Fiddle and pins

Talking myself into it

2012-01-24T20:43:00.003Z

When January does clear and frosty days, I think there is no better time of year. The light, what few hours we have of it in the North, seems to possess a clarity unlike any other time of year. And with the month getting older and the books I had hoped to have begun by now still unwritten, I took myself off for a long walk through the woods and down to the sea. I walked for hours, lunching on a handful of nuts and dried fruit, drinking a bottle of icy water, taking the occasional diary-photo on my phone, but mainly walking and failing utterly to still the ceaseless chatter inside my head.

Lordy, but I do go on. I would be booted out of any self-respecting monastery for crimes against meditation were I ever to join an order. My 'internal dialogue' is an internal wordsalad on steroids ramped up to an earsplitting volume by way of a Marshall stack. Somebody shut me up. Turn it down, wouldya?

I'm praying* it's entirely because I'm in the predromal phase of the socially-acceptable psychosis that is the precursor to going all-out fruit loops and gobbing out a book. But you know, I could be wrong. I could just be on the threshold of lunacy. Wouldn't be the first time. Uh huh. AWOOOOOOOOO. When is the next full moon anyway? Why are you backing away? Aw, c'mon. Stick around. It might be entertaining. It might be enlightening. It might even be unforgettable.

I can promise you one thing, schweethoit. It sure as hell won't be quiet.

*But, you know, not like a monk, yeah? More like a kind of Pentecostal holy-roller type with a bit of swaying and speaking in tongues. And fur. Sort of grey fur. And yellow eyes and pointy ears. Know what I'm saying? AWOOOOOOOOOOO?

sparkly new thing

2012-01-09T22:45:00.002Z

I'm ready. I've been good. Over the holidays, I didn't fill my temple with assorted burnt offerings, I didn't stay up late knocking back vatloads of fermented grapes and grains ( too headache-inducing, alas) I played my fiddle lots, read three brilliant non-fiction books made out of paper and went for walks in woods and on beaches and didn't throw out any leftovers.

So. Today I tidied the studio. Well, insofar as I ever tidy. I paid bills and filed things but ignored the floor that hasn't been mopped for, pfffff, going on eleven years. Replied to emails that had to be replied to. Changed onto new diary. Shredded things. Put other things in envelopes and crossed things off lists.

I'm ready now. I have a clear window of opportunity in my diary. I'm going to take myself out for walks. I'm going to take photos. I'm going to make sketches. I'm going to go to the library. I'm going to play my fiddle in the hopes of coaxing some ideas out of hiding by pretending to be doing something else entirely. I'm going to go for more walks. I'm going to write. I'm going to throw what I write in the bin. I'm going to go for even more walks. Play even more tunes. Faster. I'm going to write more binworthy stuff. I'm going to draw. Badly. I'm going to feel The Fear. I'm going to gnaw the end of my pen and wonder if I've lost it.*

I'm going to eye the bottles of single malt, lined up like dark green solace in the drinks cupboard, but then I'll remember that these days even the faintest whiff starts the siren-song of migraines. Instead, I'm going to seriously consider cleaning the u-bend, but then I'm going to get real. Ewwwwwwww. Fuggeddit.

I'm going to have a long bath and fall asleep in it and probably let whatever I'm reading** fall into the tepid water. I'm going to do a ton of displacement activities because- guess what- even after all this time, the act of writing, of pulling a story out of thin air still scares the living daylights out of me. But I have to do it. Come what may. Hell and high water and all points in between.

And if I'm very, very lucky, what happened in the picture above will happen inside my head.

A SPARKLY NEW THING will arrive from the place where sparkly new things come from.

Or even a sparkly new thing. Hey. I'm not size-ist. The mere fact of its arrival will be cause enough for celebration.

*My mojo, not my pen.

**Thankfully, not a Knoodle or a Why-pad

The self-employed person's office party

2011-12-20T15:32:00.002Z

Crack open bottle of champagne, pour self a large measure into vessel usually used for washing brushes and drink responsibly. Crank up music till windows start to throb in sympathy. Pick up fiddle and join in. Read one of one's U.S. picture books out loud and marvel at depths of one's own perception and literary brilliance. Trip over rat's nest of trailing cables and belly flop onto tottering pile of books remaindered three months ago and sent by U.S. publisher to relieve pressure in warehouse. Note that these are the same volumes of deathless prose that one was declaiming from a scant five minutes ago. Sic transic Gliori(a) mundi.

Pour another generous volume of champagne and neck in one fell swoop. Too late, discover that along with fizz, one has inadvertently necked brush cleaning paint-water awash in a hefty titration of Cadmium Red. Cadmium? Faint bell goes off in memory. Isn't that radioactive?

Crikey. Better rinse out mouth straight from bottle instead. Cut out the middleman. So to speak. Chin, chin. What ho, chaps? Bottoms up. Vaguely recall apocryphal tales of office parties where unwise dalliances are conducted in broom cupboards and wobbly bits are photocopied to the general hilarity of all and sundry.

Eye photocopier.

Decide against making a complete idiot of self. Where's the fun in doing that if there's nobody to see you do it? Instead, while away the remainder of the afternoon turning the lights on and off to see if I glow in the dark yet. Like, just how radioactive is Cadmium red ?

And later, as I fall into the embrace of a particularly thorny rosebush on my evening commute home, ( 34 seconds up the garden path, max.) I consider how useful it would be for humans in the Northern Hemisphere to really glow in the dark. That way we could light our own way home like little self-contained candlepersons, instead of stumbling around in badly lit streets, falling over kerbs and cursing the darkness.

This reads like the deranged thoughts of a woman in need of sunshine, however. It is the day before Midwinter, and I don't know about you, but I am feeling particularly lumen-lite right now. Tomorrow, the year turns, and Light slowly gains the ascendancy, and with a bit of luck, my sodden Christmas cake will have returned from detox and will be fit to wear its coat of marzipan. Right now, it's slumped in a corner of the kitchen, muttering wetly to itself, exuding brandy fumes and trying to pick a fight with everyone that walks past. I overdid it on the 'feed your cake' instructions. To be fair, it didn't exactly try and stop me. Not one word of protest did I hear. It just sat there swallowing till it fell over with an expensive splash.

Now it's the kind of cake your mother told you to avoid. Come to think of it, I should have taken it to the self-employed person's office party. It would have been the life and soul of. Dance to the myooozick. Uh huh, uh huh. Voolay voo cooshay aveck mwah. Sisswarr. Oh, god, the shame. It would've been up on the photocopier in seconds flat. And as for introducing it to the shredder? Cake and shredder in a tree. Kay, eye, ess, ess, eye....well, you know how that one goes. Sultanas to hell and back. Currants? Peel? Just don't mention the angelica.

Slainte. A Merry Christmas to all of you Out There xxx

I am the Spoon

2011-12-06T21:08:00.003Z

Or at least, I feel like I'm running flat out. Trying to get the inside artwork for my What's the Time, Mr Wolf? book ready to take to Lunnon the day after tomorrow. Gasp, pant, phew. A self-imposed deadline, I hasten to add. I mean, it's not like there's a big Dish in hot pursuit, at least not if you factor out the Domestic Debt, the impending Festive Season, the Next Project In Line, the Diminishing Number of Years Left of Functioning Eyesight....

Oh, shut up, Spoon. Just keep running, right?

domestic bliss

2011-10-30T15:19:00.003Z

When we were younger, breakfast at GlioriSchloss used to look a bit like this. Back then, we fantasized about a future time when we'd actually be allowed to read the Sunday papers cover-to-cover without constant requests from the smaller members of the family for catering services/ quarrel arbitration/ laundry facilities/ taxi services/ toy hospital/ homework-helper and all the other multitudinous tasks in tiny print that parents find they've signed up to with the final pushhhh that ejects the precious little one out into the world. It's a bit like that moment when you've finally downloaded an app, or a program and if you're as fecklessly impatient as I am, you skim all the contractual gubbins and click the blue ACCEPT button in the interests of getting your sticky little mitts on whatever it was you wanted in the first place. Click, pushhhh, DONE.

I mean, did any of us who are lucky enough to be parents really know what we'd let ourselves in for? Hostages to fortune doesn't even come close.

I've been trawling through my artwork archives for the past few days ; ostensibly to locate some artwork for a publisher who wants to re-jacket a picture book, and also to put together a retrospective powerpoint presentation to try and give some idea of what my work has been about. In the trawl, I've been struck by how many of my books are about families. In fact, just about every single thing I've written and illustrated has a family at its core. And looking at the illustrations, I can trace the progression of my own family ; how we grew up, added new members, fell apart and remade ourselves into a new form. Seventy odd picture books, six novels and four works of junior fiction and they're pretty well all about families.

And then...a little bomb went off inside my head yesterday. I was reading the Saturday Guardian in which there was a heartbreaking article about growing up to become a writer by Jeanette Winterson in which she said, 'Unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.'

Winterson's story comes straight out of Grimm ; mine is more Hans Christian Andersen, but as I read on, I acknowledged a degree of kinship with this woman whose writing life has been the only way she could make sense of a world from which all sense appeared to have gone. I write about families because the family I grew up in was so fractured and desperately unhappy that try as I might, I still cannot make sense of it. So I'm making up families as I go along. Where do I get my ideas for my books from? I watch my own children, my own family and I am continually amazed by them. They are the best* people I've ever met.

*Even when they require laundry services/ taxis/ dispute arbitration/ loans/homework-helper/ catering etcetera.

Publication Day!

2011-10-17T11:48:00.002+01:00

And a week off for me. I'm under strict instructions by Emma B. from Bloomsbury to become the bunny in the bath with the cup of tea and the magazine.

To hear is to obey, my liege.

Take a big deep breath...

2011-10-14T23:38:00.004+01:00

I'm nearly there. The final event of eight days of events is tomorrow. I'm tucked up in a hotel in Leeds, about to go to bed, fighting off what promises to be the mother and father of all throat lurgys (lurgaes?) brought about by being up close and personal with over a thousand small children in the past week.

Small children, as if you need reminded, who hack and cough like elderly bronchitics, sneeze wetly into one's face and generally share the bliss of being in possession of more germs than the probably now redundant research facility at Porton Down. Aaaaaaakerchoooo.

Bless 'em, each and every one. I've had such a good time. I don't think I've EVER enjoyed touring with a picture book as much as I have done with this one. It works. It reads out loud like a wee dream. We all RAAAaaaaar together like we've been rehearsing for weeks. Damn, but when it's good, it's really good. We've had technology meltdowns when the promised Powerpoint facilities have failed, or been bleached out by sunshine pouring in the classroom windows ( we can't see), or failed to materialize or crashed, or interrupted themselves with vast dialogue boxes appearing unbidden onscreen in the middle of the story to remind the user to update their antivirus software ( not now for heaven's sakes, can't you see we're telling a story?) or there's been a missing VGA cable that has entailed a 90m.p.h dash to the nearest Comet only for the missing cable to miraculously appear at the same time as the newly purchased VGA cable is speeded into the library at risk to life and limb...

Regrets? We've had a few. And lunches wolfed with indecent haste? Our digestions may never be the same. And trains caught with the barest whisker of time to spare? Oy, oy, oy VEH.

But I saw children kissing their copies of The Scariest Thing of All yesterday. And my son's girlfriend texted me late last night to tell me that her little boy is going as Pip at Hallowe'en, and a little girl in a signing queue today said she had every single one of my picture books and really loved them all, and one of the booksellers I met this week said I was 'masterly' and there have been conversations with people during this week that will stay with me for a long time, real conversations about big important stuff and many confidences shared and so much laughter that my sides ache even now in the quiet of my hotel bedroom....all in all so many people have been so enormously kind to me all week long that I feel as if I am floating on air, buoyed up by a huge amount of general goodwill. So this is for everyone who took part in making this week such a happy seven days ; for launching The Scariest Thing of All out into the world - THANKYOU. I hope you have had as much fun as I have. It's been one of the best weeks ever. xxxxx

On the rabbity road

2011-10-09T19:39:00.003+01:00

Like my small rabbit in The Scariest Thing of All, I am peering at my stomach in awe, somewhat taken aback at the noises issuing forth from its depths. Obviously it thinks I'm hungry, but does it have to be quite so loud? This is one of the problems with living an orderly life. The minute one steps outwith the tick-tock measured existence of meals at eight, one and seven respectively, and starts the on-tour nonsense of meals whenever it's convenient, or whenever you can get a table, or as soon as you roll in the door and can persuade room service to bring you anything...well, for a creature of gustatory habit ( that's me, also known to my family as The Food Fascist) it's digestive murrrderrrr.

Fortunately, for the next week I'll be in the company of small children who find rumbling tummies wildly amusing and blithely expel their excess gases with gay abandon, so I''ll have no qualms about blaming them for anything that I might let slip.

Oh dear...Was that you? Oh, well, never mind. Better out than in. Smile, turn page and read on.

And besides, my book, the Scariest Thing of All has a lot to do with rumbly tummies. The crux in fact is to do with- oh, but I mustn't give the game away. Do shut up, Gliori. It's only the first day of your book tour and already you're giving away the ending of the book.

Heavens. Must be dinnertime. Lordy, I'm rrrrrrrrravenous.

Something for the weekend

2011-09-28T17:28:00.000+01:00

So this is what we call work. I think you'll probably agree that it barely passes muster as hard graft. A lot of chat. Even more laughter. At Wigtown, an awful lot of lobster-consumption as well. And if only I was more technologically savvy, I could do all that cool linking hyperlink stuff and people's names would come up in blue and you could click on them and whizz off to their webpages, but....

I'm still at the level of using a bit of burnt stick to draw images on the cave wall. The little video clip above is proof positive of this. So - apologies to Renita Boyle, storyteller extraordinaire, whose retelling of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was masterly. Mistressly. Atmospheric. Had us all, large and small in thrall. Apologies to Shoo Rayner whose mastery of all things Youtube is stellar - I am in awe of your abilities, not to mention your dynamic and ridiculously need-a-change-of-underwear funny telling of your Olly and Olympia stories. Apologies also to Sarah McIntyre who is a complete delight, a pirate Queen of Queens, an illustrator of great wit and talent and a joy to share a stage with. I cannot wait to be entented with you all again.

And if only I had a techno-brain, all of these brilliantly talented people would be only a click away. Must learn how to do this stuff. Must. Must. Must. Aaaaargh. Beats self round head with pointy burnt stick of willow charcoal. But for now, must go feed family, water greenhouse, light fire, feed dog, gather apples, help with homework, work out how to get from King's Cross station to the Bloomsbury 25th Birthday party in Bedford Square and then back to Euston to catch the sleeper home tomorrow.

Oh, and have a wardrobe crisis. What to wear? Oh, what to wear?

Wigtown is Bestown

2011-09-23T10:22:00.004+01:00

There's a wistfulness to the season ; the summer that wasn't a summer has elided into a dreich* autumn, the field outside my window has been shaved down to stubble and across the land our sons and daughters are spreading wings and heading off to university and college and the unimaginable freedoms of young adulthood.

Leaving us in a mess of discarded twigs and grubby fluff. Or perhaps that's just the nest chez Gliori. Still two chicks left, but the nest is showing distinct signs of wear and tear if not downright decreptitude. And winter still to come...

But for now, hush. We shan't talk of fare-thee-wells for the best bit of the year is here. It is time to head to Dumfries and Galloway for my personal favourite and much looked-forward-to and absolute best book festival in the Western Hemisphere, if not the World. I'm referring to the Wigtown Book Festival, which is possibly the best fun a human being can have in a tent in the 21st Century. Truly. All of life is here, nestled in a picture-perfect small place. Words cannot do it justice, even though it is a festival about words and ideas and writing and thought. Suffice to say, at this time of the year, there is no better place to be than Wigtown.

So. You have to come. And bring your best friend so that you have somebody to turn to and hug and say - Well, dyamm - see that Debi what's-herface with the hideously unpronouncable surname- she speaks the truth, her.

*Translator's note. There is no other word that describes unending grey, oppressive, spitty skies better than dreich. Let the 'ch' roll out to chhhhhhhhhhh. Feel our Caledonian pain. We're rusting up here.

Ten thousand hours

2011-09-18T14:50:00.003+01:00

I wonder what I was playing?

I was six in that photo and I'm fifty-two now. Pause while I scream quietly to myself. Cut to a shot of the last fast-running grains of sand in the hourglass. So much to do. So little ( sob) time. I wonder if I'm anywhere close to having put in the necessary ten thousand hours of practice yet?

Although I love my fiddle now, I absolutely detested it when I was wee. Back then I had a succession of tetchy old men as teachers, a weekly lesson, and no desire whatsoever to practice in between. In my own defence, I have to say that the fiddle is pretty unrewarding at first. Every bowstroke sounds ugly. People wince when you play to them. It's completely un-natural , not to mention painful, to clasp the buggar in your arm and twist your wrist round its stalk and somehow, sans frets, find where your fingers are supposed to fall in order to make a sweet, true note. And don't get me started on the utter horror for a beginner when your strings go out of tune and you have to turn the utterly disobedient and bloodyminded pegs all by yourself. All I can say is thank heavens for fine malt whisky - although perhaps not when one is still a primary school pupil. Meanwhile, some old tweedy grump is breathing his stale pipebreath all over you and chastising you for not slogging away and becoming note perfect on some hideous bit of monotonous musical juvenalia like three blind mice three times a day seven days a week in between lesson days.

Now if they'd only started us all off on fingermangle or any number of basic Shetland reels, I have the sneaking suspicion that I'd have enjoyed my fiddle a whole lot sooner than I did. Considering how I feel about my fiddle now, the word 'enjoy' doesn't even come close. But then...I was taught by fear and shouting. Nobody ever said 'that sounds good', undoubtedly because it didn't, but children learn best if they're encouraged. I associated music with embarassment, with exams, with never quite measuring up, with something taught by brilliant but unpleasant old men to this particularly stupid and incompetent girl. It's no surprise I couldn't wait to escape that particular tyranny.

If I could turn my personal clock back to 1974, this is the only thing I'd change. I wouldn't give up my fiddle at fifteen, thinking it was part of what I needed to run away from. With hindsight, I've realised that you can run, but you can't hide. I ran for a long time. Thirty two years it took until a fiddle found me. My partner bought me one, an electric s-shaped seriously cool beast, and I fell upon it with cries of delight. Couldn't draw a note from it at first, but I persevered. And the joy of an electric fiddle is that you can plug it into a pair of headphones and nobody else is forced to endure your early squawkings.

And now. On a different fiddle. One that my Dad made. A lovely, big blonde Strad copy that is almost too big for my left hand to span, but I love its sound, so I persevere. Every single day. Sometimes I manage to sneak in three practices a day. How long do my books take to write and illustrate? Hmmmm, that depends on whether I'm currently trying to nail a tune or not, but shhhhhh, don't tell my editor. Debi Gliori is playing truant on her fiddle. The long-dead old men would have been amazed at my diligence, but it's not diligence, it's love. I close my eyes most of the time when I play, all the better to hear where we're going, my fiddle and me.

A wolf in case

2011-08-05T21:15:00.000+01:00

When I board the ferry to Shetland tomorrow night, I'll have a virtual wolf in my baggage ; undetectable by sniffer dogs, not requiring his own kennel in the animal enclosure, not really needing any care at all, just occasionally taken out, liberated from his digital billet and waved about a bit. Wolves just want to have fu-unn, you know?

Can't quite get my head around the fact that I've managed to dream him up so quickly. That's what happens when your publisher puts a rocket under your rear and invites you to light the blue touchpaper. Phwoarrrrrrr. We have ignition. We have lift-off.* We have...a sneak preview, without wolf, but with a fiddle because that, she said in a circular fashion, is why I'm going to Shetland tomorrow.

For a week of heaven. A week of learning fiddle tunes by 'ear', from a tribe of geniuses at Shetland's annual Fiddle Frenzy. Can't wait. All packed, me and my wolf, and rrrrrraring to go.

*We also have a decidedly sore derriere, but that's another story.

The lure of a good cake

2011-07-27T16:31:00.004+01:00

Poor Mr Wolf. So hungry, he's been reduced to eating his hat. And then the very cake he had his eye on has been nabbed by that teeny wee sprite thingy - it's enough to make a grown wolf weep. Furry tears. Tears of furry. Oh, shut up, Gliori.

Even though this picture only exists in black and white, its overload of shweet shtuff still has the power to make me want to make a dash for the cake tins, only I happen to know that they're empty. Well, not quite empty, but the birthday cake tucked inside one of them isn't mine, it belongs to Michael, and it would be morally wrong of me to sneak into the house while he's out and nibble bits of his cake. Even if I did bake it. With my own hands. Sandwiching it together with my own greengage jam. From Michael's trees. Ah.

Sigh. Kitchen morality... Keeps you thin but boring.

Anyhoo - on another note, finally taught myself Bethany's Waltz (by Shetland fiddler and composer Jenna Reid) which I've been meaning to do for ages. Lovely, lovely, lovely tune. To add to the tottering pile of tunes that all vie for attention inside my head, some faded from disuse, some bright and shiny due to being taken out and polished frequently, and some, like fingermangle*, needing me to sprout five extra fingers and a whole new brain ( but where to put the extra appurtenances? And would my family still want to know me post-sprouting? Somehow, I doubt it) in order to even come close to being able to play the damn tune. In this lifetime.

*Mak a Kishie Needle, Dye. Well, you did ask.

A very Scottish wolf

2011-07-20T17:06:00.002+01:00

...and then, on the next page, it rains.

Introducing Mr Wolf. Mr Wolf and basket. What d'you mean 'real wolves don't have baskets?' Jeez - do you have a lot to learn about real wolves. Come and see me later and we'll complete your education. Suffice to say, there's no room for anything as prissy as an umbrella in that bijou little shopping basket, so Mr Wolf is going to get wet. Actually, there's no room for anything in there. Whisper it, but I think it's an accessory. And he hasn't got an i-phone. Probably hasn't heard of FurBook. Or Tweeter. And he hasn't straightened his fur. Or shaved his furry little - oh, that's quite enough of that, I think. An unreconstructed Celtic wolf, then.

Savage. A little bit of RRRRRrrrrrrrrrrufff. Mmmm.

Bless. I'll have a dozen, thanks.

Hack, cough, sheesh what a mess.

2011-07-19T11:46:00.003+01:00

Dusty in here, or what? How long has it been? Two years? Oh my gorrrrd. How time flies when you're having a horrible time.

Right. First things first. A troll to evict. ExCUSE me. Just why exactly it had to post its illiterate yibblings in triplicate, I have no idea, but anyway, out. Bin. Forever cast into the Outer Darkness, but thanks for letting me know that I need to go back to Woodstock in my Prius. Oh wot laffs. And all for writing a book about climate change. Let's hope that particular troll gets a job insulating attics in the Nu Economy. With Itchwool. *

Next. Some redecoration. New pictures on the wall. From my new book called 'The Scariest Thing of All' and trust me, it's autobiographical. Oh, what a time we've had. Oh, the thinks you can think. In the middle of the night.

Anyhoo. Laters. Miles to go. Promises to keep and roughs for a new book to do and tunes to learn. The days are just packed.

*Troll beware - it has the documented side-effect of causing vascular torpor. But you've probably got that already. In spades. And other parts.

please, somebody, plug me in

2009-06-18T22:06:00.003+01:00

I'm imagining a crash team breaking down the door and dashing inside to find me, wan and limp, flopped in a corner of my studio, index fingers still twitching feebly in a rictus-like attempt to air-type out one last post before I flatline.

