In this photo diary author Sue Reid Sexton takes us behind-the-scenes on a fascinating trip to the Midi-Pyrenees in the south of France as she combines a family holiday with using her trusty campervan, Vanessa Hotplate, as a mobile office and creative space.

Meet Vanessa Hotplate, a small but perfectly formed Romahome campervan. Vanessa has living quarters for two, but for me the van functions best as a mobile office and creative space. I favour laybys in isolated locations for this purpose and this summer, I voyaged all the way from Glasgow to a tiny village in the Midi-Pyrenees in the south of France.

This was a distance of 1277 miles or 2043.2 kilometres to be exact and frankly more impressive. Such a journey is all the more remarkable with an engine of only 1,300 horsepower (though that does seem like a lot of horses...

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For David Robinson’s first column for Books from Scotland he writes about two very different pilgrimages in the recently published Poacher’s Pilgrimage by Alastair McIntosh and White Sands by Geoff Dyer.

The thing about pilgrimages, as Chaucer never quite got round to saying, is that where you are going isn’t often as important as the people you are going there with.

For me, it works like that with travel books too. I want more than just a journey. I want even more than finding out what it’s like to live in a place, what the people there are like and what they think about life. On a good day, I can get that from a newspaper travel feature. From a book, I expect more: I want it to be written so well that, when I finish it, I will feel as though I have been on the journey myself.  And the very best – the ones in which the writer’s mind matters as much as th...

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Walking With James Hogg

‘Hogg’s travel journals spoke of magic and mystery; of fairies, witches, ghosts and monsters’

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Q&A on Surfing with Jonathan Bennett

‘Whenever I caught a wave, the fear was replaced by absolute exhilaration’

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Writing a New Chapter for Scottish International Football

‘It’s not the winning and losing that counts, it’s the stories’

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Poetry from the Iona Community

‘Cut deep into the earth – a firm track, going somewhere’

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Arthur Melville’s Adventures In Colour

‘Nothing in Melville’s background predisposed him to the exalted sense of visual drama that emerges in his work’

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Q&A on Time Travel with Janis Mackay

‘I wanted to open doors to other worlds without writing pure fantasy’

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Ethiopian Vegetarian Recipe and Chef Q&A

‘The traders are like a family and the market is a lovely mixture of tourism and local eccentricity’

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An Introduction to Scotland’s Coasts

‘Scotland has almost every kind of coastal formation there is’

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