she lost their trackers on the unregistered Autonomist trader where, awaydeaddistracted, she took her new name and body and face, where she took time to choose and recover, which took her here to Orcadia, the Northern station closest to the galactic centre, once the edge, once the centre, fullbursting and empty still, with Darling, after buypaying her way across such a goodbig placedistancepartwhile of space, looking for a little placedistancepartwhile to listen and look.

 

Deep Wheel Orcadia by Harry Josephine Giles is published by Picador, priced £10.99.