One... last...post....say, didn't Ry Cooder sing that once? Or was it a meatball? Or have all the songs I've ever listened to while I work and work and work all run together into song-soup? And do I even care?

The crash team are distracted by the studio. I'm making landed-fish gaspy sounds and needing their immediate attention, but they're too busy pulling books off the shelf and exclaiming - wow - I had that when I was a kid. Jeez, did she write that too? Oh, my, I loved that one. Mum used to read me that at bedtime. And that one too. Just how many books has she written?

Seventy six...I gasp, but my voice is fainter than a line writ small in 8H pencil.

They peer down at me, and they all look so young, and far away. They don't read books made of paper now, d'you know? What I do, in the writing and illustrating of books on paper - well, that's kind of quaint and dinosaurish. I knew if I lived long enough this would happen. I have become a living curiosity. I still, dammit, prefer pens and paper to just about any other recording medium.

I'm lying there, gasping pathetically and hoping they might be able to use the USB slot at the back of my neck or the Firewire TM connection in my ear to connect me to the grid, otherwise my hard drive is going to dump all my remaining data onto the rug. Via my nostrils. And that won't be a good look.

Or maybe they'll use a Stryker saw to unzip me from sternum to pubes and peel me back to reveal a smaller, younger, fresher version of the me that is draped, like a strand of overcooked linguine, across the sofa that I used to take afternoon naps on, back when I was trying to write six linked novels in six years followed by four linked younger novels in three years topped off with five hundred line drawings in three months. Or was that three blinks? Or was it forty younger novels? Or.

I forget. Unsurprisingly, memory, then eyesight go first.

Maybe - and this is the kindest scenario of all - just maybe they'll unscrew me at the waist, and lift my top half off my bottom half, and inside, there'll be another me that looks just like the one that's been unscrewed. And inside that one, there'll be another, and another, and another, and another, right down to what, when our girls were little, we were pleased to call 'the bean'. The smallest matrushchka of all, the core dolly, the girl in the middle of the woman in the centre of the lady. The one where you can barely make out her features, since they were painted by an underpaid woman with a one eyelash brush. Core dolly. Babeheart. She is so very small, and so very well guarded. Was so very well guarded.

And then our puppy will nudge past the crash team and stick out her long, long tongue ( you would not believe how long that dog's tongue is) and, schloooop. I'd be gone.

putting my witch to bed

2009-06-01T23:20:00.002+01:00

Can't quite believe I've finished the illustrations for Witch Baby and Me After Dark, and not only finished them, but parcelled them up and posted them to London.

Maybe when I wake up tomorrow morning and automatically think - what am I going to draw today?- and the answer comes - the artwork for a new Mr Bear book, maybe then I'll believe I've done it. Or maybe when I see the hole on my drawing board where WB&MeAD used to be, I'll feel bereft, anti-climatic and flatter than a flat thing.

I tell you, though, WB&MeAD ( as she is known) was a labour of love. One hundred and eighty seven illustrations in all. One hundred and eighty seven? Somebody shut me up.

Here's one of them, fresh out the oven.

living in stupid times

2009-05-29T22:40:00.002+01:00

Tonight we went out to see a small local screening of 'The Age of Stupid'. To be honest, I'm completely blown away by it - partly because most of the predictions on which this deeply disturbing prediction of future climate catastrophe is based have been shown to be too conservative and cautious in their scope. The IPCC have to go through a ton of peer-reviews, re-writes and general toning down ( the detail of which would make your average writer throw in the towel in disgust and go get a career in something less demanding like writing up experiments in quantum mechanics with a goose quill pen dipped in toffee )before they can publish anything relating to MMGW, and consequently their data is past its sell-by date before it even hits the shelves.

So - hard as it is to take on board, the future could well be even worse than the film showed? Gulp. The words toast, utterly are and we come to mind. Hosed, stuffed and completely fecked can be substituted for toast should carbonized bread product seem like too gentle a description for the fate awaiting us. The film states categorically that unless we do something, and do it soon ( like get our carbon emissions way down by 2015 at the latest) we're heading for extinction - or as somebody said in the film, 'Mankind appears to be determinedly focussed on the little patch of sand upon which it is standing as a tsunami sweeps towards us'.

Or, put differently

So, if you know a dragon

and most of us do

ask it if it thinks that this story is true

for if we can't see that our stories are linked

then sadly, like dragons

we'll soon be extinct.

D'you know what was the most terrifying thing about this film? Not the bald facts of the mess we're in. Nor the possibility that we may already have reached the tipping point beyond which we will be unable to prevent runaway climate catastrophe. Nor the exposure of a fraction of the ghastly underbelly of the oil industry with its tentacles reaching out across the globe to draw us all into a web of culpability for atrocities practised in the name of Big Oil.

No. None of these was as frightening as the fact that only about twenty people bothered to come along and see 'The Age of Stupid.' If it is screened somewhere near you, please, try to go and see it.

http://www.ageofstupid.net will show where it is being screened. It's powerful, moving, funny, wise and, I think, the most important film I've seen for years. Or you could just file it under 'forget'. Apathy is indeed a weapon of mass destruction.

no hay fiesta, amigos

2009-05-26T21:32:00.001+01:00

Once upon a time, I went to the Hay Festival, did my event, was presented with a white rose and, much later, the crate of champagne that is Hay's wondrous tax-free payment for services rendered. I stayed in Laura Ashley's old home - now a hotel of deep beeswax and buttonback leather luxury, and dined and breakfasted with authors far more famous and celebrated than myself.

Two things stood out of that time - one was the morning I had breakfast with a mortally hungover author who was, for reasons that I shan't go into here, giving a wind-up paper bat its trial flight over her porridge bowl ( porridge - with a hangover? yeeeearrrrghhhh) while giving every indication that she was about to throw up into her linen napkin.

The other thing was that after dinner the night before - also with famous authors and harrassed publicists - I sat down in a deep sofa - actually collapsed would be more accurate - and felt a chill breath all down my spine. This proved to be the zip of my dress giving way in its entirety, and effectively reducing my frock to something more like the kind of gown one slips into prior to serious surgery. Crossing the acreage of Aubusson on my way back to my room to effect a quick change was a journey I have no desire to repeat.

So why do I always feel like a geriatric version of the Little Matchgirl when Hay comes and goes and I'm not invited, again? Cool and hip festivals bring me out in hives, as a general rule. I've never felt cool or hip, and you can usually get a seat at any event I've ever done, right up until the doors close. Which is a nice way of saying that I rarely sell out. Any more. I did, once or twice, way back when, and once I'd stepped onto the podium and stopped shaking, I revelled in the buzz. My goodness - what a heady feeling it is to play to a packed auditorium. Whooooooo, it's not rock and roll, but it certainly comes close.

The de-zippered dress was never the same again, btw. Lacking the skills to insert a full-length zip in a linen dress, I employed a local seamstress to do the job for me. She, I am sorry to say, made a complete arse of the job, and the frock now languishes at the end of the wardrobe which is a scant black plastic bag's length away from being recycled.

However - the wind-up paper bat lives on. Two years ago, I found myself emailing the famous author and asking her if she would name her source of wind-up mammals. Being famous, and kind, she went one better - she sent me the remains of the same Bat at Hay Breakfast. Unfortunately, BaHB had suffered the ravages of time, and fell out of the envelope in its component parts. Undaunted ( I lie - I was deeply daunted, but not irrevocably so) I set about trying to find a substitute bat. Finally, after much purchasing of secondhand books on paper folding/ automata, I discovered a source of wind-up paper butterflies. Spent a merry week pulling the wings off the butterflies and trying to cut out and retro-fit all manner of black paper, plastic, tissue, cloth by way of substitute. In the end, after many, many doomed attempts, a high street retailer's January Sale plastic bags provided the perfect black plastic for my bat wings and the rest you can see for yourself on http://www.meettheauthor.co.uk/bookbites/1417.html

At least, I hope you can, but being about as technologically capable as the bowl of porridge that the original bat nearly ended up in, you may perhaps encounter some difficulty accessing the link. You may have to, gasp, manually input it, which I guess is several keystrokes too many. Suffice to say, the bat, and several of his brothers and sisters, puts in an appearance.

Well, that seemed to go well

2009-05-25T20:32:00.002+01:00

Had a delightful afternoon with my visiting Witch and Son. Thank heavens she didn't feel constrained to throw any spells around. Phew. More coffee, anyone?

Sorry to have taken almost a week to post this, but life and work rose up and devoured all the hours between then and now. And I still haven't finished the illustrations for Witch Baby and Me After Dark. Aaaaaaarghhhh. This task is turning into a pictorial In( accessible) Pin(nacle). Every morning I tie on my crampons and have another go, but every evening I find myself

(metaphorically) retreating back to Base Camp, short of oxygen and running out of steam.

Talking of which, the gym doesn't get any easier. I'm still Mrs Blobby No-Lungs, or She Who Drips. And my old kit fits not - sadly because I'm a different shape ( think wider) and not as I'd fondly imagined, because it had shrunk in the wash. As I drag myself out of the door at 5.35 a.m., it's hard to keep my motivation going when a little Inner Voice of Sedition is muttering something about how comfortable our bed had been and how hard I'm working and how I should cut myself some slack.... Then, as if by magic, I find I'm outside the gym ( Note to Self : must've sleep-driven) and heading through the turnstile into the little Chamber of Cardio-Horror for another forty minutes of gruesome self-flagellation. In a shrunken gym kit. What a vision of loveliness - NOT.

Had wonderful conversation over dinner tonight. Youngest Daughter was saying that when she grows up she wants to write Popular Books for children. There was a silence after she said this, while we all mentally arrived at the corollary - unlike Mumma's Unpopular Books for children.

Oh, groan.

me and my big Hexenkessel

2009-05-20T16:52:00.001+01:00

I'm having a Rather Special guest and her Son to lunch tomorrow, which is why my thoughts are turning to menus as I speed homewards on the train from Aberdeen. I've been thinking about this meal ever since my Special Guest and I firmed up our lunchdate. And emailed back and forth about what would be off-menu, since I am lunching with a (whisper it) Witch and her Son.

Yup. You read that one correctly. A real Witch.

You can perhaps understand that this is one lunch that I'm rather keen not to make a complete dog's breakfast of. She said, inelegantly. In fact, let's ramp up the tension a little here. When having a Witch to lunch, one most certainly doesn't mess up on the culinary front. Not if one doesn't wish to spend the rest of one's life extruding frogspawn from one's nether regions.

So. No pressure there, then.

My Witch-to-lunch sent a messenger ahead on the ether a few months back with a list of forbidden gastronomic no-nos. Some of these were things you'd expect - no cherub steaks, no wings under any circumstances, no fluffy, pink mousses or saccharine candyfloss desserts, nothing that's been even remotely near anything ecclesiastical ( pope's-eye steaks come to mind) and absolutely no salt, stakes or holy water.

All of that you would expect. But can someone please tell me why it is that when given a list of proscribed ingredients, all that this cook can think of is - ooooh, but I make such a sensational cassoulet de cherub. Or - what a shame I can't let her try my Texan chilli wing thing. Or that yummy River Caff acqua sancta bollito misto, or Fergus Henderson's salt-glazed Pope's eye medium rare with ceps. Or the River Cottage mousseline of raspberries and rhubarb with a blood orange jus? Or, or, or....

And my cauldron is, in truth, a tad rusty. Haven't hauled it down from the attic since that last disastrous attempt at stirring up a Perfect Love Potion and, after hours of effort, pouring the result down the drain only to discover that I'd turned the entire population of the South East of Scotland into something that resembled Brigadoon on Viagra.

Oooops. Only for one night, you understand. Yes. That night. Mmmmhmmm. Sorry about that.

I digress. I think I know what I'll make for lunch, but you'll have to wait till tomorrow to find out if it passes muster with the http://bookwitch.wordpress.com/

If I'm not back in 24 hours then come looking for me, huh?

no fatted calves

2009-05-18T09:52:00.001+01:00

It's not a question of etiquette or appropriateness or even of ecological sustainability ( anyway these days, it's almost an act of eco-terrorism to eat beef) but for the return of my prodigal, I didn't go overboard on the food front. We had kedgeree followed by apple crumble and ice-cream. Normal food for an abnormal occasion. It was a very late dinner, since my prodigal didn't arrive off the train at Waverley until 9.30 p.m and was heading back early the next morning. He drank loads and loads of water, didn't have an after-dinner cigarette and joy of joys, didn't wash it all down with a swift injection of heroin. So. Huge progress has been made.

Didn't realise how terrified I was at the prospect of Eldest Son's first home visit from rehab until after I'd put him on the train back, watched it pull out of the station and went home to be hit by a wave of weariness that went so bone-deep it was almost frightening. Could barely keep my eyes open for the rest of the day. Which was unfortunate since it was the only day I had to bake cakes for Youngest Daughter's weekend celebration of her twelfth birthday. A coffee and Smartie decorated sponge ( Youngest Daughter's choice) and a sensational sour cherry and beetroot streusel number invented by the talented Dan Lepard and published in the weekend Guardian last week.

Family all arrived on Sunday to eat cake and drink cava, sun slid out from behind the clouds and Youngest Daughter did a wonderful thing which we shall all treasure for the rest of our lives. While the grown-ups were admiring the garden and being typical grown-ups, she snuck back into the house, took out her pipes ( which she only graduated to three weeks ago) and started playing as she walked round the back of the house and came to stand at the top of the garden. So at first, there was the distant sound of pipes and then, there she was, slender and beautiful, backlit by the sun, dark hair blowing in the breeze and playing something deeply evocative, traditional and almost unbearably moving. In a Scottish garden in May.

So if I'm not making a whole lot of sense, it's because that was a weekend and a half and although I'd like nothing better than to begin this new week slowly processing the events of the preceding 48 hours, sifting through all the love and loss and hope and fear and stifled feelings and silted up muddy stuff all bobbing around demanding my emotional attention, instead I find myself biliously green-gilled and travel-sick and on a train to Turriff (north of Aberdeen) to do three days of back-to-back school events in a library. Three days? After that weekend? And no opportunity to play my fiddle for the next three days since I could not manage to carry it along with suitcase, portfolio and computer bag and besides, I'm sure my scraping and sawing would not be exactly welcome at the b&b where I'm staying.

Damn shame, that. Music really does help. Especially if it's music I make myself. Swaying in a fashion which is guaranteed to deeply embarrass my daughters, and sometimes trying to ignore the tears that roll down my nose and slide under my chin to join me in a salty communion with my fiddle's chinrest. I debated whether to pack my flute instead, but decided that my fellow guests at the b&b would rise up and beat me to death with the thing after hearing a few of my shrieky attempts at notes in the higher registers. So I crammed in running shoes and a wet weather jacket instead and shall take myself out for some heavy breathing in the lanes of Turriff after my day's work is done.

That is, if I can stay awake...

A grand day out

2009-05-07T16:44:00.001+01:00

Brighton was a joy. Amazingly chilly sunshine ceded to amazingly chilly fogginess, but walking by the sea never fails to lift my spirits, even if my teeth are gritted against the cold. I could have simply stayed in my amazingly comfortable room at the Cavalaire Hotel but I needed to walk after the four-train, six hour journey down from Edinburgh, and if only I hadn't then decided I needed a spot of retail therapy, I wouldn't have tried to singlehandedly prop up the ailing British economy by dint of nobly handing over the contents of my slender wallet. But hey - I wouldn't have bought a divine pair of gladiator sandals ( for all those occasions where I anticipate going into the arena for the express purpose of being mauled by lions: a.k.a book festivals) nor would I have spent a merry hour or so struggling in and out of a succession of breathtakingly chest-compressing sports bras in forgiving shades of black, coal and soot. I didn't exactly need the sandals, but the sports bra was long overdue - the current once-white-but-now-taupe model being the kind of undergarment your mother warned you about* being run over while wearing.

*As if you'd put on your best scanties and then go out and deliberately fling yourself under a moving vehicle all the better for the A&E staff to admire your impeccable taste whilst picking bits of your person off the tarmac.

Also, there's something quite encouraging for reluctant gym bunnies about buying new kit - it's not exactly inspirational, but it does vary the monotony a little. And monotony there is by the square hectare at the gym. Urrrrrghh, it is So. Very. Boring., especially on the days that my gym buddy doesn't show and I have to put in my lonely miles on the treadmill without the respite of conversation. There are only so many thinks I can think before my Inner Couch Potato starts the Seditious Whispering, and to my horror last time I went, some close descendant of the Marquis de Sade was - gasp - making toast downstairs from the cardio suite and had left all the fire doors open, all the better to waft the zephyr of carbohydrate concupiscence under our innocent noses.

And then somebody sneezed. Wetly. Explosively.

If you'd managed to hook all our rolling eyeballs up to a Van der Graff generator at that precise moment, our combined voltage could have blownthe sneezer straight across the room. As it was, we just kept calm and carried on. Proving once and for all that the Spirit of the Blitz is alive and stalking the land.

cross-country training

2009-05-06T09:20:00.000+01:00

On a train to Brighton - actually, on four trains to Brighton, such is the nature of interconnectedness-not. Four trains? Sheeesh. And dipping in and out of wireless broadband signals makes for twitchy blogging, lousy Guardian onlining and dodgy emailing. But hey. And it's beautiful outside - blossomy, sunny and precisely the kind of day that I do not want to be stuck on a speeding steel tube heading South. For some reason I get very travel sick on trains, and a day spent feeling decidedly ill, trapped on a variety of trains is Hell On Toast.

However, if I was home I'd still be beavering away at the line drawings for Witch Baby and Me After Dark which due to my having to lovingly limn each and every particle of foliage, shadow and woodgrain, are taking forever. FOREVER. Sisyphian doesn't even come close, right? Fortunately, I love drawing and close to four hundred line drawings ( over the series of three books) have sharpened up my technique to the extent that I no longer hyperventilate at the prospect of drawing a human face in deep chiaroscuro, but instead enjoy the challenge. Since the majority of the scenes in WBandMeAD are set in darkness ( the action takes place around Hallowe'en) there's plenty of opportunity on my part for much cross-hatching, and consequently the book will probably weigh more than most due to its freight of black ink. I used to have a tutor at Art School who would accuse me of knitting when he found me cross-hatching. That was back in the Dark Ages when knitting didn't have the same cultural appeal as it does now, and the tutor had an inbuilt bias against black and white line work due to being a watercolorist. Media regardless, I wish I was a better draughtswoman, though. Looking through youngest daughter's copy of Finn Family Moomintroll, I am as ever struck with awe at how stunningly brilliant Tove Jansson was in her use of light and line.

There are some jewel-like drawings in Tove's books that lodged in my subconscious when I read them as a ten year old, and rediscovering them a few years ago was like finding buried treasure. Or, as I'm sure I may have said before, like stepping into a sunlit attic room and finding oneself home.

plague central

2009-04-28T21:35:00.005+01:00

Yup. We got it here first. Scotland is now officially a pariah nation, second only to Mexico. If I listen very carefully I can hear the sound of walls to rival Hadrian's original being erected down there in them thar Border country. Sigh. Tomorrow I have two events at an independent bookshop down in the Scottish Borders, and next week, I'm supposed to travel down to Brighton to do an event for which a whole class of children, their teacher and I have been preparing for the past two months.

At least, that was the plan before Media-Flu broke out all over the planet.
Media-Flu Symptoms :

Weakness of the normal critical faculties - we appear to be rushing like Gadarene swine (ooops, perhaps not the best analogy) I mean rushing like lemmings towards a Panic Pandemic.

Vomiting: Acres of newsprint are even now being ejected from the vast factory sheds of the Fourth Estate.
Diarrhoea: (or perhaps logorrhoea )This unstoppable eruption of tides of foul-smelling discharge is flowing from the fevered minds of journalists trying to file copy before rushing out to buy their personal stockpiles of Tamiflu.
Temperature: Rising by the minute towards a complete global meltdown of common sense.
Pains in the joints: and in most bars and other places where people gather to spout nonsense.

Maybe it's not nonsense, maybe a pestilence of biblical proportions is headed our way, but the way that the printed media have seized upon this topic to the exclusion of all else is wearisome. Our eerily deserted local supermarket had a whole raft of DOOM, DEATH and OINKERCHOO tabloid titles in evidence, and try as I might, my eye had scanned them before my brain could censor what I was looking at. And I most emphatically didn't want to look at those.

Marvellous. More interesting things to wake up and ponder in the wee small hours. O, the thinks you can think...

a feathery hug

2009-04-22T22:08:00.002+01:00

Sometimes we all need an owl mummy. This one is from Stormy Weather - publishing in October 09.

But much more importantly -Welcome to the world baby Findlay Langlands - the first new baby in our wider family for eleven years. Can't wait to meet you. Ahhhhhhhhh.

101 today

2009-04-21T22:30:00.002+01:00

I don't usually pay a whole lot of attention to numbers - except when the come suffixed with a DR which in these benighted latitudes means you've got to get on the phone quiick to the bank before they close you down. Post codes, phone numbers, car registration numbers, tax codes, pin numbers, birthdays, national insurance numbers....you know what? I don't retain any of them. So, when I logged on tonight, I noticed that my last post was the Fiddle and Pins centenary edition.

Aw heck. If I'd noticed, I would have baked a cake, but since the dawn of spring has also brought the dawning realisation that my jeans and assorted trousers are growing decidedly tight round my rear, cakes are temporarily verboten.

Which means I'll have to ignore the siren song coming from the big glass-topped cake tin that holds our 2009 Simnel cake, which I swear is trying to attract my attention as I type this. If I listen hard I can hear it banging up and down and hurling home-made candied peel all about in a fit of the 'Notice me! Eat me! Eat all of me! We're talking quality adipose tissue here, not common-or-garden flubber! Come on, you know you want it!'

Attention-seeking little cake. Actually, not all that little - it's a bit of a monster with it's cape of marzipan and freight of speckledy chocolate eggs. And given the tightness of my jeans, to eat anything more than a slice about a micron thick is to call down the wrath of my Inner Personal Trainer, and trust me, I don't want to do that. Shhhhh. Whatever you do - don't rouse her.

Having blithely said I don't pay much attention to numbers, I've just worked out what a complete lie that statement is. I pay a lot of attention to the numbers on the dial of my bathroom scales. And I'm gripped by the calorie count that my heartrate monitor watch thing tots up at the end of a session. And the number of minutes still to go in the self-imposed purgatory of running for half an hour non-stop...although since I wheezed my way through January's 5k, I haven't done any running longer than about 10 minutes. In fact, since January I have completely trashed what I laughingly call my fitness regime, and am currently at a high risk of jumping two sodding dress sizes in an upwards direction.

Which is why I'm going to get up at 5.25a.m. tomorrow just like I did yesterday, and will continue to do on a one-day-on, one-day-off basis until I'm back in the rut of early morning gym-bunnydom. And yes, I hate it every bit as much as you might imagine, but the prospect of facing down my Inner Personal Trainer is far, far, far worse. The only thing missing is a good playlist to fire me up and keep me at cruising altitude while I dree my weird.* All suggestions welcome.

* As good a phrase as any to describe the ungainly, wheezing, red-faced, sweaty and ultimately pointless procedures I put myself through in the pursuit of fitness, happiness and tighter buns than a desk-bound illustrator deserves to possess.

unsprung Spring

2009-04-16T21:12:00.002+01:00

The blossom is out, the trees are at bud-break, the primroses carpet hills in Argyll but it's so damn cold that I can only think wintry soup thoughts and warm cashmere wrappy things and hot baths and electric blankets cranked up to max and every meal i make seems to have a dried red chilli or two snuck into it. Brrrrrrr.

Spent the Easter break over in Argyll, making up crummy doggerel for my youngest daughter's egg-treasure hunt, baking Simmnel cake and trying to feed beloved visiting friends on a budget of precisely zilch. We did have one spectacular dinner at sunset at the top of a newly-opened right-of-way at the top of a hill with an unexpected picnic table sat right up there at the end of a half-hour uphill slog. Needless to say in the same postal code of the smoking capital of Scotland, that particular picnic table is totally underused, if not certifiably virgin, but hey, not any longer. We had our wicked way and heated a chilli con carne, deflasked a pile of Basmati rice and necked two bottles of red from wealthier times.

And Michael even remembered to pack candles.

Ther's nothing quite like eating volcanically hot chilli with friends and drinking wine at the top of a hill looking out to a seaview of the island of Arran. There was a sufficient window in the weather to allow the candles to burn evenly, and I was left with the feeling that we will all remember that picnic for a long time to come. Not for the food, but for the place and the unlikeliness of eating outside in Scotland at night in April.

We're back at the coalface now, though. Work is beginning to eat me alive, my fiddle playing hasn't improved much but my flute playing has taken an exponential leap forward when I abandoned my godawful Tune-a-Day primer and went off-piste and played real music. Real music, breathily played ( in a previous life I was a smoker, so my playing and hill-walking will always be -gasp -breathy) on a beautiful silver flute. The beautiful flute was a 50th birthday present from Michael which initially felt like more work ( must practise NEW instrument, must get good at flute as well as being average at fiddle and drawing 145 line drawings for the new Witch Baby and bake our own organic bread and, and, and....) but now I'm loving it, loving the sound I make and occasionally really flying. In the way that you can only fly with music.

The other wonderful thing about the flute is that it won't go out of tune in the cold weather. I can sling it in its case in a rucksack and go play at the top of a hill with a view to Arran if that is what my heart desires. Once I've drawn the 145 line drawings and baked the bread, that is.

so far to go

2009-03-23T15:53:00.002Z

Spent a large part of last night's session with the Fiddlers wishing I was a better fiddler than I am now. This has probably got everything to do with the fact that the wee reel I'd practised assiduously all week and thought - hey, I'm getting the hang of this - turned out to be one of those tunes that require playing with one's bow a blur and fingers flying. Like an old 33r.p.m L.P played at the speed of a 45 r.p.m.single. Or a treadmill at the gym speeded up from walk to sprint. Aaaaargh. Fingermangle. How the heck...? Donald says it's muscle memory (obviously my muscles have got dementia) and Pete says don't think about it - it's easier.Oh, how we laffed.

As with most things, it's practise. Or practice. Just do it.

But supply your family with ear-muffs and plugs before you begin.

There was a stunningly talented piper at the session last night. Small pipes, I hasten to add .The piper's effect on the resident black labrador ( Fergus) was marked. Fergus came round all the fiddlers, one by one, looking for reassurance that the Boy With The Waily-Waily Thing was actually Safe. Poor Fergus. not only having to put up with weekly infestations of fiddles, but now a plague of pipes?

But even if I do practise till my fingers bleed, I'll never catch up with the Fiddlers. I swear they've all been playing since they were tots, like me, but unlike me they didn't give up in their teen years, and carried on fiddling all the way through their twenties, thirties, forties and are now amazing. Really, truly amazingly talented people. It's a joy to occasionally have a tune with them.

At least ritual humiliation-by-fiddle took my mind off the terrors of packing for Bologna. I'm over that now. I've been to have my first hair-cut for a whole year, and...well...it's signally failed to have the desired morale-boosting effect. Perhaps I should have embraced my Inner-Harridan/ Unst Granny* with the long wild hair , but I had a yen for sleek shiny hair ironed flat. I know, it's lamentable to be so damn vain especially when you're ( whisper it) Getting On A Bit- but my Inner Fluff-Brain occasionally does get her turn in the driving seat and such is her unfamiliarity with the controls ( ooooh, what's this knob? gosh, I wonder what happens when I press this one? what's that siren sound? why are there red flashy thingsin my rearview mirror?) that it's a safe bet that it will all end in tears.

So - not quite tears, but it is a pretty indifferent haircut, made even less flattering by the fact that due to advancing decreptitude, what I now appear to have is a sleek headful of grey ironed flat stuff. I look, in short, like I'm about to audition for Blake 7.

* Thankyou to Mel for this glorious image. Unst Grannies, Fetlar Uncles, Yell Spouses and suchlike can all be found at 60 degrees North.

Coming up for air

2009-03-19T20:29:00.006Z

So that's what I've been doing for the last fortnight. Writing, thinking, scoring out and writing again. And doing two heeeuge events with children in Liverpool for World Book Day, one rather quiet event in Glasgow at Aye Write and finally two more events in Craigmillar which is full of good people living difficult lives exacerbated by appalling poverty, below average literacy levels, above average social problems all within some of the crumbling remains of one of Edinburgh's most shameful public housing estates. Needless to say, out of the five events I've taken part in, the two in Craigmillar were easily the best fun, the most rewarding and the ones I will remember for a long time to come.

Although, it has to be said, standing up on stage in Liverpool under hot, bright lights in front of heaving rows of hundreds of children was pretty memorable in terms of Need For Clean Underwear.

I used to think that being a children's writer guaranteed one a life of quiet, contemplative self-reliance. A sort of love affair between a Zen vegetarian and a Beat Poet who moonlighted as a Lollipop lady. These days, it's more like being the product of a one-night-stand between a rock star on the downward career trajectory and a hermit with literacy issues. The job description has changed beyond all recognition. I suspect E. H. Shepard would have been horrified at the prospect of 'drawing' on an interactive whiteboard, even in front of an audience of adoring fans.

Now, before the next tranche of editorial input, I'm having a wardrobe crisis of epic dimensions because next week I'm off to the Book Fair in Bologna, Italy. When you are fortunate enough to spend the majority of your working life tooling back and forth from your garden shed with occasional sorties to the supermarket, you can grow very accustomed to wearing whatever you wore the day before, even if that was what you wore the day before that, and regardless of the fact that it makes you look
a. old
b. fat
c.like you really have given up any pretensions to elegance or style
and d.as if you are acknowledging your Inner Harridan

This is all very well until you are ripped untimely from your cosy cocoon of Dressing Down. Dressing from your vast selection of washed-to-death and decidedly greying Couture Noir. A.K.A. Dressing for Expanded Waistlines and Comfortable Comfort Eating. Whatever. Suddenly you have to Dress for Work. This never fails to throw me into a complete state of terror, which will lead to my travelling with a suitcase of ludicrous heaviness and, I can guarantee, will entail a long, dark teatime of the soul in an uncharted pensione during which the complete contents of said heavyweight luggage will be tried on in various combinations with escalating cries of dismay as all are found wanting.

Don't even get me started on what shoes I'm going to take.

Long hushhhhhhhh

2009-03-10T22:14:00.003Z

Please forgive the long hush/gap in comms but February went by in a haze of deadline fatigue. Don't think I've ever written a book quite as fast before, and frankly, it's not an experience I'd care to repeat, but a bit like what is coyly termed a 'precipitate labour' ( think three contractions and you're done...) it does at least have the advantage of getting the horrible bit over and done with quickly.

Yes- sometimes writing is horrible. It's a shocking admission, but after several of the great and the good 'came out' in last week's Guardian to tell all that they loathed writing and would rather floss with a circular sander than sit down with their blank pages day after day after day, I feel empowered to add my name to the list of Authors who Wrestle with Demons. It's not always the pits, but for a fair amount of the time I spend sitting at my desk conjuring words out of thin air, it is a lonely, gruelling task, and one that I can come to dread if the writing isn't going well.

Why do we do it? I can only speak for myself in saying that I go through the grey blahhhhs secure ( -ish) in the knowledge that eventually, I'll emerge out into the sunny uplands. The good outweighs the grim, and the good feels so damn good that it's worth the pain. Or something like that.

Last week we had World Book Day which involved loads and loads of children and not nearly enough cakes, and the week before, I had a Significant Birthday which involved loads of trekking across peat bogs and narrow cliffside goat-paths and not nearly enough lazing around sipping champagne and eating chocolates. And for the three weeks before that, I was doing a fine impersonation of Boring Mummy Who Shrieks and Writes 24/7. Not, I must say, a good look.

Now I'm deep in the Edit, which is a stage I've come to relish ; far more craft than Art, but consequently, the pressure to create is lessened, and the sheer enjoyment of refining, honing, tweaking and finally polishing is putting a smile on my face and a spring in my step. Sadly though, it's not putting a whole lot of moolah in my bank account, but hey - these days, why the heck would I want to put anything in one of those? Banks? Meh...

And finally, today felt like spring was winning. Time to redecorate the blog. Much as it pained me to take down the dragons in the snow picture and haul it upstairs to the blogattic, I hope its replacement finds favour. The running foxes with wind-tossed trees are from a book called Stormy Weather which, if Western capitalism doesn't crash and burn beforehand, will be published this coming October.You saw it here first.

stormy weather, the movie

2009-01-23T12:03:00.002Z

With one of those bits of divine serendipity, when we celebrated my handing in of the artwork for 'Stormy Weather', it just happened to be one of the filthiest days ever on the West coast of Scotland. So - your intrepid blogger here ( also known as She Who Doesn't Get Out Much) decided to go out and get live footage of just how wet it was. The waves came up over the sea wall, crossed the street and, as you can see, half-drowned innocent pedestrians.

What the video doesn't convey is the smell of the entire sewage system of Tighnabruaich backing up, swirling all about and being hurled back into the centre of the village. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but in this case, it saves you from a billion bacteria. We went home and stood, fully clothed, under the shower.

But hey. It was, as they say in movies, Real.

what is worse than not being a nerd?

2009-01-22T22:17:00.004Z

I have Mel to thank for this. Thankyou Mel. According to the Nerdtest, I'm officially' not nerdy, but definitely not hip'.

Not hip? Bloody hell. Something has gone hideously, horribly wrong. Gasp. I was so sure that having spent the better part of this evening trying to master the intricacies of uploading my own clips onto YouTube, I would have skated easily into the category of the mother of all Dweeby Nerds, but no. And then, sniff, to discover that I'm not even hip? Did I die one night in my sleep? Is there an alternative universe in which I am Forever Hip, while in this one, like Dorian Gray's portrait, I am doomed to crumble and wither into a carpet-slippered, Horlicksian nightmare of bedpans and wrinkled sagginess?

Er. Seeing as how I'm fast approaching a Significant Birthday, I'd actually rather you didn't answer that. I stood on the bathroom scales this morning and could barely hold back my shrieks of dismay. How much?That's what happens when there's not enough light to go round. I make a heroic attempt to achieve the inner glow that cometh only from the combustion of carbohydrates and alcohol. All through the dark days of November and December I kept telling myself that all the running I was doing was bound to keep the flubber under control, but five minutes before the end of my wee Winter Run, I felt each and every extra gramme I'd acquired, and all of them weighed twice what they normally did.

Until I can come to grips with how to upload video, I won't be able to share the true horror of the red blob that barely made it past the finish line, but hey - I DID DO IT. So what if I finished 1,345th out of 1,890? The most salient bit of my last sentence was the bit about finishing, not the placing or the time it took. I still pinch myself, two weeks on, reminding myself that I achieved my little goal. Proof positive that little by little, and bit by bit, if we persevere, we can achieve things that we once believed to be impossible.

As America is now discovering. A new day, and a far more hopeful feeling in the air. And as if to underline that audaciously hopeful young man's message, all around are the first shy buds of the new year. Bring on the new.

A marked lack of lumens

2009-01-09T21:23:00.003Z

Lordy, but is it just me that thinks the days are getting darker, not lighter? Seems like we wake in darkness, the sun drags itself above the horizon, effortfully hauls itself up to the treeline and then, exhausted by such Herculean efforts, sinks back over the rim of the land once more with a barely disguised snore.

All I can say is thank heavens I've finished all illustrations for Stormy Weather ahead of its impossible deadline. Trying to paint pale watercolour washes in these kind of light levels would be an exercise in severe eye strain, three helical daylight bulbs notwithstanding. No. Stormy Weather the artwork is tucked in a plastic slip, zipped into a portfolio and awaiting transport with me down to London. Handing it over to Bloomsbury in three days time which is hugely exciting, but slightly overshadowed by the imminence of the Great Winter Run which is - gasp - tomorrow.

To which the only proper comment is YEEEEEEAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH, what the hell possessed me to sign up for it?

My dear children yawn and sigh and roll their dear little red eyes so far backwards in their heads I swear they'll cause their eyeballs to slip down the back of their mocking little throats, but for Mummy, it is a Very Big Adventure, this going for a run-thing. They are deeply unimpressed, and only the littlest one can be persuaded to haul ass out of her bed on a Saturday morning and tool into chilly Edinburgh along with her loyal Daddy to come and watch Mummy be very embarrassing,turn very pink, and, alas, probably come in very almost probably last. Speed not being one of the things I seem to be able to get the hang of, no matter how much I train. Speed, breathing, elegance and, let's not forget, discovering an inner ability to glide uphill without sounding like I'm about to blow all gaskets.

Everyone says - get a grip, it's only 5k, but I have to point out that the first 1.5k are up a hill that is steeper than a steep thing. Yup. That steep. I can hear you sucking air. I knew you'd be impressed. Heck, I'm impressed, and I haven't even seen this hill myself. If I was a mad keen competitor, I would undoubtedly have already run the course twelve times over, but I don't want to win, I just don't want to make an absolute idiot of myself.

However, my inner Dammit-I-Want-To-Win demon may well rear its ghastly head tomorrow and give my feet wings, but somehow I doubt it. I suspect halfway up that hill I may just settle back into the gasping and clammy embrace of the Bloody-Hell-If-I-Get-Out-Of-This-Alive-I-Swear-I'll-Never-Do-Anything-So-Dumb-Ever-Again demon. This demon and I have met before on Scottish mountaintops when, confronted with a horrible, horrible vertiginous ridge, my legs turn to overcooked linguine and I begin to plea-bargain with a divine being that I'm pretty sure doesn't exist. At which point, that demon surfaces. I'm told it hangs around A&E wards too...

Anyway. Who knows what tomorrow will bring? With luck, a healthy glow of cardiovascular virtue and that glorious feeling of a fear vanquished. And possibly, a photo to scare the children.

round and round and round and round

2008-12-12T19:06:00.002Z

Perhaps it's not too clever an idea to read the news online at guardian.co.uk before posting to this blog. Tends to colour what I want to write about.So- for once I'm not going to wiffle on about the disastrous political shenanigans going on in all our names over in Poland. Nor am I going to bore y'all to tears about the paucity of moral fibre that has led to us all saying yea to a vastly expensive bail out of the US car manufacturers. Not to mention the Merkel-led suck-up to the German automobile makers , but we're not, not NOT going to go on about that.

No.

That way lies madness. And spiralling around in ever-decreasing circles is not what I want or need right now. Right now, here is my wish-list for this festive season.
1. A posse of endearingly fey elves to do my bidding. Ooooh yes. Left a bit, right a bit, mmmmmm, don't stop.
2. A personal shopper to go and fetch what is on everyone else's lists so that I won't have to go and engage with the madness that is Edinburgh retail.
3. A pop-up masseur to iron out the wrinkled bits and a miraculous re-elasticization of my aged skin combined with a targeted weight loss in all the right places.
4. A heeeeuge and hitherto undiscovered royalty cheque to materialize in tomorrow's post.
5. A clear and present idea for the text for my next picture book.
6. A sudden ability to bow my fiddle like a diva, and a gift for being able to play Shetland reels at full speed rather than my feeble dead s..l...o...w efforts at present.
7. Oh, yeah. World peace, massive and mysterious reduction in the ppm of carbon in the atmosphere and Love for all.

LOVE is all there ever was.. Nothing else matters. Happy pre- Solstice to one and all.

my Inner Slug

2008-12-09T21:10:00.001Z

Flat, I am. More like crepe woman if that didn't have older-lady with wrinkly neck connotations. However, the morning mirror informs me that I am heading for, nay am in the joyous territory of the crepey neck, so we'll drop that subject because there's nothing I can do to stem the march of time across my person.

Should celebrate it, really. But, ungrateful wretch that I am, I tend to look in the mirror and mutter 'eughhhh' rather than anything more encouraging.

Perhaps it's the lack of light that makes me feel as if I'm spread too thinly across the surface of my life. Light finally makes it feasible to go for a run along the little single track road outside my house at 7.50 a.m. and disappears entirely round about 4.30 p.m. which makes for an awful lot of time spent in darkness* wondering why I feel so sluggish and dull. The discipline of going running in the morning is a good thing, and lifts my mood to the point where I feel like a goddess - but only for an hour or so until my Inner Slug reasserts itself.

I finished the artwork for Stormy Weatheryesterday, but far from feeling triumphant and full of joy at completing a set of beautiful illustrations for what I hope will be a profoundly reassuring lullaby, I feel numb. This is because all work and no play makes Debi a boring old fart, but sadly, still an impecunious one. From various sources I hear that there are no copies of any book I've made to be had in any of the high street chain bookstores in Edinburgh. For Edinburgh, this gloom-laden illustrator extrapolates The World. How the heck am I supposed to make a living if my books aren't actually in the shops? At the time of year when people actually buy the bloody things? How are any of us, apart from the top layer of bestselling authors, supposed to put bread on the table if our wares cannot be found in the marketplace?

No - don't answer that. I'll answer it for you. One of the places that books actually can be found is through a deep discount merchant who out of the goodness of his own heart, brings a huge variety of books into workplaces around the UK and piled high, sells them so cheaply that the creators of said books do not make much more than 1% of the cover price. The cover price which is massively discounted. Why would anyone ever want to go into a bookshop when they can buy insanely cheap books at work or online through the ironically titled bookstore named after a tribe of one-breasted women? Roll up, log on, who'll buy my luvverly books? Cheap, cheap, cheap.

I feel like one of those little birds that plucks the down from her own breast to keep her chicks warm.

But hopefully some utterly misunderstood, as yet undiscovered Caledonian biomechanism will register that we are almost at the lowest point of the year, and, accordingly, will swing the nation's cheerometers over into the black once we pass the solstice. Till then, I'm clinging on, white knuckled, gritted of tooth and totally fed up with this endless year's sodding treadmill which has me unable to step off, unable to admire the view, unable to do anything other than turn, turn, turn...

*15hours and 20 minutes ecksherly

and home again

2008-11-23T13:06:00.001Z

Another train, in the dark, heading North. Bjork on the earbuds and a feeling of a job well( ish) done. Two events with mixed age groups of children today - the little ones in the morning appeared to be half asleep, verging on comatose; the afternoon group was sparkier and waaaay more fun in terms of audience participation. Go figure. At times like this morning I wonder, as I stand up there drawing and drawing and talking non-stop to fill up the endless yawning silences, I wonder what the hell am I doing up here?

Is it me? Or is it them? Or is it just that the us isn't working? So, for my partners in non-creativity this morning, I have this to say - it didn't work out, did it? It may have been me, it may have been all of you ; but no, there were small pockets of resistance, some of you smiled shyly, but the rest of you looked as if you were hoping it would all be over soon so that you could get back to whatever it was you were doing before your thoughtless parents dragged you out of bed/away from the tv/the playstation and forced you into a car/bus/train to make sure you participated in a free but ticketed event at a book festival that is stunningly, brilliantly, wildly enthusiastically run by a team of unpaid volunteers.

The key word in that last sentence was 'participated'. Dear children, for the majority of you this morning, your sum total contribution to this event was... to look bored. Bored, bored and beyond bored. I'm sorry that you felt that way. Certainly makes me wonder what I was doing wrong, or even if there is anything I can do to wake children up out of that kind of depressing torpor because whatever it takes, I sure didn't have it. Not this a.m.

However, there were pockets of resistance. Not all of you looked like the flesh and blood embodiment of that well-worn teen look of 'yeah, whatever'. Not all of you made me wish I'd chosen a more rewarding occupation like manual sewage operative. Not every single one of you looked dead from the neck up. So....to the little boy and girl who made a big effort to make up for the embarassing shortfall in the audience involvement of this morning, a thousand thankyous. For smiling. For making an effort to join in. For connecting. Thankyou.

natcherl born traveller, me

2008-11-21T16:43:00.000Z

Bizzarely, I'm at my happiest writing-wise when I'm on a moving train. There's something about being rocked by the motion and locked in my own little applemac bubble. Works for me, every time. Which does rather nake me think that should I get another suicidal urge to write another beast of a novel, I'll probably have to acquire a railcard and spend a year travelling on the great iron road. Which is all very well if you're Paul Theroux with little in the way of family committments, but totally impossible if you're moi.

The only way it could work for me would be if I shuttled backwards and forwards between Dunbar and Edinburgh in the hours when I'm not having to do the school run. I think one of the true joys of travel is the fact of being surrounded by one's fellow citizens without any of them having any earthly idea of who you are. Sure, you can do some covert detective work and assess your fellow passengers by virtue of what they carry, but other than that, anonymity rules.

So - a combination of close physical proximity and the alone-ness of being utterly unknown. Seems to free up some synaptic pathways and allow the words to flow. And flow they must because I'm off to another book festival - this time the Northern Children's gala day in Newcastle whic is always good for meeting my colleagues and having a good moan. Writers can moan and moan and moan, but they tend to do it in flowery language, and even their most vitriolic outbursts are couched in wonderful prose, so tonight should be a blast. and it's always helpful to know that we're all in it, all of us wallowing round in the post-Potter aftermath.

The wordyhurricane came, it flattened our little world and we're now picking ourselves up out of the wreckage. And, oh, the stories we could tell....

scary biscuits

2008-11-04T22:43:00.002Z

Well, I've gone and done it. As of ten minutes ago, I've gone and committed myself to ten weeks of training with a purpose. This is a better idea than the other training plan I've rigorously followed which involved a bit of concentrated lying in bed, a few short intervals of pillow management, and an extended period of devising endless excuses for why I can't possibly spare the time to go out for a quick run when there are such interesting things happening behind my eyelids.

The Great Winter Run beckons. So what if its beckoning finger bears more resemblance to a whip? What care I for the aching muscles, the inhalations of partially burnt hydrocarbons and the freezing cold rainy mornings where I'm sprayed with grit from passing cars as I pound the tarmac intent on upping my cardiovascular virtue quotient? Fie upon my slugabed self. A pox on my pathetic Inner Duvet Hog. A plague upon my perfectly human desire to burrow deeper under the feathery quilt and squinch my eyes shut against the first rosy fingers of dawn and mentally consign all members of the dawn chorus to a swift neck-wring, pluck and into the pot.

Nope. The New Me shall embrace the day, lace the trainers, squeeze into the rather alarmingly tight running kit ( must have shrunk in the wash, surely) and take to the streets.

Oh what the heck have I done?

The sudden panic engendered by having registered for my first 5k race is offset by a deep, unspoken until now, fear over the possibility that the good people of America could be so shortsighted as to elect a candidate with his very own defibrillator and circling fascist vulture-lady. They couldn't. They wouldn't.

Would they?

Tomorrow we'll all find out. I still have my copy of the Guardian the morning we woke to discover America had re-elected Bush. The cover was entirely black with just the words Oh. My. God. printed in a bold white font. Let's hope history does not repeat itself.

swathed in dustsheets

2008-11-02T20:51:00.003Z

Sorry about this - the carpets are rolled up, the furniture is swaddled in cambric, supper will be cold cuts and fridge leftovers and if you want entertaining, grab a paintbrush. I'm renovating. Don't know about you, but I've been bored witless with the way this page has looked for over a year, and for heaven's sake, I am supposed to be an illustrator, so surely I ought to be able to produce a more visually exciting blog?

Sadly, illustrator I may well be, but html code decipherer I am not. Dweebs are sooooo not us. So the title bar with attendant illustration may well be as far as my renovations go. I'd love to be able to lay out my blogpage in a more adventurous fashion but I need to be shown how because, well..perhaps I'm just terminally dim, but I don't understand how to tweak the Blogger layout and make my page my own. Also, time is somewhat precious, money is scarce, and spending hours plittering about with pixels is not going to put broccoli on the table.

The good news of this week is that eldest son is off to rehab after going through three weeks of rapid detox. He has done very well to overcome the chemical addiction, but his thoughts, dreams, desires and general life patterning will take longer to detoxify. That's where rehab comes in. Unlearning what he learned from the unreliable pedagogy of the poppy. Changing all his habits. Untying the knots that bound him to a half-life spent oscillating between the dealer and the Deeps.

I'm doing a fair bit of oscillation myself between a range of emotions that I wish I could harness for the purpose of energy creation. I'm a one-woman alternative energy generator, me. My feelings can blow up into gales which could set the blades spinning in a wind farm. My stormy highs and lows are like a form of emotional wavepower. Intense bursts of rage and grief flare like solar power... I could go on. I'm sure you'd rather I didn't. However, it should come as no surprise that I can hardly get my head off the pillow in the morning ; the whole upheaval and upset and digging up of the past consumes so much time and energy that I feel wiped out by it all.

Next week, with my son safely tucked up in rehab a long way from wintry Edinburgh, we have to go to his lair and gather up the salvaged bits of pieces of his life that he would like us to keep for when he rejoins the human race. His home of the past three years is a lair ; there is no better word to describe the flat he has inhabited through the dark years of addiction. I would rather never go there again as long as I live, but this mother's hardwired guilt will drive me up and down the entire height of an Edinburgh high-rise, over and over again to retrieve the detritus of my son's long love affair with narcotics.

It has been a long love-affair, and there is a heck of a lot of detritus. He has an entire room full of disembowelled bikes. He has another room full of disembowelled computers. In the middle of this incredible chaos, two sleek, well-fed and beautiful black cats prowl, stalking through the circuitboards and derailleurs as if rooms full of urban trash were as homely as their ancestors' palaces of Ancient Egypt. The ashtrays are full of cigarettes rolled from the ends of other cigarettes which, in turn, have been made from the cannibalized remains of other cigarettes ; the whole ashy history stretching back in time to the days of a tar-drenched nicotine quest fuelled by poverty and need. The kitchen houses a vast collection of brown medicine bottles and burgeoning spider plants spilling out of their pots over the top of the fridge. He began to strip the wallpaper in the hall, then gave up on the job. The scraps of discarded wallpaper have littered the bare floorboards ever since. There is an unsurprisingly bad smell; strong enough to make me mouth breathe on every occasion I have visited.

I hope that the next time we go there is the last time. Groundhog Day is all very well and good if you spend it someplace pleasant. Otherwise, you have the feeling that you're on the Hamster-wheel of Hell.

a breath of winter

2008-10-27T17:17:00.004Z

Sailed out of Aberdeen at 3 a.m. on Sunday morning, heading for Lerwick in what I thought were mountainous seas, but hey, I do have a tendency to exaggerate. I did lurch to my cabin window at about 7.30 a.m to take some photos to prove that the mountains were real and not imaginary, but the very action of standing upright was more than enough to bring on a fit of the dry heaves and I had to assume the horizontal position promptly before I went in for major cabin redecoration.It was a journey from hell, and as the ship left Aberdeen harbour and wallowed and yawed out into the full ferocity of the North Sea, I did wonder if I was going to make it intact.

And what vicious shipping magnate named the Shetland ferries in such a completely unsympathetically onomatopoeic fashion. To wit : the s.s. Hrossey and Hjatland. Don't know about you, but when I give it the technicolour yawn, the sounds that emerge from me are along the lines of Hrosseyyyy and Hjat, hjat, hjaaaatt. Too much information, I suspect. Enough already.

I'm still swaying slightly and I've been here for 24 hours now. I was greeted with horizontal sleet as I came off the boat. Sleet? Yikes. We are far North. Edinburgh was sub-tropical by comparison. I'm only here for four days, talking to Shetland's teachers about the projects that I worked on with their children. Also talking about my dragon book and banging my climate change drum, but mainly having fun showing groups of teachers how I managed to get their children to enjoy writing stories. This involves a lot of drawing on the dreaded interactive whiteboards which is about as easy as drawing with a small and wayward half brick with a different agenda from your own. Where I place my pen on the board bears little relation to where the actual drawn line appears. This is deeply disconcerting. Off the top of my head I imagine it to be a bit like chopping onions using those gloved hands that you see in use in nuclear power stations when they're handling uranium - you stand on one side of the leaded glass screen, and on the other side are your virtual hands actually using the knife on the onions. Weird. However, when the whiteboards work, they are truly amazing devices, enabling large numbers of people to watch as you draw something to illustrate what you're wiffling on about.

But when, as happened today, I accidentally hit the wrong area of the screen with my mouse/pen/cursor, and all the huge drawing we'd been working with disappeared, it was incredibly hard to keep sounding ladylike when all I wanted to do was curse like a sailor.

Two hours of talking is effortful, though. At the end of the morning all I was fit for was to curl up with a book and try to pile in enough calories to stop myself from freezing. I can't seem to find a switch to turn the heating up, or indeed, to turn it on in this room where I sit tapping out this post. And yes, I've piled on more layers of clothing, but there's a limit to how many layers I can fit, one on top of the other before my arms stick out from my sides like the Michelin woman. The heating here in Lerwick comes piped in from the town's monster incinerator which occasionally belches out foul smokes and fumes that you can taste. It's called 'district' heating, and is a grand idea if, and it's a big if, the filters work. On the days when you can almost chew the air, I suspect the filters are not working as they should.

So. Tomorrow, I go talk to another group of teachers, but afterwards I hope to get out of Lerwick and go breathe some seawashed air. Winter has already arrived up here at sixty degrees North, which came as a surprise since I left mid-autumn behind in the softer South. I want to get out in the crisp wind, feel the teeth of ice blown across the sea and flirt with the Big Chill before it comes in a few weeks time to the more temperate latitudes where I live. Annoyingly, the clocks went back this weekend, thus allowing fewer hours of daylight to walk Shetland's coastline. I won't be able to go for the long walk I'd anticipated, and will have to find a shorter route - perhaps I'll attempt Fitful Head again, now that there's no chance of being set upon by Arctic terns determined to protect their nesting sites. At this time of year I might get blown off the summit, but that's a risk I'll be able to see coming. The Arctic terns came out of a clear blue sky last May and forced me to turn back. This time the only thing that'll be nesting in Shetland are sets of occasional tables.

And that was a truly pathetic joke for which I apologize.

last of the southern epics

2008-10-17T21:26:00.001+01:00

Thank heavens. Now I can collapse in a small Ardbeg-sprinkled heap and say - Job Done. One last heroic effort today - up and down to London in a day, by rail ( am I insane, or what?), pausing momentarily in front of a roomful of senior librarians to flash images, illustrations, sketches and ideas and general climate-rant in front of their thankfully smiling faces and receptive minds. And then back on another train up to Scotland. Phew.

Let's hear it for librarians. Come on, LOUDER. Damn it, these people are the Keepers of the Faith, the real Masters and Mistresses of the Universe. They deserve a special place in our hearts and minds. When the money is tight, in this country you can still go to the Great Temple of Literature and ask politely if they will acquire something you want to read for their collection. Oh yeah, and you are hoping that they're going to pay for it. Try doing that in a bookshop and see how far you get.

And the fund of knowledge pooled in that room today was formidable. Anything you want to know about children's books - enquire within.

But for now, I'm on an unbelievably overcrowded train and one of my fellow passengers ( the posh one with the flaky children) is - I can't quite believe this - pouring milk out of a vast plastic container into a teetering cup of hot tea a scant millimetre from where I sit tapping this out on my Precioussssssss. Can I stand the strain or shall I pack up, fold my tent and stop now before it all goes to hell?

Tough call. One last heartfelt hoorah for librarians the world over. And now - I'm gone, before the Descent of the Milk and the Ensuing Carnage. Laters.

train through Lakeland

2008-10-13T10:35:00.002+01:00

When I was very very small I was given a beautiful two-tier box of coloured pencils. All shades of the rainbow were there, pointy end upwards in a matt black card box with a top that tilted on a paper hinge to allow this baby artist access to her tools. I loved those pencils to bits. Every time I tilted back the lid and gazed in awe at the colours, I was almost hyperventilating with excitement.

Not unlike how I respond to a wall of yarn in a knitting shop, actually. However, these days, my response to all the hues and types of yarn has to be firmly sat upon less I commit fiscal suicide. Fiscicide? Yes. Anyhoo... My pencils had their maker's name embossed in gold ( not real gold, for heaven's sake) and the name was Lakeland and Cumberland.

Well, that was a long, long time ago. Coloured pencils? These days, my dears, we find ourselves a burnt twig with which to daub the walls of our cave in these straitened times. ( you know - that stockmarket-melted, climate-changed, credit-crunched Armageddon we're currently enjoying. Some of us are enjoying it more than others but they had better hide their smug smirks less the rest of us rise up and rip them limb from limb, but hey, I digress) It's pretty chilly in the cave, and most of the stunted twigs we find lying around are saved to put on the fire at night. But sometimes, as the Tribe's resident storyteller, sometimes they allow me just one little twig with which to tell the story of what the heck happened to all our 21stC towering dreams, and how we all ended up living in caves.

I think, in truth, the Tribe would probably eat me, because my net worth in survivalist terms, is really negligible. Too old to bear Tribabies, too slow to hunt Tribeasts and way too mouthy to put up with any kind of Tribull, I'm pretty sure I'd end up in the pot, simmering nicely along with some turnips.

where the hell am I going with this?

Heavens, by now you're undoubtedly scratching your heads and wondering what on earth was in my breakfast back in Birmingham earlier this a.m. Or can it be that a week of touring has finally dissolved the weak glue that held my synapses together? Hope not. Boy, do I hope not. I still have miles to go and promises to keep. So. Pencils. Lakeland and Cumberland have long gone, I think. Or morphed into another pencil-creating company with a different name. Derwent pencils are ringing some vague and distant bell in the porridge of my brain. Anyway. Lordy. Do stick to the point, Gliori. The train has passed through some hideous urban conurbations, most of which have completely passed me by, locked in embrace with my desktop, as I have been. But I looked up about half an hour ago and found myself in the middle of a landscape of such quintessential pastoral beauty that I was completely blown away. It was the Lake District, home of Beatrix Potter, William Morris, John Ruskin and many other luminaries of the art world whose work has enriched our world, to the betterment of us all. The views were exquisite, and if only I still had access to my little box of pencils ( reaching out for them down through the years) I could have drawn a sketch to show you what I mean. For now, simply the words will have to do.

This is a wonderful world, full of beauty. We ignore it at our peril.

dogless in transit

2008-10-10T12:43:00.000+01:00

Another day, another train.

Yesterday was spent partly in York and then on to Newcastle. Three separate events in one day, three hour-long talks to different groups of children about climate change. And my dragons were welcomed, well-received and the message they bear was well and truly delivered.

The rest is up to each and every small person, every teacher, every parent and every single individual who has heard what I had to say. And none of it is exactly stuff that we, the adults, didn't know already, but perhaps something of the passion and the urgency I have brought to this whole project might rub off on some of the people who have heard me talk.

The working day started at nine in the morning and finished at eight at night. After which, Emma and I headed for the bar of our exceptionally comfortable hotel and toasted ourselves for having put in a stonkingly good day at the coalface. We had supper and then, eyes barely able to focus due to sleep-deprivation exacerbated by a fire alarm going off in the wee small hours of the night before in the hotel we stayed in the night before in York. Well, that wasn't exactly the most elegant sentence I've ever cobbled together, but I'm sure you know what I mean. You get the picture. We're into the home stretch of the tour, as of now heading back down the country to Cheltenham to take part in the Lit-Fest. Anyhoo - last night, after drinks and dinner, I collapsed on my vast hotel bed, sank back into the pillows and phoned home. The news was good, but let me feeling a very odd mix of emotions. To explain-

my beloved Eldest child has been struggling with heroin addiction for years - how many years we're not entirely sure, and in this case, the numbers are not important. Suffice to say, this has been a very difficult thing for all of us to get our heads around. Crikey, Gliori - mistress of the understatement, or what? I'm trying to keep this light, so bear with me. Don't think for one second that I feel lighthearted about all of this, but there is nothing to gain by wallowing. You'll have to trust me on this one. My child has been in the Dark Woods ( his words) for so long he can probably hardly remember what the sunny uplands feel like. In terms of years spent on this planet, he's old enough to have a house, a job, a wife, children and a receding hairline. In reality, his life stopped when he put it on hold in his early twenties by embarking on this descent into hell. Watching this happen to a beloved child is something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. In truth, when members of your family embark on this journey, they take a part of you with them.

The news from home is that next week he's going to start to claw his way back out of the darkness. He'll do some horrible and necessary weeks of de-tox and then he'll be gone, far, far away to do at least one full year of re-hab. I have no idea who he will be when that year is over. It's not like the Federal Witness Protection Programme in the good old you-ess-of-ay, but there are similiarities. It's unlikely that he'll ever be able to return to the city of his birth, and it's possible that he may never want to re-engage with his family. He has to break ties with the past in case they are the ties that bound him in cycles of self-destructive behaviour. Only he can decide in the years to come, which, if any, of the threads from the past he will pick up and weave back into his new life.

And I have to watch from the shore as his boat heads out into the fog, without any clear idea of where he's headed, whether he will return, or if I will recognize the man that steps back onshore. I am so very proud of him for deciding to take this step into the unknown, and I applaud his courage.

But right now, on a train to Cheltenham, I wish my dog was by my side, because right now, I could really do with an uncomplicated creature to wrap my arms around and have a good cry on.

Sleepless in transit

2008-10-08T10:04:00.003+01:00

It's now Wednesday and Emma from( The Trouble With Dragon's publisher) Bloomsbury and I are on another train, with a wifi signal dipping in and out of focus, on our way to a school in Ilkley ( Yorkshire) to talk to another 110 small persons. Yesterday was great - speaking to a whole school of children( ages from 5 to 11) about climate change, and about the Dragons, and watching their dear little open faces as they 'got' it. And it's such an important thing we're talking about that my voice breaks every time I talk about it, because I am so utterly convinced that we have to hurry up and DO something before we miss the window of opportunity for turning this whole thing round.

The soundtrack that runs through my head for the tour is Kate Bush's 'Ariel'. Songs that get stuck in your head are known as 'earworms' but this music is far too beautiful for such an ugly term. I am transported literally by the train, and metaphorically by the music, and the net result is a dreamy state of langour which seems to work well when I have to get up there and talk to hundreds of people. By the end of this week, I will have spoken to almost a thousand children, and I'm hoping that those thousand children go home and start asking questions of their parents, their teachers and each other. I'm hoping I've given them exactly the right amount of information about climate change, in a form that they can understand and remember. Hopefully presented in a way that will give them enough of an idea of the urgency with which we have to address the issue, and of the importance of doing so.

Otherwise we are going to sleepwalk our way to extinction.

All around us, financial markets are in turmoil, the US is obsessed with election fever and we appear to be taking our eyes off the most important issue of our age. Climate change gets a few column inches while the FTSE and Dow Jones steal the front pages. If we all lived on Tuvalu and were watching our homeland disappear under a rapidly rising sea, or if we lived in Bangladesh and were watching as our tiny vegetable gardens wilted and died under saltwater, or if we were Inuit people who could no longer dare to go fishing on the ice because the once solid whiteness beneath our feet had become treacherous slush or...if we were one of a billion people whose lives are going down the pan and not because their investments were failing, then I think we would no longer care about what the markets were doing.

Apologies. Not my most cheerful posting,this. I remain hopeful, but I also want to jump up and down and yell HURRY UP.

And being away from home without my fiddle has made me feel music-starved. If the craving gets the better of me, I can always go and find a music shop and pretend to be interested in buying a fiddle just so I can get my hands on one, but I'm still too shy to play in front of strangers, and besides, Emma would probably die of embarrassment at being seen out with an author with what I can only describe as fiddle issues. She undoubtedly would think fiddle music is boring as hell, and would be too polite to say so.

It can't be easy, going on tour with an assortment of authors and having to adapt to whatever their particular 'things' are. As a publicist, you're obliged to spend an awful lot of time with your author. Breakfast, lunch and dinner for a week, plus all the work and the in-between stuff too. Next time you're in a hotel, have a look at the couples having dinner. The ones where there is a young woman in the company of an older one - they're not all mother/daughter combos or even father/daughter ones, some of them are publicists with the people they're paid to look after. Their 'monsters'. I'm trying my hardest not to be too monsterish, and I think, apart from yawning non-stop due to sleep deprivation, demanding to be fed three times a day and ranting on about climate change, I'm not too bad, but you'd have to ask Emma.

But not right now, because she's grabbing a quick nap, the sensible woman. I've got zizz-envy - I'm too wired to sleep, probably due to the bucketloads of coffee I've already consumed and it's only mid-morning. On tour, I never sleep much which means that by the time I get to the end of a tour, I'm so spaced out I look like the unholy union of the marriage between a rabbit caught in headlights and Dracula's mother. Attractive, NOT.

The Trouble With Dragons goes live

2008-10-06T06:39:00.006+01:00

It's publication day today, and I'm on my way to London. The night is slowly turning to day outside, as this red-eye train sways and clatters towards London. I'm red of eye too - not enough sleep for the past few nights, nervously anticipating this week of full-on dragon events. Why exactly this meant that I had to sample my way through several single malts and talk long into the wee small hours for the last three nights when in truth, the sensible thing to do would have been to have gone to bed early, relatively alcohol-free, is a question I'd rather not answer.

But hey - hindsight is a wonderful thing. And I haven't drunk any malts since last winter, and it was like meeting up with an old and dear friend. Och, Ardbeg, come away in, and wee Caoil Islay - how grand to see your wee face again... and we just had to have ourselves a ceilidh and put the world to rights, and before we knew it, it was 2 a.m and the bottle was drained. In my own defence, I have to point out that it wasn't even half full. I am such a cheap date.

The most exquisite dawn is breaking outside - the sea a pewter sheet of rolling silk on my left, one lone fishing boat dragging a v-wake back to shore. As ever, I am reminded what an beautiful world we share. Which makes what I'm about to do a whole lot easier, because it's far simpler to talk about something you love than just about anything else. Touring with a book is a tough gig - being hauled out in public after the months of solitary confinement when you actually made the damn thing can be very discombobulating. The contrast between the big cities we're about to tour and my normal Sleepy Hollow lifestyle, gives me a wide-eyed staring look just the right side of psychotic. Thankfully, authors are expected to look a tad deranged, so I can get away with it, but trust me, if I was your medical health professional, you wouldn't let me within a million miles of you.

In anticipation of being heckled by climate-change deniers, I've been re-reading all of the books I initially digested while I was working on the Dragons, but I know that I'm pretty useless when confronted with the kind of rage that the majority of deniers seem to exhibit. The rage is born of fear, but that doesn't make it any more palatable. It also, ironically like a high-performance sports car, goes from nought to sixty in under a second, and I am continually aghast at the speed with which seemingly mild people will transform themselves into froth-at-the-mouth table-thumpers when the subject of climate change is raised.

Their arguments become more and more hysterical and unsound, which tends to be indicative of someone finding themselves stranded on the moral equivalent of melting pack-ice. In a way, this is funny, if you happen to enjoy wiping spittle off your glasses, but in another way is pretty tragic, since we all have to share this green and blue oasis in space, and frequently, I find that it's the table-thumpers who are beasting through far more than their fair share. Their arguments tend to begin in a condescending, avuncular fashion - as if it's their mission statement to put me straight, to disabuse me of my falsely held opinions. First they attack my knowledge (and the findings of the IPCC), then they move on to my politics ( it's all a left-wing conspiracy) followed by my choice of newspaper ( suddenly it's bad news to be a Guardianista) and then rapidly, they turn, Jeckyll-like into a creature resembling the unholy union between a frill-lizard and a froth-monster.

Oh, sigh. I can refute, explain, reason and generally hold my own till the cows come home, but in the end, it matters not a jot. I may as well spout pages from the telephone directory for all the good it does. Recently, a relative actually came out with the appalling opinion that the flooding in the coastal plains of Bangladesh was a good thing because 'there were too many of them'. The root assumption at the slimy black heart of that particular foul sentiment was that 'they' were less deserving of life than the relative herself. Her solution to the over-population part of our climate change problem being - the hell with the poor. The horrible thing about this kind of ghastliness is that these core beliefs are held by apparently kind, good and upstanding citizens. Kind, good and upstanding citizens who are terrified of change if it means that they have to accept a lesser share of what's available in order to accommodate the needs of people they perceive as being less deserving.

So, yeah, that was someone with whom I exchange Christmas cards. What the heck is it going to be like having a frank and full interchange of opinions regarding climate change with persons unknown and possibly hostile? Watch this space.

I'm just going to step outside for a while...

Darkness Falls, Part One

2008-09-28T20:49:00.003+01:00

Safe home after the rigours of amusing six hundred children in tents, I have allowed myself a few hours to sift through the Sunday papers and came across this delight in the Observer.

On being asked how he will spend the hours of darkness forecast for Britain in the forthcoming winter of powercuts, financial doom and rising unemployment, Donald Macleod, principal of the Free Church School in Edinburgh replied,
'Now that we've run out of coal, gas, oil and old newspapers, we should have a nationwide network of wind turbines and nuclear power. Sadly, we don't, because they either spoiled someone's view or offend someone's principles. So the short answer is that I'll wring necks.'

Visions of our rapidly emptying oil tank being scaled by a commando force of rampant ministers, all hopped up to the gills with righteous god-given indignation. Great, huh? That's all we need. Ranks of dog-collared thugs patrolling our streets, some of them drunk on communion wine, others simply fuelled on belief that their Way is the Only One. Oh, fun times ahead, people.

The line drawing of Daisy and her Inner Demon is one of the 143 black and white illustrations I finished last week for the inside of Witch Baby and me at School ( publishing in January 09). I took approximately half an hour off to celebrate this completion with a cup of coffee, and then began my next project - a picture book called Stormy Weather. Strangely prescient, what? One wonders what, if anything will be left of Western capitalism when it is published in October 2009. It is a lovely book - I'm really looking forward to immersing myself in the doing of it. All the pencil roughs are done, so the months between now and the hand-in date in January will be spent painting watercolour artwork for every double page spread. That is, when I'm not out in tents, or at book festivals or, like next week, on tour with The Trouble With Dragons.

The tour is a week of events up and down the length of Britain, travelling by train, armed with a powerpoint thing on a usb data stick, some pens and missionary zeal ( though not of the same order as Donald Macleod's) I'm hoping to add my voice to the rising clamour regarding the urgent need for us to do something to reduce our carbon output. I'm fighting a rearguard action by attempting to engage as many children as I possibly can in the course of a week, in the hope that they will go back home and pester their loving parents into taking action.

Meanwhile, the rest of the world appears to have taken their eye off the ball entirely - obsessing about money, mortgages and the identity of the next new and sparkly leader to replace the older models who have failed us. Deckchairs? Titanic, anyone?

Hotel du Cac

2008-09-25T19:14:00.003+01:00

I'm in downtown Newton Stewart in a somewhat unprepossessing Nameless Hotel* ( big sign outside beside the dumpster in the litter-strewn car-park telling all and sundry that the Nameless is under new management - doesn't that just make your heart sink?) and as I checked in, I noticed a sheet of laminated A4 stuck to the reception desk ( probably with the effluvia of guests gone by) bearing the fateful words

Binky and Charlene invite you and your colleagues to celebrate our Grand Opening Night. Dress informal. Party starts at 9.00 p.m.

That, my dears, is tomorrow night. Tomorrow brings two events each with 250 children, followed by the firework opening of the Wigtown Book Festival, followed by what I fervently hoped was dinner and an early night before getting up on Saturday morning to do another event in a tent and then driving 189 miles back home.

Instead...Oh. My. God. The part of me that is forever teenage wishes I'd bought my fiddle and had the cojones to drink several large shots and then join in with the Nameless Opening Party, and another part of me ( the crusty old fart) envisages a night of stomping downstairs in my PJs to demand a little bit of consideration for those of us blah de blah de blah zzzz.

Problem is - I forgot my PJs. Just how steely are my cojones, anyhoo? Have I got what it takes to stomp downstairs in the altogether and demand a little hush? Somehow, I suspect I wouldn't have to be too strident. The Shock and Awe caused by my naked arrival in the public bar would ensure that silence fell with an all-too audible thud. Eughhhhhhhh. Doesn't bear thinking about. Ladies of my age are invisible, mostly, and if rash enough to bare anything, are the subject of public ridicule.

So. Earplugs it will have to be. But the Nameless is too raw to be called a hotel. My room was recently painted - yesterday? This afternoon? The fumes are evil. I have no table to work at, no wardrobe, no drawers, no chair - just a bed with a stack of puffy pilloids which will ensure that I sleep for approximately ten minutes before waking in the Human Pretzel Position. I am shortly going to venture downstairs to brave the dining room, driven more by a desperate need for G&T rather than any appetite, since the paint fumes appear to have put paid to that. Have I unwittingly stumbled upon the secret of effortless weight loss? I'm trying to find the positive in this situation, but heck, it's a bit of an upward struggle.

Back later with an update from your own correspondent in Newton Stewart.
*I wouldn't dare name it while I'm staying in it. I choose life.

bring on the revolution

2008-09-20T21:37:00.002+01:00

Of course, I don't really mean that, given that my recurring dystopian nightmare is of a revolution of baseball bat-wielding visigoths coming to raid our broad bean patch. Or whatever current horror my wakeful subconscious cares to throw at me in the wee small hours. Mind you, the content of each evening's ten o'clock news has been nightmare enough - this was definitely a week for giving thanks for being poor enough to possess no spare capital whatsoever, especially since we bank with what used to be called ( until Wednesday) the Bank of Scotland.

Not that they were, of late, all that great. Actually, having banked with them since I was a student ( back in the mists of time when the Romans ruled Caledonia and we were about to invent the wheel) of late, I have noticed a certain aggression coupled with a kind of dumb-assed laissez faire bordering on insolence in my dealing with the bank. Or mayhap, I am simply getting old. No. I am getting old, no mayhaps about it, but still...

The thought that out there are some persons unknown who have actually made bucketloads of profit out of a concerted whispering campaign to drive down the bank's share price is pretty shocking, but unsurprising. It has to be said that there have been a heck of a lot of Porsche Cayenne 4WD's belching around the countryside of late, and they can't all be owned by footballers, can they?

Edinburgh is full of fund managers. Or perhaps mis-managers might be a better name. The few that I've had the misfortune to meet have been so utterly morally bankrupt and cocky that one has to conclude that death is too kind an ill-wish to wish for them. Leeches, parasites, human flotsam, visit upon them every plague and pestilence, may their parts wither to match their shrivelled souls, may their children grow to curse the day they issued from such foulness, may black boils sprout from between their eyes so that by their countenances do we know them....

Or, at the very least. let them have erectile dysfunction bigtime.

There, that ought to do it. Phwoarrrrr. Bet they're quaking in their boots, eh?

attention all shipping

2008-09-11T21:40:00.005+01:00

The days are too full right now - every waking moment accounted for and spent either working, cooking or laying down the produce of the garden for consumption over the colder months. The freezer has bag upon bag of beans - broad and French, all blanched and tucked away for later. I've been oven-drying tomatoes to the point where my dreams are full of little red orbs, and now the apples have started falling off the trees and I'll have to start on them next. And then the pears will begin...and this weekend I ought to pick the blackcurrants and and and.

Work is pretty full-on too. I'm currently up to number 99 of a total of 143 of a set of b/w line illustrations for the second Witch Baby book. This entails getting up early and arriving, bleary-eyed at my drawing board at 7.30 a.m., whereupon, in between school runs and emails and phone calls, I've been cross-hatching away like...like...er, I have no idea what I'm like when I'm drawing in such a concentrated fashion - a desperate illustrator, I think. A demented draftswoman. Whatever. It's a whole new way of working for me. In fact the entire, once-familiar landscape of publishing seems to have shape-shifted into an unrecognizable terra incognito.Due to publishing schedules, the book I'm working on has to be done at a break-neck speed, which forces me to think very, very hard, stare mightily at what I'm doing and stops me from my usual serendipitous methodology whereby I used to drift, and dream and plitter around in a box of paints, doing a convincing impersonation of a ditzy lady watercolourist.

Not any more. Off with the floaty chiffons and billowy silks and on with the tailored twill and tweed. If you follow my drift. In fact shortly, if this pace continues much longer, it'll be off with the twill and tweed and on with the leather and rubber. With studs. And chains. Let's not forget the chains, eh?

In the middle of all this time-constrained nonsense, something had to slip, and sadly, it was the gym. I am, officially, a slob. This state of affairs is, I have to say, a temporary blip in an otherwise spotless record of cardiovascular virtue, but right now, there are not enough hours in the day.There's the 143 b/w illustrations followed by a ten day book tour with my dragon book, and then , oh, puhleaze, then I will try and squeeze my 5k running and occasional visits to the gym back into my days. The think I was not prepared to let go was playing the fiddle. Even if I'm cross-eyed with tiredness, I try and fit in an hour a day. Some days, I even like how I sound.

Summer flew past. Then it rained, I think. I didn't get out as much as I would have liked. Didn't swim nearly as often in Loch Fyne. There were shoals of jellyfish making me very wary of the water. Besides, most of the time I was working my socks off. One weekend off all summer. One. The rest of them I was working one or both days. I think I can say, hand on heart that I've never worked as hard in my life as I have done this year. Part of this is simple timetabling - the books have to be done for tight deadlines. But, the other part of this punishing workload is a simple lack of money. Publishers advances are reflecting the somewhat depressed market, or at least that's what I'm being told as I'm paid what I used to earn back at the beginning of the Nineties. Urrrrghhhhh. And just to crank the stress-factor up a notch or two, my trusty Mac went down last week, and not in a Lewinsky fashion either. It died on me, a long, long way from home. Up on the Hebridean island of Lewis, in fact. It stayed dead all that long and hideous weekend during which I did my best to not think about all the 'stuff' I had stored on its silent hard drive. So, after trying to fix it myself, I called in help, and help duly took it away for intensive care and reported back that it was officially a deadmac.

So. Newmac had to be bought with the moolah earmarked for something trivial like eating or the mortgage or some such frippery, and then, oh joy, newmac had to be toilet-trained, socialized, educated and is only now standing on its own two feet for long enough to demand 'when's tea?' and 'have you washed my socks yet?'. Don't know about you, but I think I'm living in the epicentre of a Chinese curse. You know - the one about 'may you live in interesting times'. Hmm. Interesting times are here. I'm living them.

out with my Baby

2008-07-04T19:28:00.001+01:00

Well, that's that done. 'Witch Baby & Me' is now officially out there ; yet another book to join the hundreds of thousands of other books published every year.

At the risk of sounding like a cynical old hack, I have to pause here and say a resounding - SO WHAT?

But there's always a part of me that counters with - I did my best, wrote the best book I could possibly write, tried to give it heart, leaven it with humour and illustrate it with the very best drawings I could draw, so THAT'S what. In the general scheme of things, yeah, so what, but in my little corner of the planet, if our children are the living arrows we fire into the fray, then our books are darts of light.

And besides, there are some truly groan-makingly terrible jokes between the covers of my Witch Baby, and watching childrens' faces light up as they get my dreadful jokes and seeing their faces dissolve into giggles - that's good too. I've also had a really, really good time, introducing new, young eight-year-old readers to my imaginary family and watch as they allow their imaginations to flesh out the characters that walk around inside my head - that's pretty close to flying, actually. Damn, I think my job is one of the best jobs a person can do. As a session with children progresses, I feel less nervous ( let's not forget here, people, that launching a book is still public speaking, even if it is with children rather than adults, and I still find the first introductory ten minutes to be a nail-biting nightmare of stage-fright and terror. As would you, I promise. Unless you have cojones of steel.)and once I stop feeling nervous, then I can begin to fly. And Witch Baby is an easy book to fly with. Which came as something of a joyful surprise.

So I've done three days in London, trucking hither and yon in the bowels of the Underground, emerging dripping ( it's not air-conditioned down there) eating out for every meal, drinking mojitos at night at the end of a long day, limping around in pointy shoes ( the downside of touring is the wardrobe crises from hell that I undergo - what to wear. Oh, what to wear?) and talking, talking, talking.

Now, on a crammed to capacity train heading back North I think I've had more than enough of not being home. I'm tired, my tolerance levels are well into the red zone due to the presence of a crew of rugger buggars who got on at Durham and have been steadily drinking their way North. Their crass, woman-baiting t-shirts, their loud shouty voices and awful porn mags, their burping, farting and swearing.... - I know I'm sitting here looking like a vengeful, mean old harpy, shrivelled and shrewish, but if I could hit the ejector switch and launch them all into hyperspace, trust me, i'd do it. Big, drunken loutsh thugs, trampling all over everyone's sensitivities and forcing their thick and oikish inanities down all our throats. Oh, ghoddddddd.

where's my loving-kindnesss, then?

Pfffffffff, as one of my characters would say. It hardly needs to be said that she is a witch, a Sister of Hiss and that like her two other sisters, she must represent some less than generous facet of my personality - my Inner Bitch. A useful facet, at times, but not one that sees the light of day too often.

mossy heart

2008-06-27T21:23:00.003+01:00

Decided to take time out from Poo Central to do some work. On a Friday night? Jeez. How bad, exactly is Poo Central? It's not that bad, really, just a tad puppy obsessed. I have no room to complain, in truth, since 99.9% of the mopping-up operations are carried out by Michael, but there still is only so much obsessing over has she, does she, will she, oh, not again that one can take. I need to disengage for a wee while in order to regain a sense of proportion. I need to remember that this stage will not last the rest of our lives, right? There's only so much toilet-training an intelligent puppy can undergo before her dumb owners realize that, like a small baby, she is simply too small to understand what is being required of her.

Poor thing. If synaptic pathways could be willed into existence, she'd be sitting on the toilet like a human, demanding to have her bum wiped, but as it is....well. It's Friday night and I'd rather work late than stand in the rain, begging an infant dog to void her bowels on the grass rather than the carpet.

Yes, it's raining and yes, it's the first day of the children's summer holidays and yes, we're spending them in Scotland, more or less at home, except for one short week in August when we'll decamp to Wester Ross to sample a different kind of rain. Last summer, The Dreech, started just like this one. The Dreech just about finished us all off with its incessant chill and wetness. Another one of those we do not need. And should you wish to know, the plural of Dreech is Drek. With the 'R' rolled, as in Drrrrrek.

So. The mossy heart I found on Eshaness, on the day that Mary Blance and I were lost in fog. Sometimes you find exactly what you're looking for in the strangest of places. I went to Eshaness for the view and the majestic seas, and instead I found this bonsai heart- garden of moss and sea pinks, growing on salt-drenched rocks. Proving that love can flourish in the harshest of places.

roar of distant thunder

2008-06-16T12:34:00.002+01:00

or was it a drum roll?

Ta daaaaaaa.

Introducing She Who Has No Name Yet. We have a history of this nameless thing. It's our understandable reluctance to slap on a label that may well be the wrong one. At least, that's our excuse. In keeping with our lovely Islay, we're looking for Scottish islands names. But with one proviso - whatever it is has to receive the majority vote from all of us who are going to share a house with this dear little puppy.

So far, Cara is a strong contender. Not only a Scottish island but also means 'dear one' in Italian.

Right, must go - poo detail awaits. Who'd've thought one so small had so much inside her?

green and leafy

2008-06-10T22:41:00.002+01:00

I'm speeding by train through the English countryside late on a
summer night after a day of astonishing heat. Most of today has been
passed on a train heading South or a train heading North and in
between these compass points, in an overheated room in a library in
Birmingham talking to independent booksellers and librarians about
Witch Baby.

And being in a city centre with the crush of people and the mindless
buying of pretty stuff and the endless consuming stupidity of our
desire to own, to have, to have more of whatever didn't quite fill
our inner void, and the many glossy temptations on offer in our
cities today...well, too much of that leaves me rubbed raw and dirty
by association.

But now, on the way home, looking out at twilit fields and hedgerows,
I am astounded by all the beauty. Eleven days before midsummer and
the world beyond the glass is full of the promise of summer. And so
green and soft. The quilted fields look deep enough to sink into, the
barley more like swansdown than stalk and stem. On a night like this,
the world could break your heart.

This weekend we go and collect a small Golden Retriever puppy from
her loving breeders and bring her home with us. Over three years in a
dog-less house and we know that we have mourned our beloved golden
Islay enough now. Although when she died the hurt was almost
unbearable which makes us wary of putting ourselves in a position to
feel like that ever again. Even writing this, now, years later and I
am close to weeping. Gone but not forgotten. Our beautiful Islay
dog. Last night I sat beside her grave and hoped that she would have
given this new puppy her blessing.

So. Soon this weblog will be deep in puppy tales. Not to mention
other puppy things which are far funnier in retrospect than they are
at the time you're scraping them off various surfaces and precious
furnishings... Once she comes, there will be photos. But right now
I'm mentally cataloguing my shoes and wondering where the hell I'm
going to hide them from her little nibbly fangs. Not to mention how
we're going to save our youngest daughter's Sylvanian Family members
form being chewed- bunnies, foxes, cats etc. And the doll I knitted
for youngest daughter's last birthday. What if....Oh lordy. It
reminds me of the day when one's adorable littly finally graduates
from crawling to standing up and making swipes at whatever takes her
fancy. With the big difference that you can't put a nappy on a puppy.

Thank heavens.

wir midder, da sea

2008-06-10T19:28:00.001+01:00

Watching the wake of the ferry as it drew me slowly away from Shetland on a beautiful blue evening I saw it as an unravelling lace from the ocean's bodice, a vast thread that stitched the two halves of the sea together. Neptune's zipper, if you will, unzipping me from the island. Leaving, rocked in the embrace of wir midder, the sea. Our mother, the sea from which all life came.

And I secretly long for one friend's hand waving from shore, but Noelle and I share a loathing of long drawn-out farewells, so it was a silent and unremarked leaving. I stayed out on deck till I was numb with cold, then I ate supper and went to my cabin. The sky outside my window was a pale, clear blue and in these days of the 'simmer dim', the light was unlikely to dim until much later. Then I remembered the dvd i'd requested from Medecins Frontieres called ' Invisibles' and slung it into the mac and had my consciousness raised, if raised is the right word.

I'm lying in comfort, safe on the sea, propped on pillows in my cabin on a gently rocking ship, fed, watered and on my way home to a family who love me, in a warm house with food a-plenty and few real worries. So - the film didn't raise my complacent consciousness. It was not raised. No. Probably 'prodded' , 'pricked' and 'shocked' would be closer to what I felt as I watched the series of short films by world-famous directors on the subject of people living in deepest poverty, ill-health and in war-torn lands.

And as I watched, I became acutely and uncomfortably aware of what a privileged and pampered life we lead over here in our first world fortress. I saw their faces, their tears, the pain engraved round their eyes and heard the terrible stories of the lives of child soldiers, war-victims, raped, pillaged people and young children who had little enough before their worlds fell in. People dying from curable diseases which aren't cured because big Pharma doesn't think the numbers would add up for the end-of-year reports to the shareholders ( big banks, small banks, tobacco companies, agri-businesses, oil magnates, pension funds, all the vested interests of the million shareholders and thus, ultimately, us. We, the shareholders profiting from the misery of these people.) And on and on, the films went, one after the other, the parade of beautiful faces, dignified faces, people with the same human needs as us, people just like us except...

Except we live in heaven and they live in hell. And, by and large, they are invisible to us. We don't see them. We completely forget as we go about our daily lives, that over on the other side of our garden planet are millions of people who would give everything to share in one tenth of what we have. Clean air, clean water, enough food to feed our children and ourselves. Roofs, shelter, schools, books and clean clothes.

And that's before you even begin to factor in the toys we love to own. We have so much. So much. If you feel like a wake-up call to your conscience, email Medecins sans Frontieres and ask them to send you a copy of the 'Invisibles'. Watch it, share it with as many like-minded people you can think of, and let's try and start a revolution. We first worlders have enough. We have more than enough. There's enough to go round if we all share.

land of air and sea

2008-06-06T18:05:00.004+01:00

Another day of fog, but experience has shown that while it may be a complete white-out in the South end, driving over to the West side sometimes brings a slight clearing of the skies.

At least, that theory held yesterday. Lerwick was thick with fog, so I spent the morning cooking a special meal for Noelle and Tommy (keema matar with Shetland lamb), then I turned off my pans, tucked the pudding (raspberry and strawberry roulade) into a paper and foil cradle, slung it in the fridge and headed out into the day.

I drove to the Dale of Walls, which was a river-cloven valley with irises and buttercups limning the water's edge and hills on each side speckled with little crofts; some in use, some tumbledown, all picture perfect. And all the while, as I headed seawards, the ridiculously theatrical silhouette of the island of Foula was rearing higher and higher out of the line of mist blurring the border between sea and sky. Dramatic? Oh, yes. Plus as many superlatives as there were flowers underfoot. So, I parked and headed off to the North, heading for Deep
Dale which is a huge cleft running east into the land. This is an utterly exquisite coastline - soft and grassy underfoot, covered in seapinks, wild orchids and cottongrass, and the edge of the cliffs undulating in a line as unpredictable as it was breath-taking. Almost as if the coastline had been drafted by a drunken architect, or perhaps it was more like one of those jigsaw pieces that refuse to be slotted into place, but has a fascinatingly convoluted profile. Damn this slow broadband, if ever there was a case for a photograph, this is the one. Words fail me.

I walked as far as I could see little blue 'access Shetland' signs nailed to posts and stiles, and then when they ran out, and I judged that it was time to turn round, I headed home, Deep Dale-less. ( Oh, okay there were some cows off in the distance, and I'm not brave enough to walk through fields of cows perched precariously on cliff edges. Actually, let's be honest here, I'm not brave enough to walk through any enclosure that has cow involvement, not after the night when I left an old studio of mine in darkness and discovered that its tiny front garden was crammed full of cows. And their calves. And when I opened the studio door, I was face-to-face with a bonsai stampede)

However, I digress. That was yesterday, the walk round the coast at Dale of Walls. Today, I thought I'd attempt to walk another part of the same coastline, and try another approach to the romantically named Deep Dale. With a name like that, I had to try. I decided to approach from the north and walk south to Deep Dale, thus avoiding fields of cows and hopefully finding a path that was liberally strewn with blue 'access Shetland' signs. For the first hour, all was perfect. Stunning coastline, even more seapinks, no cows, loads of blue signs and then...

Attack of the giant skuas. As I trekked towards a high lochin, a flock of these monsters rose up into the air, and my heart sank. Two of them, the outriders, were dispatched to see me off, and they did so with terrifying efficiency. My stick to hold above my head ( surrogate scalp, I'm told) was jammed in my rucksack, and when a giant skua is swooping down on you, trust me, you don't stop to fossick in your rucksack.

I legged it back the way I came, apologizing to the birds for disturbing their loch and trying (but failing) to send out the telepathically reassuring message of - feathered ones, fret not, I come in peace, honest, I haven't eaten an egg for ages - if you don't count the egg whites in last night's roulade, that is - I'm harmless, I'm an illustrator, I'm almost a sodding vegetarian ( if you discount last night's lamb) all I wanted to do was walk to Deep Dale...

They were having none of it. They saw me off their territory, and I had to retreat once more, Deep Dale-less. I have to concede. It belongs to the birds and the beasts, sea-girt and for now, impregnable.

fogbrain

2008-06-05T11:35:00.005+01:00

Shetland is blanketed in one of its summer fogs today. Just like it was yesterday and the two days before that. My walks up hill and down dale have been taking place in white-outs, in which everywhere looks exactly the same, but you keep on marching on in the hope that the fog might lift and whisk away to permit a view that you just know would be stunning if only you could see it.

I've been hunkering down in a variety of peat bogs, sand dunes and heather banks to do my lady watercolourist thing, but all that there is in my sketchbook for yesterday is a big blank page. Yesterday I caught a sense of just how dangerous it is to go a-wandering on cliffy coastal paths in the fog. Yesterday I might just have needed a change of underwear if I hadn't worked out how to use map and compass to navigate a tricky bit of coastline up at Eshaness.

Mary Blance and I wandered blithely along the cliff-top, cautiously admiring the deep, deep fissures cut into the cliffs at our feet. Fissures, or voes, made by the pounding of the sea on the ancient rocks of Eshaness. Some of the oldest rocks in the world are here, and it is a place of majestic, wild beauty which, on a clear day is as breathtaking as it is terrifying. Here, on the edge of the world, you can easily imagine that you stand on the dividing line between the known and the Abyss.

Yesterday, as we peered and oohed and ahhed, we were respectful of the edge, the drop, the exposure. The sea crashing down below, and the crumbly edges carpeted in sea-pinks, thrift and cotton grass. We admired that floral softness, blossoming for such a short season in contrast to the stony eternity of the rock's existence, predating us, and all our foolish human attempts to gain dominion in such a wild place.

We walked, then we turned to head back to the car, talking, talking, talking and assuming that we only had to reverse our path to bring us back to where we began. We noted the fact that the fog had thickened, but on we went. And on. Until we noticed that the little loch on our left wasn't the one we'd seen before, and if that was the case, which loch was it, and, um, where are we? To which the only answer we could find was ; in the mist. In featureless terrain with the possibility of the hole of Scraada opening up like a yawning mouth at out feet, so we had to be mindful of where our feet were, but also to keep a look out for the Edge. On we walked. Assuming that something familiar would hove to out of the fog.

Something didn't. On we went until I hauled out my compass, got a grip of myself, realised that as compass and map bearer it was Up To Me to get us out of this mess. We needed to be heading South West. We had, until then, been heading North East, convinced that we were going the right way. It turned out that we were a very, very long way from the car. Some of the way back involved Mary discovering just how woefully inadequate her walking boots were to the task of keeping the peat bog off her socks, but hey. Some of the way back involved my trying to sound like I knew what I was doing when inside myself I was full of fog and doubt and a worm of terror.

We made it back, obviously, but wiser by far. Hills kill. Fog confuses. Maps, compasses, good boots and decent weatherproof clothing can make the difference between being really lost, and being able to rescue ourselves.

future perfect

2008-05-31T16:22:00.003+01:00

I've seen the future, and it works. It's a hydrogen-fuelled car, where the hydrogen is made with the surplus energy ( after heating and lighting a large office/workshoplaboratory) generated by two wind turbines. So, technically, this futuristic vehicle is powered by wind. A car that runs on fresh air, and has h2o as its by-product after combustion. Oh. My. God. This might save us yet.

On the other hand, possibly due to our pesticide overuse and monoculture as an efficient way to grow vast fields full of profitable crops, our honey bees are dying off in droves, so, people, we might have cars and heat, but no food. Hmmmm.

Yesterday Noelle and I had a day on the island of Unst. We visited an amazing 'alternative' school in Uyeasound, went to Hermaness ( the most northerly point in Britain) and saw puffins galore, amnd then visited the Pure Project, makers of the world's first hydrogen car. Spent a heady two hours talking ( no, Debi, ranting) about peak oil, oil at $200 a barrel, the need for decent governance regarding climate change and how we're going to tackle it, the need for energy rationing and soon - like by the end of this year and other such full-on topics. It was amazing to meet with the co-designer of this immensely complex, yet simple hydrogen car, and not only to be able to understand him, but to actually feel that change is coming.

I so hope I'm not deluding myself. I mean, we've been here before. Remember that historic May morning when it all seemed soooo hopeful? Labour were in after umpty dreadful years of toryblah, and the morning news on BBC1 began with not the usual corporate muzak, but with David Bowie singing ch-ch-changes. All things seemed possible that morning. Change felt like it was just around the corner. And yes, I know the argument about how it's like trying to steer a cruise liner, and how it takes ages to change course, but somehow, I'm pretty sure that we don't have years left. I think if we don't get our climate act together ay ess ay pee, we're heading for extinction and catastrophe on an unimaginable scale.

On a far lighter note, I had a Shetland haircut. It took two hours ( !!!) but it looks pretty sharp. Gone is the Susan Sontag witchy intellectual look, and back is the bobbed fluff-brain. Ahhhhh, so much more mwah. Haven't actually washed it yet, so it will undoubtedly go into frizz hell thereafter, but just now it's sleek and swingy. Vanity is appeased, temporarily.

toot sill

2008-05-26T22:05:00.001+01:00

I've been getting my hands dirty with Shetland soil - weeding my
hosts' rose garden and fighting what I hope is a winning battle
against the pernicious creeping buttercup, which has always sounded
to me like a guerilla freedom-fighting cow, rather than a weed. Also
touched the Shetland sky and trucked up Ronas Hill on Saturday in the
good company of a friend from Shetland Arts, and we both remarked
upon the fact that the miles fairly fly by when you have a companion
to blether to. On Sunday I nearly made it to the top of Fitful Head
( the migraineur's summit) but ten feet off the summit, I was
dissuaded from climbing higher by a determined and scary Great Skua
( or Bonxie as they're called here)which divebombed me with
increasing ferocity and proximity until I had to turn back. so back
allll the waaaaay down to sea level and I went for a paddle in the
turquoise and icy waters of Quendale beach. Tucked myself up in a
sand-dune and read the Sunday papers and had a cup of tea - just like
a proper tourist.

Beautiful weather - sunny and chill, but on Saturday, in the odd
sheltered hollows that we found by the side of the many tiny lochs
which turn the landscape into lace, the sun was blissfully warm.
Still, it's more of a weatherbeating than tan that now has turned my
face even more wrinkled than usual. Sigh. None of the perfumes of
sweet Araby nor the diligent application of precious unguents have
made a blind bit of difference to the marks that Time has scribbled
all over my skin. I am rapidly approaching a prune-like state, which
is something that I manage to forget until confronted with the
evidence in the mirror at tooth-brushing time. Whereupon I leap
backwards from my reflection with a squeak of dismay.

Can this really be me?

I must learn not to mind. Most of me doesn't, because I fit myself
far better as the years go past. There's a kind of comfort inside my
own skin, most of the time. Well...except those times when I'm aware
that I've increased in girth, and discover that my clothes don't fit
and that realisation stupidly, still has the capacity to make me feel
grim. But doesn't stop my forays into the secret bar of Green &
Blacks tucked at the back of a kitchen cupboard. I think I need re-
programming. I need a brain-wipe in the chocolate- loving synapses.
Actually - my love of food generally makes it well-nigh impossible to
turn myself into a sylph. I'd hoped that the solitude of living on my
own again up here in Shetland would reduce me to monkish aescetism.
Alas - no. I have been cooking up a storm since I arrived here, with
the sole beneficiary of all this culinary largesse being myself. Last
night it was bouillebaisse ( the quick version) before that it was
coq au vin, the day before it was a puy lentil, red wine and chicken
stew...the problem is, I'm still, in my head, cooking for the family,
so the net result is that I end up eating the same thing three days
on the trot. And that is dull, dull, dull.

I even made bagels for the hillwalking at the weekend, and the first
thing I did on taking possession of this kitchen, was make a batch of
sourdough starter, which I turned into bread five days later. I'm a
hopeless case, I fear. Cooking is simply what I do between the hours
of five and seven each day. I have invited Mary Blance and her man
for tea next weekend, and already I'm planning pudding.

sixty degrees of chill

2008-05-19T11:57:00.003+01:00

Phwoarrr - it's cold up North. Like an idiot, I swung into summer mode at the first ray of sunshine, so consequently have packed for Shetland as if I was heading off to Biarritz. Oh, sigh. And I forgot to bring socks, except for my hillwalking ones which are vast hairy thick things for yomping up and down chilly hillies, and also my running socks about which, the less said, the better.

The rest of my island wardrobe is all floaty silk nonsenses or full-on hill kit with fleece and goretex. Nothing, but nothing in between. had to email home to say - please send socks. How sad is that, pray?

However, on balance - who cares? Socks? pffffff. I'm here and it's every bit as gorgeous as I remembered from last autumn and I feel completely at home. It's Monday morning and I'm sitting at a table and roughing out a new Mr Bear, I've got my mp3hifi belting out Faithless and lunch is about to fill the house with the smell of coq au vin because, dammit, my eldest daughter isn't here to disapprove of my odd forays into eating Dead Beast, and I wanted to make a comforting lunch for Noelle and i to ease us into the week.

Last night Noelle and Tommy made some amazing stew with Shetland lamb, which is a lamb like no other. Vegetarians, please turn away now. Sweet, tender and without any of that horrible background taste of lanoliny muttony greasiness. Haven't tasted lamb like it since I was on Crete as an art student. But sadly, I can't walk past the dear little white fluffy things with a clear conscience now. Not until I've done some months without having eaten lamb again...

My portable broadband dongle thing is working, but the connection speed is painfully s lll ooo w. Urrrgh. If anyone sends any photos, I'll be in trouble. consequently it takes forEVER to get onto any websites, and as for posting pictures myself while I'm here.....eeeeeee, fergeddit. shame though, especially once I get out there and get some miles on my boots. Oh, I can't wait.

Right. work to do. Less chat. more pencils on paper. Laters amigos...

the prodigal returns

2008-05-16T22:11:00.000+01:00

It's growing dark outside on the sea, but I'm currently on the boat's
wrong side to be able to see the lights vanishing off to portside, so
I'm not sure if we're still tacking up the East coast of Scotland
heading for North by northwelcome, or if we're actually out at sea.

I'm going back to Shetland, bless my great good fortune. Can't wait.
Can hardly believe that I'm being given the chance to come back here.
Or there, since technically, I'm not there yet. And yes, it's still
grey out there, just like it was back last August/September/October.
But hey - I have high hopes that I will see a few sunny Shetland
days. After all, I have to see the fabled 'Simmer Dim' when it hardly
gets dark, when the sun barely shaves the horizon with its lowest
curve before heading straight back up into the blue heaven again.

At least, that's the theory.

Off out in the darkening, there's the silhouette of a huge ship with
all its lights on. Fishing? Freighting? Tall as a skyscraper, a vast
chunk of metal drawing across the surface of a dark blue sea. It's
all so like rewinding a well-loved tape, I'm working on another
hideous edit of another Witch Baby story, but sadly, further back in
the editorial process - this is Witch baby 2 v2.1, so if past history
is anything to go by, I still have many grey hairs to go. I don't
want to waste my time on Shetland on cudgelling a reluctant m.s. into
shape - but I'll have to do some work on it. Like I did last time I
was here. Plus begin roughs for a Mr Bear picture book, think long
and hard about 'Stormy Weather' for Bloomsbury and put together a
proposal for Mary at DK ,and, and.

What do I really want to do? Drink sundowners with Noelle and Tommy.
Run Quendale beach. Go back to the vicious cardio class at the gym in
Lerwick. Go to Makkin' and Yakkin'. Go back to Oyeasound and cross to
the island. Go to Eshaness and take loads of photos. Say hello to
Harry and Mandy, wherever they are. Swim that beach. Have a long walk
with Donald. Play my fiddle better, but not always on my ownsome.
Play with other people. ( never easy for an only child) Draw some big
smudgy b/w things for future paintings. Lose some of the blubber
( mental and physical) Visit Mr Stewart the fiddle maker. Laugh till
I have to leave the room. Only connect.

So, yeah. Should get that all done in the first week.

warm drafts

2008-04-29T14:24:00.002+01:00

Well, 'tis done, but don't tell my editor. i've finished the first draft of Witch Baby and Me Mk2. at this stage, I have no idea whatsoever if it's a pile of dung or a nifty little book. I'm too close to it to tell. That's why I need a few weeks of editorial grace to achieve the requisite distance from it, in order to be able to come back to it with a reasonably savage red pen and do some of my editor's slash and burning myself.

Such a good feeling, though. That little pile of pages, all of them covered in raw story. Also heard that there are contracts out there in the ether for more picture books - blank contracts, ye gods, so that makes me feel pretty good. although i seem to have some kind of Scottish streak, not a Calvinist streak because I don't think I'm that kind of a gal, but mean? thrifty? Ahhh, there's the word, thrifty - right, a thrifty streak which makes me feel distinctly uneasy at being paid before I do any work. I'd rather have the texts written before I sign the contracts.However, that hasn't really been the case too often of late - with the exception of The Trouble With Dragons, everything else has been the subject of a multibook contract waaaay in advance of being fully written.

Which is all fine and dandy if the book under contract behaves itself and the writing isn't too hideously difficult, but if it all starts going pear-shaped, then the multibook deal begins to feel like a millstone. and hey, if the writer takes absolutely years to honour her side of the deal, the advance begins to look niggardly because inflation has snuck up on it and rendered it worthless.

I mean, when I signed the contracts for 4 Witch babies, diesel was only 93p a litre. Only! bloody hell, we're fast approaching the time when it would be cheaper to tip single-estate, virgin, hand-pressed, unfiltered organic olive oil into our tanks. Some more unleaded on your raddichio, pet?

isn't every day Earth day?

2008-04-22T16:51:00.003+01:00

Happy Earth Day.
I believe that every little thing we can do counts, so today
I didn't use a car
I signed a petition to stop a dam being built in Patagonia
I didn't eat meat
and I tried, but failed to drag the words of a new picture book about climate change out of my subconscious. They're in there, but can I access them? Pffffffff.

the cruellest month

2008-04-17T16:58:00.003+01:00

No fooling. It's freezing outside, despite the springlike appearance of the tender pink blossom on the cherry tree.I can see snow on the Lammermuirs in the same frame as this pink effusiveness, and the air blows straight from Vladivostok. Tonight, I finally dared do a little light fiddle playing after two months off due to incipient r.s.i in left arm. Wrapping my fingers round my fiddle's neck causes my hand to start up a dull shriek as it goes into a cramp, but I'm so keen to keep on playing that I'm going to force it a bit this week and see what happens.

Such fun. I seem to have new confidence, because I'm attempting loads of jigs and reels that I didn't dare try before. The poppy reel has weirdish timing and looks like a dense page of black-noted difficulty, but it's a rollicking good tune, and I'm determined to become fluent in it. Da full rigged ship is one of Fiddler's Bid's tunes, and having already heard it on Da farder ben da welcomer really helped my interpretation of its lilting rhythm. There's a bellying swell to the tune that could, with the slightest stretch of the imagination, be seen as a musical interpretation of the wind filling a ship's sails.

And now, dammit, I have a new earworm to drive me completely bananas while I run.You know those tunes that stick in your head and replay endlessly, especially when you're engaged in some meaningless task with repetitive movements? Running fits the bill as one of those repetitive things - it's nothing if not coma-inducingly boring, but I don't mean that in a bad way - just that I seem to veg out while I'm pounding the paths and byways of East Lothian doing my half hour stint.

I ran through a deep puddle last time I was out, and mud oozed into my trainers which are now grey instead of white-ish. As were my socks and my feet underneath. On the way back from this run, as I was slowing and cooling down, I spotted some wrecked old fenceposts lying in the hedgerow. Having burned our way through our winter's supply of dry firewood, I'm now always on the lookout for wood to burn in the woodburning stove until the sun finally starts to warm our world up a bit. So I hauled all the dirty old fenceposts back to my car which was parked in the middle of a very modern and squeaky clean housing estate at the start of the railway walk where I'd been running. I loathe housing estates like this one - utterly prissy and up itself and liberally dotted with little f.o.a.d signs pointing out that these premises are protected by sentinel/ armedguardian/ urukhai/ kraken security as if every single person wandering its streets who isn't lucky enough to be a resident, must, therefore be criminally-minded. With my post-running bright red face, sweaty hair and clothes covered in either mud or leafmould, I realised that I didn't exactly look like a vanilla citizen, and when I ran into our old postman from many moons past, I could see that he wondered what the heck I was doing, dressed like a tramp and lugging an armload of old fenceposts along the street.

The wood thing is becoming a bit of an obsession. We heat our house and all our domestic hot water with the woodburner, so no wood equals no heat and no baths. Normally, there's enough wood in four woodsheds to carry our house through the winter. But this year, winter has stretched from October through to April, and we've run out. We've scoured beaches, raked through woods for dead trees, and every time we see any wood lying unclaimed, we stop and claim it. The girls are utterly mortified by our scavenger behaviour, which is entirely understandable when everybody else's parents look as if they've just stepped out of the hairdresser's, and theirs looks like they have not only been dragged through a hedge backwards, but stopped halfway and tried to drag the hedge home with them.

hams of steel

2008-04-15T23:16:00.004+01:00

How do they do that? Run for twenty six miles non-stop? God - it's so impressive I just want to lie down and weep. In these parts, I'm still limping my way through re-learning how to run my piddly little 5ks four times weekly, and even with such a small distance, I find the going is incredibly tough. At the moment I've got to the stage in my training where I run for thirteen minutes, walk fast for two and then repeat, but even that has me feeling like a dung-beetle pushing my vast ball of crap uphill. All too solid the flesh, and none of it exactly feeling like it was built for speed. All of it creaking and groaning and whining -do we have to? aren't we there yet? And the cold and wet weather turning my preferred track through woods and fields at back of our house into a black and sticky mudslide, which means until it dries up, I have to go road-running which feels hideously public, not to mention fume-laden. I'm not a lycra-clad godess, alas, just a middle-aged woman who'd really rather prefer if nobody had to be forced to witness her heaving and gasping round her five ks's like a geriatric grampus. Whatever a grampus might be...Also, tarmac is very unforgiving to the aging underfoot compared to the path I've been enjoying through trees and mud which has been my usual training ground. I use the word 'training' loosely, although I'm going to have to set myself some real training goals before I die of boredom. Actually, I also use the word 'enjoying' loosely ; enjoyment tends to hit me all at once when I'm standing in the shower at the end of a run, although there are moments when there's a serendipitous alignment between the music on my i-pod and the cadence of my running - mind you, the sun has to be in the sign of the Nike and the moon in Diana, and there has to be an 'r' in the month, but when all these conditions are met - yeah, it's enjoyable.

But those brave marathon runners, all 35,000 of them; there's something about the London marathon that brings me almost to tears. This year they ran in rain, hail and very occasional spells of wintry sunshine. To my relief, I saw that some of the runners do actually slow to a walk, but most of them keep pounding the tarmac, step by hard-won step. So to all of them, the walkers, the runners, the fast and the slow and the quietly determined in between - respect. I am in awe of your achievements. It was, as always, a joy to watch.

Today, thanks to Michael encouraging me to take some time out for myself, I managed to add on a week to my Shetland trip. YIPPEEEE! This means that I'll have a week to walk the beaches, paint and recharge my batteries and get out there with camera, sketchbook and eyes wide open. Also I'll be able to revisit some of the places I saw last year, and see them in a different and hopefully even more clement season. Uyeasound, Muckle Flugga, Quendale, Ronas Hill...and maybe if I'm feeling suitably brave ( or insanely optimistic), I'll even get into the sea and swim. Woo hoo - bracing, what?

men in woolly skirts

2008-04-10T21:52:00.002+01:00

It's a first for me.

Yesterday, I took my youngest son to be fitted for a kilt. We spent months dithering over what to buy our boys for their 21st birthdays - both turning 21 this March within three weeks of each other, so the family coffers have taken a wee bit of a battering. Step-son wanted some obscure bit of music making electronic kit, so that was duly ordered off the net and arrived and was wrapped and handed over, but frankly, both his dad and I are none the wiser. We're not entirely sure what the heck it was that we bought. Suffice to say, step-son was delighted with it. Whatever it is...

Youngest son was another matter. Not big on possessions, and dark green to boot, trying to get him to work up any enthusiasm for anything in the 21st birthday gift line was well-nigh impossible. However, inspiration struck one day last month when one of youngest daughter's friend's parents was round dropping or picking up her child and in conversation I mentioned how hard we were finding the choosing of a good gift to mark a beloved son's birthday. She said 'why not a kilt?'

Perfect. Why not indeed? It wasn't despoiling the planet, it's made by an individual artisan, it's part of a historical tradition, it's a fantastically practical garment and it ought to last my son for most of his adult life. Better than a watch, an mp3 player or any bit of modern and breakable, soon-outdated kit - a kilt may not be the most exciting thing ever to receive as your 21st birthday present, but I have the suspicion that it will grow on him. When we went to the kiltmaker's, she had a kilt-in-progress on her worktable, so we could see what a beautiful thing a handmade kilt is. All hand-stitched, robustly made, and as youngest son's girlfriend and I both agreed, the boy has the perfect thighs to carry it off . Must be all that football...oaks come to mind. He also did not want a big fuss made for a birthday party, so in the end we just had all of us round a table and invited his girlfriend too. I made my first sachertorte for his cake, but again, he didn't want candles and fuss, so we didn't do any of that stuff. It was a sensationally good cake, though. Phwoarrrrr. And the boy ate the last slab today and practically had to go and lie down in a darkened room to recover. Dense, rich and chocolatey, I could only manage slivers at a time, but my son's calorie consumption rate is prodigious to say the least.

He's gone now. Back to Aberdeen till the summer, with exams looming and football matches in the offing. Not to mention what Michael irreverently refers to as his 'tin man'. This is a triathalon involving a lot of swimming, running and cycling. Tin? Sounds like kryptonite to me, but what do I know? I'm a zillion miles off being able to do a triathalon. This weekend is the london marathon, and just thinking about it makes me feel inadequate. I'm still slowly working my way back to being able to run four times a week in easy, incremental stages. Actually, not easy at all. Wheezy and hot-making despite the rather arctic temperatures when I set out.

But the running is great. This time last year I was growing more and more injured while running, but I kept on going, convinced that it was just a passing phase.Now, a year on, I'm a lot more cautious. There's been a lot of rain recently, so the wee track in the woods is a quagmire. Tomorrow I'm going to try the old railway walk and see what that's like for running. Only problem is that I'll have to cycle to the start of it, and it's been months since I took my bike out. Urrrgh.

The only problem with the running programme is that once I've done my run and showered and am finally at my desk, trying to write 1000 words or whatever I'm aiming for each day, all I want to do is put my head down and snooze.It's not that I'm knackered - heck no, not me, see me, see bouncy - it's just that post-running I'm so relaxed my spine has all the tensile strength of a strand of overcooked linguine. But my inner personal trainer will not let me off for so much as a single training session, so tomorrow, out I go come rain, hail, shine or probably all three if the past week's weather is indicative.

Despite this, I can't sleep at night. I wake around 4 a.m. and lie there scratchy of eyeball and somewhat hacked off at being awake. If only I could toss off a small literary masterpiece while I lie there sleepless, but instead, I put the time to good use and have myself a little pre-dawn Fret and Nail-Gnaw. Then, twenty minutes before I'm supposed to be awake, I fall deeply, dribblily, deeply-dreamily asleep. Actually, asleepdoesn't even come close. Let's try coma instead. That's what I fall into.

After three - horns IN

2008-04-06T22:34:00.002+01:00

Nearly died of shock in garage forecourt today after filling up gas-guzzling behemoth. Jeez. When did it suddenly get to costing nearly seventy quid just to fill my tank? Last time I did that it cost a mere ( sic ) fifty. Crikey. Will walk more. Will have to cut down on going to the dreaded gym in the morning - that's about the furthest I go regularly - a round trip of about eighteen miles. I guess I'll have to learn to love running closer to home, up the track through the woods.

Little by little and bit by bit, all the things I used to take for granted ( meat, diesel, going to the gym, trips to the shops for one forgotten item like a pint of milk or a newspaper etc etc ) are being slowly excised from my life. This is no bad thing, but it does take some getting used to. Feckless consumer wretch that I am, one of the things I find it hardest to give up is my Boden habit. These days the catalogue falls through the door and I have to sling it in the recycle bin before I am seduced by the glorious clothes within.

Yeah - the belts are tightening and the horns? Drawn in so hard my cheeks are sucked in. I keep doing sums on the back of my bank statement trying to work out how much longer we can make my teeny royalty cheques stretch. I hate living like this, but I feel bizarrely at home being skint since most of my adult life has been spent doing sums on the back of envelopes. It's a drag, but it's familiar.

Been beavering away on the story for Witch Baby II. My beautiful, wildly extravagant baby blue notebook with airmail paper leaves is filling up nicely with page after page of inky storytelling. There's something so deeply satisfying about carving out a tale in one of these beautiful journal/notebooks ( I'm damned if I'm going to name the makers) that even if my day has been a complete pig, I can be soothed by casting a glance over what I've managed to write. Even if it's drivel, it looks like the writings of a Real Writer as opposed to whatever terrible name I'm calling myself depending on what sort of a day I've had.

Snow fell this morning, and we had my eldest daughter's Young Man over for the day. He brought a beautiful loaf of bread that he'd baked himself, still with the warm breath of the oven on it. What a lovely gift. Raisin and fennel bread. The boy is such a star. And only thirteen years old. After dinner, I drove him home ( very slowly - with diesel at seventy quid a tank if I could've pedalled him home in a rickshaw, I would have, but he lives uphill in the Lammermuirs, on the very same farm I used to live on in another lifetime)

It was decidedly weird, driving on a road I used to know backwards, being the first car to leave tyre tracks in the snow, like I used to twelve years ago, when I used to drive back from the airport after a long day in London. driving back through ( then) snowdrifts, back to a silent and cold house where my ( then) husband was fast asleep, caring little whether I made it back home safely through the blizzards or not. That sounds rather pathetic and self-pitying; it's not meant to be, just a statement of fact. One of the facts that made it all the easier to leave when I finally did.

These days, if I was late home, driving through a blizzard, Michael would be out there in the cold with a torch, shovelling snow and phoning to check when my plane touched down and therefore when he could reasonably expect me to make it through the drifts. Mind you, in these carbon-aware days, I would have taken the train. So yes. The lack of money may be a familiar drudge, but there's a whole world of difference between being hard up and unhappily married, and being hard up but part of a loving, supportive partnership. I daily give thanks...

x marks the spot

2008-03-21T14:51:00.003Z

This is where I am. The chair looks comfy, but as I get older, despite spending a fortune of Snap Crackle and Pop with a horrible chiropractor, my neck hurts like billy-o when I sit driving the desk. There's a drawing board/drafting table out of range of the photo, for when I draw, but since I'm in a writerly phase right now, I thought that the writing desk was germane. The bunny in pink is Willa from Joyce Dunbar's book Tell Me Something Happy Before I go to Sleep which I illustrated waaaay back when I was pregnant with my youngest daughter. Got so big I could barely reach the watercolour paper with my brushes and I was parcelling the artwork up to post to London when I was in labour. The black lizard/salamander is Orynx from my novel Deep Trouble, the long huge poster of the fox mummy and her child is from my best book ever called 'No Matter What' and if you've got very sharp eyes you'll just be able to see the sheriff's badge pinned to the wall just below the foxes, on the bottom left hand corner of them in fact. That badge is one of my most precious possessions and was given to me by a lovely sheriff in Kansas right at the very end of a book tour celebrating No Matter What being the book chosen for the inaugural Kansas Library's One Book One State initiative. By the time the sheriff barrelled into the diner where I was eating a late supper before falling into bed and then flying home the next day, I was so trashed that my voice had disappeared. What a tour that was. So moving, so heartbreaking and so life-affirming at the same time.

My inspiring view is out to the woodpile and, you can't see, but I can, to the compost heap. I could, if I turned my chair through 90 degrees, look out on sky and hills, but d'you know what? I prefer my wood and compost.And right now, today, i'm looking out on hailstones.

Happy Easter!

the call of small islands

2008-03-19T18:34:00.007Z

The medium of blogging, or this particular aspect of the medium is driving me completely nuts. I would blog far more often, but hell, I'm an illustrator, and I want to be able to illustrate my posts without undergoing the mother of all technology crises every time I try to make my blog look a tad more personal. One of the downsides of working for myself is that there's no I.T. department to call when things go wrong. If it's broke, I have to fix it. just as there's no lovely person to come in and clean up my mess in the studio, make my train reservations, plan my travel, invoice my clients and wrap my artwork. On the plus side, we don't have a vast wages bill at the end of the month - there's only Michael and I to pay, and heck, we don't earn much anyway.

So that's all right then.

Lordy, the Money Hum hasn't eased a whole lot. This year is shaping up to be the year we got Reality. Oil is going through the roof, the city is in turmoil, food is going up in price in a rather scary fashion and the icecaps are melting far faster than anticipated. Reasons to be cheerful? Well, spring is hard on the heels of winter, and that is always something to gladden the heart. Primroses, buds, blue skies, blackbirds hauling unfortunate worms out of newly turned earth - all of these are immensely comforting markers that make me believe that the good times will roll again, but perhaps not the good times that are predicated on commerce in all its multiple manifestations. The photo above was taken on the 12th February on the island of Mull on one of those days that are a gift from the weather to the Celts. It was a golden day - we were all gilded by it.

We walked round the coast, puddled in rock pools, ate a picnic by some vast boulders studded with uncut raw sapphires, took photographs of the wild goats whose coastline it really was, talked, laughed and all the time, Mull was driving a deep hook into us all with its immeasurable beauty.I swear, if we can do it, we're going to find a way to live there.

For now, though, we have to keep afloat. We're running an exceedingly tightwadded ship right now, and at times it can feel a bit constrained. I mean, it's not as if we ever did have much of an extravagant lifestyle - rarely going out, neither of us having expensive habits, both, in truth being rather boring old farts whose idea of a good time was a good book, a dish of decent olives and a well-mixed G&T. We still have that, even in these days of big economies. There's a big part of me that relishes making a little go a long way. A part that remembers that most of my life was spent with not very much money. In truth, I'm happier with less, if that doesn't sound utterly bizarre. I found myself doing housewifely things like mending a linen sheet by turning the outsides into the centre and sewing them together. I also made pillowcases from an shredded lined sheet. less you think I've completely lost my marbles and mojo simultaneously, can I just say in my own defence that I love sleeping on real linen sheets, but to replace out over 100 year old ones would cost over £400 per sheet.

That's why I was being so unaccustomedly hausfrau-ish. And it felt good. it felt like I was following that maxim of recycle, reuse and reduce. I felt slightly better about my wicked carbon-snorting ways when I was mending and making do. God. Must be getting old, huh? Nearly came to blows with a work colleague over my recent quasi-conversion to vegetarianism ( I love meat, but I now hardly eat it for several reasons too tedious to relate) and general attempt to live a more carbon-lite life. Said colleague snorted rather impatiently - oh, for God's SAKE, you buy cheap food don't you? To which I replied - never, I just tend not to buy meat because the decent organic stuff is so very expensive - but she interrupted to enquire nastily if 'we' ( I think she meant the Scots as a whole) were not so backwards that we had a Waitrose nearby. Waitrose being the most expensive supermarket in the UK. This wouldn't have been so bad if I hadn't been telling her how utterly broke we are. She was basically doing a Marie Antoinette, only instead of carolling let them eat cake, she was saying haven't you tried sourcing your asparagus and shitakes at Waitrose? Dwahling.

Actually, no. We shop locally. It does rather undo all the good of trying to buy organic and not from too far away and seasonal and, and, and if you then tack on a huge mileage to drive to the nearest Waitrose. Besides, read my twitching red lips, We Are Currently In A State Of Fiscal Frugality. We're enjoying finding new ways with beans, lentils, rice, cabbage and potatoes. I can say with hand on heart, my beanburgers are the business. I can cook meals of such meat-free perfection that you wouldn't notice the lack of dead beast. I'm amazed, myself. I would never have thought it possible that I could live without my slabs of high-class protein, but you live and learn.

everything is (un)illuminated

2008-02-05T21:24:00.000Z

We seem to have reached that point in the calendar where the true awfulness that is February finally begins to kick in. Boy, has it kicked in. Not only is our household utterly stony broke but also, all around , things are going on the fritz. First it was the cd player, then the amplifier, then the sub-woofer that throbs and booms under my desk in the studio, then the washing machine refused to spin and yesterday my printer/fax/scanner combo demanded a new print cartridge ( I took out a second mortgage and robbed a bank and managed to get it what its little heart desired but I might as well have saved myself the effort) before finally sending up a little message on its screen which ( I swear) read like the digital equivalent of f.o.a.d - at which point I gave up on it.

It's unplugged and awaiting execution. Nope. I will not be granting it any last requests. A pauper's unmarked grave awaits.

Meanwhile, the only way I can send pictures/roughs down to London is to photograph them, download the photos onto i-photo and then email them. In winter light, you can imagine just how crappy they look. Actually, you don't have to imagine how crappy it looks - you can see for yourself. However, it's a rough for the cover of Witch Baby, and it does the job just fine, if rough(ly), I think. So, to add to the ongoing nightmare of coming up with a workable cover design, I have no fax or scanner with which to send images of possible workable cover designs. And no moolah with which to buy a replacement. Urrrgh.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, I'm having a ridiculously good time doing the black and white illustrations for Witch Baby. Some of the pictures I'm really proud of, some of them have taught me more about drawing than I've learned in the past five years. I think what's happening here is that I'm s-t-r-e-t-c-h-i-n-g my ability to draw by being forced to work exclusively in black and white. Heck, I've never worked through a whole book's worth of illustrations in black and white before - with the exception of the little chapterheads for the Pure Deads and Deeps, and they're more decorative than illustrative.

So. This is different, and exciting and makes me really look forward to each day instead of dragging my heels and trying to find a million other things to do rather than Work. And in these difficult times, work that engages and enlightens and entertains is a Very Good Thing.

do not adjust your set

2008-01-29T21:49:00.000Z

and please fasten your seatbelts...we are currently experiencing some e-turbulence. Why the heck I'm incapable of uploading trimmed and perfect photos to exactly the spot on my blog where I want them to go, as opposed to where some insane logic-gate deep inside the Blogger interface has decreed they will go, I'll never know, but for what it's worth - I'm so sorry you have to endure my technical ineptitude. Yes, I know there are two versions of the same picture. And yes, I know it relates to something at the end of this post. God. I'm having a bad electrical goods day, okay? Pass the axe, Eugene. My brand-new and wondrous studio subwoofer's gone on the fritz, as have the household amp and cd player and all of this is making me think that last week's rolling power outages have killed a lot of our electrical equipment, despite things being plugged in via surge protectors. Is this part of a new future in which we slowly and agonizingly wean ourselves off all things electric? And if so, why couldn't it have been boring stuff like the vacuum cleaner and the iron rather than the sodding hi-fi? Urrrrgh. Or might it be that Mercury is in retrograde and that's what's wrong? Peace and love and pass the healing crystals, man.

Tomorrow, the vatman cometh, and due to the hi-fi pox or Mercury-induced vapour fits I won't be able to send deep sub-woofy vibrations up through the soles of his feet as he pores over my vat records. Muttering blackly to himself as he inputs stuff into his calculator and frowns. Meaningfully. What a fun job that must be. NOT.

And what a humourless bunch Customs and Excise are. What fun we shall both have tomorrow when he nit-picks through the last three years of numbers I have diligently crunched on the government's behalf and I sit nearby, on standby in case he wants to interrogate me as to why I thought that three bags of Smarties, a Chris Stout CD and a cajun chicken wrap were vat-able expenses. I have to be there while he disembowels my business. I imagine I'll not be concentrating properly on my wee black and white illustrations for Witch Baby. Not with The Suit Of Menace muttering in a corner of my studio.

God. Why me, lord? Why two 'random' investigations within three years? I don't know a single other author who's had to go through this and those fellow writers with whom I've raised the thorny question now appear to regard me as a contagious vatplague carrier.

Popular, I ain't.

Anyway. by way of light relief, here's last week's work - an illustration of one of Amnesty International's Declaration of Human Rights. It's a children's book to be published in December to raise funds for Amnesty by selling the book and also by a charity auction of all the artwork from the book. My page was the declaration about being able to think what you like, say what you think and share those thoughts with other people. Which is a great idea if you can get away with it, but in my experience, is tantamount to career suicide in certain circles. My lips are sealed. Mmmmhmmm, wild horses, mffle pflffle.

Fiddle lurrrrve

2008-01-24T19:46:00.000Z

The fiddling is progressing nicely, I think. The neighbourhood cats have grown bored with singing in sympathy and my family have managed to get their synchronized winces almost under control. I did have a fairly cringe-making play with a good friend who can play fiddle beautifully ( despite not having picked one up for seven years ) when I tried to play alongside her, I sounded utterly godawful. She was too kind to wince, or fall on my throat with a Stanley blade to ensure my future silence but merely played on, in a deeply capable fashion. With twiddly bits and vibrato, and the odd lighthearted - hmm, we'll just try that again, shall we? -when the correct thing to say was Debi, put that bloody fiddle back in its case and for the good of mankind, take up macrame instead.

I sounded horribly out of tune, wince-makingly dire, in fact. I could barely cope with the realization of how crappily I was playing, but it was the first time for, er, thirty three years ( aaaaarrrrrghhhh) that I've played with another real, live person rather than a recording. But hey, nothing that a concentrated period of playing scale after scale won't cure. Like thirty three more years of practice and I might be getting somewhere. When my good and kind fiddle-playing friend left, I spent the next two hours playing and playing and playing, to try and salvage some possibility that I might be able to make a sound that was, in even a small way, tuneful.

I did have one of those rare moments of utter stringed bliss this morning, playing along with a Peatbog Faeries track, for some reason it suddenly took off and achieved altitude with what felt like little effort on my part. I flew. The notes came by themselves and for a brief five minutes, I was exalted.

Tomorrow, I'm heading off early to the shores of Loch Lomond to take part in a Babies & Music day. Whatever that may be...I'm not planning on playing music, haven't actually been invited to do so, but I will be reading some of my books to very small people which should be a riot. I will put my fiddle in the back of the car, though. Just in case. There was mention of a mini-ceilidh for tots, and that has distinct possibilities. And it's Burn's Day, and that always makes people slightly more open to all things heederum hoderum.

The pins are back in gainful employment as well - I'm knitting a hat with earflaps for our youngest daughter - one that won't get her teased in the playground, but which will keep her warm through this rather arctic spell of weather we're enjoying. This is the second time I've knitted it - first time round it was waaaaaaay too big, and rather than hand it over promising that she'd grow into it ( that is, if she grew up to weigh ninety stone), I decided to rip it all back ( small choking sobs) and start again. Should be done by the end of the weekend. It's lovely yarn- a dark grey chunky marled wool, with details picked out in one of those weird synthetic fluffy yarns which were all the rage for scarf-knitting a few years back. The syntho-fluff is in bright, hot colours - pinks and golds and bronzes, which look very fine against the grey marl. And I think I've managed to use syntho-fluff in sufficiently small quantities to showcase its rather weird beauty which is lost when it's used to the exclusion of any other yarn.

Right. Must go and have a wardrobe crisis. What to wear for a January day with babies in a vast draughty youth hostel on the shores of Loch Lomond?*

Later - Idiotically, moron here wore a woolly sweater which more than lived up to its name. Somehow I managed to forget that I heat up bigtime when reading to and talking with vast hordes of children. And I'm not exaggerating. I had over seventy babies plus their parents.YIKES!!!

sealed and delivered

2008-01-15T21:36:00.000Z

The dragons are now officially on their way. Sarah loved them. Val
loved them. Emma loved them. I left them behind in Sarah's office at
Bloomsbury and we went out for an unbelievably early lunch. I was the
only one drinking, but I offer by way of excuse the fact that I was
still feeling distinctly travel-sick from the journey down. God knows
why, but early morning trains make me want to throw up. I have to do
labour breathing for the first two hours or else it's a short trip to
the big china telephone and a reacquaintance with whatever I had for
dinner the night before. Joy. So my lunchtime g&t was medicinal,
right? It settles the stomach in a far more pleasant fashion that
Andrews Liver Salts or, urgh, shudder, that hideous Italian digestif
called something like Rabarbero (?)

Anyway. My beautiful book is safe in the hands of its publisher. Yo -
Dragons! I wandered off to the National Portrait Gallery and spent a
few hours with the Tudors marvelling at the pomp and opulence of all
those kingly and queenly ruling classes. Then I walked to the tube
and endured a short and brutal hurtle through the damp and dirty
underbelly of the Capital. God - I so loathe the Underground, but
can't afford taxis and don't know London well enough to walk. I feel
I should be having a wild celebration, treating myself to at least
dinner on the train with a spot of champagne to send my dragons on
their way, but, d'you know what? That would be Old Dragon behaviour.
In my new improved incarnation as a globally responsible citizen
( you, Boy, yes you, stop snorting at the back , I know I'm not
perfect and I've got some huge carbon-guzzling wrinkles to iron out,
but I'm working on them, right?) I ate my vegetarian supper and then
got on with putting together a slideshow based round the making of
the whole book. I've got a talk to do at the National Library of
Scotland and they suggested that I might put together a PowerPoint
presentation to illustrate my talk. Now this kind of facility with
technology is something I've successfully managed to avoid for...oh,
all my life but I thought that I'd better make some kind of attempt
to pretend that I am a joined up 21st C citizen rather than a woad-
slathering Luddite with Neanderthal tendencies...

Sadly, I couldn't find a pattern or a recipe for PowerPoint, so have
had to cobble together something on i-photo which took the better
part of six hours, but hey, that's what train journeys are for,
right? Fingers crossed that cross-platform functionality is part of
the whole i-photo schtick. If not, well heck. Right now, all I want
is home, bath and bed. It's been an insanely long day and it's not
over yet. And the on-train wi-fi isn't allowing me to send messages,
only receive them, so this post and the previous one will have the
wrong time and date on them. But who cares, huh? A post is a post no
matter when it's datestamped.

Delivering the dragons

2008-01-15T09:40:00.000Z

This post comes from an early morning ( oh, my lord, how early was this?) train whizzing down the length of Britain. The dragon artwork is all done and currently tucked into a portfolio on a rack over my head and I'm sitting here hoping that it will be loved to bits by Sarah at Bloomsbury, and also that it will contribute in some small way to the general effort to raise awareness that we need to Change Our Wicked Ways. No, that's not true. I hope it will make a big impact, because i'm enough of an ancient hippy to believe that you can save the planet.

If I had a banjo, I'd go ker-twannnga, ker-twonnng oh youuuuu gotta ch-ch-ch-change youuuuur wicked ways, but to the immense relief of my fellow-commuters, I don't and I won't. It's going to be bloody awful coming back home without the artwork. This is crazy, I know, but in a way it's like seeing a child off to make its own way in the world - you're chuffed to bits that you've raised him so well that he can pursue an independent life, you're deeply proud of the fine, upstanding person he has become but the holehis going will make in your life is a big one. And you know that he won't phone home for months. And with books, they don't phone home either. In fact, you hand them in and nothing happens for months and months. This one won't be published till next Sep/Oct....and my studio will be empty of beautiful dragon artwork and, in truth, a total shit-heap because I've been so frantically busy finishing the Dragons, that I've been even more of a slob than normal.

And, boy, is that saying something.

The last time I handed in a book to Bloomsbury was way back, nine or ten years ago with 'No Matter What'. I blush to recall what I said to their sales team as the cooed over the artwork. Nope, I won't tell you, but bizzarrely, arrogant monster that I was, subsequent events proved me right. Sort of. This time, I have far less confidence - not in the book, but in the world into which my book is going. I'm not even sure if picture books have the weight they used to. I walk into bookstores and see piles of arch, tongue-in-cheek, clever books that don't appear to have any emotional 'heart' at all. I'm not very good at those. These days, I have a tendency to write books I can barely read out loud without choking up.

Maybe it's my age and stage. Certainly I feel like I'm going through a transition phase in my own life - the mirror tells me that I may feel all of twenty inside, but outside, I'm becoming invisible and middle-aged. This is inevitable, but with this discovery comes a chill wind blowing back from the future, a wind that reminds me that nothing should be taken for granted, never a day should pass without showing those I love how much I love them, and that every day has to be seized, savoured and lived in an awake state. I'm kind of hoping that at some point I'll reach a plateau of acceptance of my own mortality and find an ability to live in accord with the slipping, changing nature of human ageing.

I wouldn't have it any other way - I will not be beating a path to Aubrey de Grey and his dodgy neo-con chums who are ploughing millions into research for how to live way beyond our allotted span. I don't want to live longer than those I love, I just want it all to slow down a bit - the pace seems to accelerate, the children sprout and move away just as I'm getting to know the adults within the babies we raised.

And let's be honest here - where the fuck did all that crepe round my neck come from? Jeez. It'll be liver spots and rheumy eyes soon. Anyone sees me surreptitiously wiping the sides of my mouth with a tissue has permission to shoot me. So far, no-one has actually thrown up at the sight of me in gym kit, but I'm guessing it won't be long before that happens. One of my sweet little children said to me the other day that from behind I looked like a girl. I'm such a paranoiac that I can't take that as a compliment - I'm too busy hearing the implied - but when you turned round - crikey, it was like night of the living dead meets the return of the mummy. Har de harrr. And then another of my children ( aka the vipers in my breast, and I'm not talking ze vindow viper either, schweethoit) heard me remark upon how I was the same age as Nigella Lawson, and he said - wow, I thought she was waaaay younger than you, Mum.

Yeah, thanks. Your dinner's in the dog.

baby, it's cold outside

2008-01-11T12:57:00.000Z

So, I've been awol, huh?

It's been a while, honey, but hey, don't go all huffy on me. Sure, I still love you.I'm here now, I've done gone and showed up, so that must count for something.

Where the hell do I think I've been? I've been busy with...er...life? Work? Stopped work on Midwinter's day just in time to come down with The Mother of all Rhinoviruses. Wow - I mean we're talking one complete box of balsam tissues per diem. Heavvvvvy. Damp, too. Loud on the sneezing front, and the endless snurking made people edge away from me as they tried to politely pretend they hadn't noticed that I was dissolving in front of them. Horrible, horrible, thoughts filled my head in what little space wasn't already filled up with phlegm. At certain times of the day, I had to stop myself from tearing my nose off and hurling it into a corner of the room( there - that'll teach you to run like that). We threw a Midwinter's Night dinner party and as soon as the last guest tripped happily out of our front door, the Plague descended. Happy Christmas - couldn't taste, couldn't sleep, could barely see through streaming rheumy eyes. Oh, what fun. NOT.

So. You don't want to hear my pathetic excuses? You're going all frosty on me? You're doing that ice-maiden thing and clipping the ends off your sentences. I can hardly hear you - what's that you're squeezing out through your gritted teeth?Your mouth goes all pinched and mean, hon. Try and be a little more understanding. No knitting? Well, er, no. I did try and finish the dolly from helly, but honestly, hand sewing every ferking strand of her hair onto her dear little bald head was more than I could take. Look, I tried. And the individual dragon bags for all family members - well, I did finish those. Those were good. Even if everyone thought I'd bought the bags and then stuck the picture on to them. Jeez. All that effort.

But it's all over now.Eldest daughter has been and come back from California to visit her seriously ill paternal grandmother. She left, in tears, on Boxing Day. I dropped her off and wept all my way home. I missed her like a hole in my life all the way through the holidays, and that can't have been any fun for the rest of my family. I may have said this before, but it's hell, living with the aftermath of a Dee Eye Vee Oh Arse. However, that was then, this is now, and now, I'm so happy she's back home safe.

It's a brand New Year. We've had snow, we've had gales, we've had waaaaaay more Christmas cake than could ever be considered good for us, and we're now into the January Repentence, big-time. No money, no waistline, no sunshine....

And just before I stopped for Christmas, I had a phone call from those nice folks at Customs & Excise to announce their intention of conducting a VAT inspection at my studio. To which, the only reply has to be a resounding fuuuuuuuckittty fuck fuck. Our longstanding acccountant has just retired, and we have to acquaint a new, untried accountant with the weirdness that is GlioriCorp a.k.a Artists-Without-A- Clue-About -How -To -Fill -In -A Tax -Return. So, up there at the sharp end with the number crunchers from Hades, is, ulp, me. Oh, ghoddddddddd.

Meanwhile, artwork for 'The Trouble with Dragons' is finished. It looks as good as anything I've ever done. No, that's not right. It's the best thing I've ever done. It is the sum of everything I've ever wanted to say about our place here on planet Earth. The artwork makes me cry, and that's never happened before.

She piddles, she fins

2007-12-09T20:46:00.000Z

Or something like that. She does both in between bouts of full-on dragoning, but she also wakes up in the wee small hours with a feeling that she ought to get up and Get On With It. Like why am I lying around in bed, pray? Don't I realise that there's stuff needing made?

Had a brief foray into The World of Seasonal Commerce last week. Tooled round various children's toyshops, growing more bleak and unseasonal as the minutes rolled past. All around lay pink plastic, batteries, fake pets rolling over and playing dead, more batteries, muzak, cheesey songs with tone-deaf celebs exhorting us to feel guilty for our affluence, long queues managed by idiots who plainly enjoy the power of going as s..l..o..w..l..y.. as they can get away with before a sudden stampede of enraged shoppers club them to death with the latest Harpy Otter Deathmask with Light-up Gonads ( takes 37 AA batteries, not included) and people looking utterly miserable...

Coming back home with a few bags of toys I barely had time to do a quick Witch Baby cover rough and then rush back out again to go to the Society of Authors' Winter Party. Jeez. Being self-employed and in straightened circumstances means that days which pass without earning diddly-squat are days on the debit side of the Great Ledger Book. If these kind of days aren't spent doing something worthwhile like spending time with one's children, walking on a beach or climbing a hill, then they are wasted days. Wasted. Spending a day shopping is not good for my soul.

And the food at the Winter Party was the wrong side of atrocious. Next year I should offer to do the catering - I'd probably make more in one evening than I do in a whole year of selling books. Plus I had a robust discussion with a right-wing fund manager who spent most of the coffee and mints course proving what a fine fellow he was, and how he knew better than the IPCC about the likely outcome of runaway climate change. My pet subject, hijacked by a fuckwit? Oh, joy.

Let's draw a veil over that, shall we?

The knitted dolly in cotton glace for my youngest daughter is progressing nicely. Two legs, two arms, a pair of pants and half a torso are done and dusted. Must go do some more. The youngest daughter is the same child for whom I knitted the jumper at the top of this post. Amazingly, she still loves it. Amazingly, it's still in one piece.

I knit and fiddle not

2007-12-03T19:31:00.001Z

Not that I'm slacking, but the action on my dragon book has ramped up a tad, and of an evening when I would normally hit the keypad and start to blog for Caledonia, I've been collapsing on a sofa with a chunk of Green & Black's white chocolate in my mitt. This is having predictably disastrous consequences for my complexion and waistline, one of which is expanding while t'other is maculating, or peccabling or whatever you call it when someone old enough to be a grandmother starts developing zits on her chin due to chocolate excesses.

The knitting urge has collapsed temporarily due to the deep tedium of knitting a seemingly endless and boring man's sleeve in unrelenting Jaeger dark green dk wool. I say unrelenting because the eventual recipient of this sleeve ( at current rate, in the year 2097) was not wooed by the beauty of Kaffe Fasset's little circles pattern and opted for the plain jumper sans ornament, sans teeth, sans everything.

Today I came to the conclusion that what I need is a hideously tight deadline to knit to, and not to knit the sodding sodding sleeve any more. So. It's tucked away on its turbo pins and I'm already beginning to hyperventilate with the sheer excitement of doing Something Else and doing it in time for Christmas. Today I phoned John lewis in Edinburgh and begged them to go out back and hunt for some glace cotton so that I can knit a doll for my littlest daughter. John Lewis being what it is ( a family-owned concern which has hauled itself into the 21st C while still clinging to some rather 20th C practices in the middle of achieving vast commercial success) I was patched through to a slightly breathless lady of, I'm guessing, middle years, who puffed into the stockroom, clanged around with a set of metal stepladders, and found two balls of the right stuff for me to be able to begin a New Thing.

The yarn will come in the post, but in the meantime, I'm embroiled in making gaberdine and grosgrain bags for the extended family's presents. Every year we give each other home-made things - advent candle wreaths, jars of mincemeat, stollens, knitted hats and shawls and assorted things that show We Care, but Are Inept.

Sort of thing. The gaberdine bags came about after trawling the web one night and finding myself on the compelling site dedicated to Modbury, the town in England that eschewed the use of any plastic carrier bags, and showed the reasons why you might want to join their campaign. Rather than bore the arse off everyone with proseletising zeal, I thought it would be better to make carrier bags of such outstanding durability and uber-chic that none of my family would ever want to be seen with a plastic bag ever again. That was before I discovered how damn hard it is to make uber-chic anything. (q.v previous years' attempts at hats, shawls, etc.) This, or these ( as in the bags) as well as the dragon book are why I haven't knitted or fiddled for a wee while. The bags (all seven of them) are nearly all sewn together and awaiting decoration. Not being a natural seamstress, the air around my sewing machine is still blue, although nothing like as bad as the air surrounding my kitchen the year I made home-made hampers for all family members.

God. What a laff that wasn't. To this day, I only have to mouth the word 'hamper' and my entire family begin to twitch. They were hampers born of the long dark teatime of the cook's soul. They were hampers of such byzantine effort and complexity that the hampees ( I know, there is no such word) looked more haunted than delighted at the gift. Hampers contained bottles of creme de cassis, corked and sealed and labelled with illustrated labels; pickled pears; a tiny decorated bag of organic hand-made cantuccini; jars of marmalade, blackcurrant jelly and green tomato chutney; stollen and if that wasn't enough to make your eyes cross, everything was arranged in baskets inside of which were nests made from the shreddings out of my studio document shredder.

What the hell was I thinking of?

Haunted by the spectre of dyspepsias to come, the hampees accepted these monsters with cries of polite terror. Oh - you shouldn't've. Too right. Heavens, what a lot of trouble you've gone to. Alas, yes. Whatever, never, never again. My family made me swear an oath upon my sacred cantuccini recipie. I will never make hampers for Christmas ever again. Gaberdine bags are a breeze by comparison.

Well, maybe a bit stronger than a breeze. Let's say a force five.

www stands for

2007-11-15T16:48:00.000Z

world without wildlife.

This is what I was raving about in yesterday's blog. It's only part of a much wider double page spread. All the dragons are surveying their drowned world, and this chap ( or chap-ess) has just chopped down the last tree.

What a laff, eh? Whoever said children's picture books were 'light' didn't know what she or he was talking about. This is such a sad book, with such a tough message and in my heart of hearts I am beginning to wonder if it's all too late. Then i take hold of myself by the scruff of the neck and Get On With...hoping.

The soundtrack to paint this picture was Joni Mitchell's latest album ,'Shine', and the title track in particular. It's a perfect 'fit'.

whisper it - I'm so proud mk 2

2007-11-14T18:15:00.000Z

Apparently one is not allowed to use the words 'Stitch and bitch' without seeking permission from the originator of the phrase. People have been sued for heaven's sake.

So. Ahem. Without seeking permission from camp-Stoller or whatever, the knitters of Shetland have sensibly gone ahead and retitled the group ' Makkin' and Yakkin''.The Makkin' was always the dialect name for knitting, and yakkin' speaks for itself, so to speak.

So there. My baby grows up and changes her name. Sounds about right to me. Soon she'll start staying out all night, smoking and having underage sex, but me, I'm a tolerant parent. I'll try my best to celebrate her independence, her determination to do it all Her Own Way, her desire to march to the beat of her own drum, but inside ( sniff) I'll always remember that first rainy, dark night when she was born in an upstairs room in the HQ of Shetland Arts.

Talking of which, Donald Anderson from Shetland Arts phoned yesterday to check that I'd had all the relevant bits of paper that I need in order to be paid my writer's stipend for the residency, and in conversation he mentioned that there was snow on Ronas Hill. This, dear reader was almost enough to make me beg, cajole or even bludgeon my entire family into putting our house on the market and moving to Shetland toot sweet. Snow? What might that be, pray?

I remember snow. I remember big snow - serious snow - fourteen foot snowdrifts, endless ski-able hills outside my door, snow that lay for the entirety of Christmas and beyond, snow that inspired my eldest child to build a snow dinosaur that stood taller than me, and longer than our family car. Snow that was playpark, menace, inspiration and danger all rolled into one. Snow that nearly killed my baby daughter and me one cold March day when my car went into an uncontrollable speedy slither and launched itself straight onto the prongs of an oncoming snowplough. Snow that appeared in so many of my picture books from Back Then that I can almost document from those illustrations when, exactly the snow stopped falling in our county.

Snow that makes you glad to be inside. Snow falling when you're tucked up under a warm quilt. Snow that hushes the roads, stop traffic and turns our world into a landscape straight out of Breughel. Snow on ronas hill had the effect of making me desperately homesick for an island that I only know in part.

In the meantime, I'm painting the dragons as if time is running out. The climate change illustrations reached their hideous climax with a spread in near black and white. A drowned world populated only by dragons and jellyfish. A volcano erupting in the distance makes the land look prehistoric, but it's not. It's our land with six degrees of warming. It's bleak and pitiless, but as a concession to the small children for whom this book will become night-time reading, I left out the methane hydrates and general apocalyptic vision of Mark Lynas's terrifying book 'Six Degrees. Our future on a hotter planet'.

If you have no idea what I'm wiffling on about, can I recommend that you read Mark's book? But hurry up - tick, tick, tick, there may not be as much time to change our wicked ways as we used to think there was.

I'm so proud

2007-11-05T15:42:00.000Z

Yup. That's our baby. It takes its first unaided steps and staggers into its local library. Gosh. Such an intelligent child too. My only regret is that I won't be there to enjoy it, but hey, hope you like my poster. Right now I'm having a tension square, so it must be time to down tools and go drink coffee....

not chilled

2007-11-01T21:23:00.000Z

First of November and I'm in a t-shirt, feeling the unseasonal heat. Outside, a confused ceanothus is putting out little blue flowers and some of the fruit trees, I swear, are budding. Oy veh, people. Do we mention the ten ton gorilla in the room or shall we just continue to pretend we don't have to change our Wicked Ways?

Make me good, lord, but not just yet. Let me just burn more carbon, eat the fruits of some thousands of airmiles and turn a blind eye to the slave labour that produced five pairs of socks for less than the cost of that lump of coal I'm about to throw on my home fire to keep it burning.

Cue the Carmina Burana in all its dramatic glory - as a soundtrack for my current mood, it's hard to beat.

So. I won't talk about the gorilla tonight. I won't mention the fact that I have a motheaten heap of warm sweaters, unworn for three years, waiting for the weather to turn cold. I won't speak about the possibility of going for a swim in the sea at the weekend, without courting frostbite. In November. I won't talk about the landslide currently blocking the road that rejoices in the name of Rest And Be Thankful but which should be renamed Can't Take Any More Precipitation So Am Turning Into A Mudslide In Protest.

Went back to the gym last week and revisited all that fun equipment designed for the express purpose of torturing one's flesh into some semblance of fittitude or full-on buffery. Not entirely sure that my flesh has got the message, given that it prefers to lie on benches groaning fitfully and revisiting every insult paid to its tender pillowyness. sudden and brutal rediscovery of stomach muscles was beyond painful. Every cough brought a squeak of dismay as newly awakened muscles shrieked in protest. The gym had been repainted, which was all a bit dazzling given that it was only six a.m. Why white? Why not a pleasant inside-of-eyelid maroon? Urrrgh.

Nothing much had changed. Everyone was the same shape they'd been when I left eight weeks ago. Some of them were more sun-tanned, some of them had recovered from injuries and were giving it big licks on the treadmill, some of them were pleasantly surprised to see me back again. It was every bit as soul-less and isolating an experience as it sounds. Just another place where I don't really fit in despite three years of trying to make conversation. Still, it gets results.

Went for my first longish run since my horrible foot injury in May. Michael and I went to Aberlady beach ( bird sanctuary, no dogs, no dog-poo but loads of birders/twitchers/ornithologists) and he walked very fast while I ran. and gasped. And sweated and heaved. A thousand deaths were died, including my i-pod which did its flaky lock-up nonsense, and since I had no breath for running, let alone looking down and futzing around with a bit of crap technology, I had to run for the first twenty minutes in silence. Yeeeeurggggghhh. I'm one of those pathetic runners that needs music or else I spend every second trying to bludgeon myself out of packing up and going home. Fun times. NOT. Then, miracle of miracles, the i-pod self-healed and suddenly there was thumpy music with big bass action and I was off in a cloud of kicked-up sand like the nasty bloke on those old Bullworker ads.

Phwoarrrrr. She lives. She runs. She whizzes past weird posses of twitchers stationed all along the beach with their bins and 'scopes hopefully not trained on Lesser Beetroot Wheezers, or Small Gasping Coldtits or that rare winter visitor to our shores, the Blissed-Out Earbud Waggler.

being unfaithful

2007-10-26T08:53:00.000+01:00

Ah, Fiddle and Pins. Erm. Drink? Have a seat? Um... No, I'm fine. Well, yes, but.....

I've got something to tell you. You might want that drink after all. We've been seeing each other, fairly regularly since, what - June? July? Whatever. Oh, you've got the exact date when we first started our...um...yeah, well, whatever.

So. It's been great. No, really. It's been uh....real. Oh, why am I so crap at this stuff? You'd think serial philanderers like me would have the exit strategies down pat. No. I didn't mean that. I'm being ironic. Sort of.

Whaddya mean I'm being immature? I've been away for what - a week, and already the accusations are flying? what did I do/ Or, more importantly, what did you think I did? God. Grammar is leaving me. So. i'll stop faffing about and give it to you straight. I've, uh....

Another drink? Ice? Lime? Think I'll join you.

Okay. Here we go. Last week I had an approach made to me by a very big and gorgeous blogsite/community thing. I have to admit, I was asking for it. gagging, even. I may have made some moves in its direction myself, but hey, I never thought I'd get...um...connected, so quickly.

Oh, be still, my beating heart.

And when it happened - it was like a thunderbolt. We're talking about thunderbolts in my in-tray, you understand. Wouldn't want you to get the wrong end of the stick and start thinking that I was sleeping around. Heck no. It's far, far worse.honey, I can't put it any plainer that I have been blogging promiscuously. Dipping in and out of anything and everything that takes my fancy. I never knew that it could be like this, though...

Yes, I know this is hard for you. I'll try and wipe that blissful smile off my face. No, it's not a smirk.

So. how did it begin? Just a little invitation from frecklegirl. Oh God. I was weak. i was flattered. heck, I'm human. I couldn't resist. I didn't use any protection. I just, uhhhh, went for it. And, damn, it was good. But hey, you don't want to hear that, right? Oh, but if it had happened to you - you'd've fallen for it too.

You wouldn't have? What d'you mean you don't knit? What's wrong with you?

I knew you wouldn't understand. that's precisely the reason I did it. Because this big gorgeous website/community/blog thing understood exactly where I'm coming from. I didn't have to say left a bit, up a bit, oh yeah, that's it, ohhh, mmmmhmmm. It knew. Intuitively.

So. If you're okay with me going off-blog for my weird knitting needs, then I'm happy to remain faithful to you in terms of my inner thoughts, wishes, dreams and all that stuff. I mean I'll still tell you about my knitting stuff, but I'll save the really passionate, perverse and full-on yarn and pins stuff for my Significant Other.

Ravelry, dot com. Was there ever a sweeter name? Listen to the wind, it calls raaaavelllllrrrryyyyyyy. Ooops. sorry. I get a bit distracted at times.

So. Yeah. More later. Work, the mainland and all that stuff is, as predictwed, swallowing me whole. Speak soon. Mwah, mwah.

Tesco Dire (ct)

2007-10-23T09:44:00.000+01:00

Now I know I'm back.

Last night found myself idly leafing through an unsolicited and unwelcome brick-like catalogue from that well-known superstore and laughing with an edge of hysteria at the volumes of utter crap within its one thousand unecessary pages. Did you know that you can buy forensic face-reconstruction kits for your children to play at being...what? Kay bloody Scarpetta?

Oh. My. God.

Or that the Disney High School Musical Studio ( 'learn moves and songs') is marketed for ages six plus? Six? SIX? High School Musical Mystery Date is slightly better - it's for ages 7 plus. I guess they can put on condoms by then, eh?

Have we grown so utterly desensitised to what childhood is about that we can tolerate this? Let's hope not. I'm going to log on to the www.tesco.com/helpdirect page and ask some pointy questions. Care to join me?

the eye of the roost

2007-10-14T16:51:00.000+01:00

Not sure if I'll be able to remain upright once this boat enters Da Roost which is the choppy stretch of water between Fair Isle and...er...um

Geography not my strong suit.

So. I'm in the bar, nervously necking g&t as if there's about to be a drought. We sail in forty minutes and an hour after that I'll find out if I'm going to survive this trip without redecorating my cabin.

Packing up all my earthly goods took far, far longer than I'd anticipated. This is in part because I had brought at least twice what I required sartorially, gastronomically and work-wise. Plus, I have contributed my small share towards Shetland's tourist economy in buying stuff to bring back to my little girls. And I have also received gifts aplenty. And yeah - I can't bear to throw anything out if it looks like it may come in useful at some future date. Oh jeez, my poor car.

Where 'stuff' is concerned, I need to cultivate a serene and chilled Buddhist ideal of non-attachment. I need to learn how to let go. What has also taken far longer than it should is my paranoia regarding leaving my car stuffed to the roof with goodies ( electric violin, artwork, computer, i-pods, notebooks, favourite cashmere jumper, best of irreplacably best coats, hillwalking gear, oh heck I could never replace the current contents of my car) in the centre of wicked and sinful Aberdeen ( well, this is according to a good friend and Aberdeen resident who regularly warns us to strip our car of consumer durables every time we go visit him - me, I'd've left all manner of crap wilfully displayed on the dashboard, but not any more, no way, not now.) I'm stopping briefly enroute home to my wee girls so that I can take my youngest son out to breakfast for, bless his little pointy head, he has promised to rise up out of his student pit on Sunday morning at 8.00 a.m. to come and have breakfast with me.

I know. This is not normal student behaviour, especially not on the other side of Saturday night. I haven't seen him since I left to come to Shetland ( once the boat sails, I'll have to amend that to 'since I left to go to Shetland'. Past tense. I used to live on Shetland, once upon a dream) and I won't see him again until his Christmas break, so this breakfast will be doubly precious ; in a family of five children, having one child all to oneself is a rare treat.

That is, if he gets up on time.

Today and yesterday have been a long unwinding, rewinding of the steps leading up to my arrival, reversing and unravelling it and turning it into departure. Yesterday began with a pre-recorded interview about the residency with Mary Blance for Radio Shetland's book programme ( tx 1st November) The interview was recorded at her kitchen table in amongst her teetering mountains of review copies, ( Mary scales the peaks of literature while Andy, her other half, scales the peaks of Britain's mountain summits) her generous coffee pot, neon kettle and freezer that had to be turned off since its motor was making a bid for stardom on the airwaves. We spoke of everything, but only a fraction of this will make it to broadcast on the 1st November.

By which time, mainland life will have swallowed me whole. Living for a brief spell in Shetland has given me a real hunger for living on an island - a hunger that we do not have the means to satisfy right now. I'll come back to this later because it is a thread of wishing that has woven through my life ever since I was a little girl and first stepped foot on the island of Mull. There have been a few islands since then, but Shetland has sunk a deep hook in my heart. Later. Much later. We will find a way back to the garden.

The engines rumble and thrum underfoot. Time to neck my medicinal gin and head outside to watch the land disappear off the starboard side. And say a little prayer to the small demon of mal-de-mer ; please let me not redecorate my cabin.

the sea will wave goodbye

2007-10-12T22:06:00.000+01:00

The last three days have been full of farewells : to the children I've been working with for the past six weeks ; to the friends I've made ; to colleagues I've worked with and lastly, to this magical place. I'm saving my final goodbye for Shetland itself, for the land, for the shore and for the sea. Tomorrow, if there's time after I've packed, I'll take myself somewhere beautiful and say thankyou. Just Shetland and me without anything or anyone in between.

Leaving is very odd. I guess because I've looked forward to doing this residency here for so long, I'm wondering how life-after-Shetland will be. After all, I won't have it to look forward to any more. Being here has exceeded my expectations, but also has been utterly consonant with what I'd hoped I might find. Does that make sense?

One of the best things that I've found here is people who have said exactly what lies in their hearts. People who have opened up and let me in. To be allowed to share in the secret territory of another human heart is a gift. For this, and for many hours of laughter, conversation and occasional silences as comforting as a feather sofa, thankyou.

Saying goodbye to the two classes of children with whom I've shared six intense weeks of work was emotionally rigorous. My P7 class at Brae Primary had all collaborated on a book which they gave to me on my last day, and insisted that I read out loud to them. I got as far as page two and my voice went all squeaky and to my horror, I began to cry. Far from embarassing my children, my leaky, snuffly, squeaky metamorphosis seemed to delight them, and they became even kinder, even more honest and loving. I will miss them enormously - I can see their faces in my mind as I write. The next day brought more tears as I said goodbye to another class of P7's, this time at Scalloway primary school. Again, my shift into sniffling, voice-wobbling tearfulness seemed to amaze and delight them.

And I have to tell you that I'm now the proud possessor of more chocolate than I can eat in a year.

Later, Noelle and I were the entire cast of the Culture Club show on BBC Radio Shetland - one hour of 'magazine' format radio, with the pair of us having a blether on the airwaves, hopefully sounding as relaxed as if it was one of our many heart-to-hearts and chats which have whiled away the miles as we trekked hither and yon across Shetland and over to Fair Isle. Except, thankfully, without any Holy Fuuuuck moments like we had when our tiny airplane appeared to launch itself straight off a cliff into the sea on departure from Fair Isle. Frankly, it was the only thing to say under the circumstances. Trust me, you'd've said something similiar.

However, for this broadcast, Noelle and I were models of maidenly decorum.
Well, she was, anyway. I vaguely recall muttering something about writing children's books because I'd also tried to write adult novels and found myself completely unable to get my characters across the threshold of the bedroom and in between the sheets because language, for once, failed me. He put his...she felt her...they....nope, can't do it. You can hear us courtesy of the Beeb's listen again service which will stream us straight to your computer for one calendar week after broadcast. Then it gets consigned to oblivion.

So I'm here, in the dark, with the sea slapping at the wall outside my little shed, thinking that this is probably the last time I'll live quite so close to water. Tonight, when I came back home my spirits were heading into the fold-up-your-tray-tables-and -prepare-for-landing-mode but when I opened the big windows onto the sea, a seal's head broke the surface of the water only ten feet away from where I stood. The appearance of the Wild in the middle of my 21st century fit of the blues was exactly what was required to lift my mood.

Bye, bye seal.

Stitch & Bitch Shetland No. 1

2007-10-11T21:29:00.000+01:00

Well, it worked. Shetland's inaugural Stitch and Bitch was an evening of delight. I have to say that on the bitching front, everyone was a little shy - as far as I could hear with my ears swivelling like radar dishes, nary a word was spoken that could be classed as 'bitchy' but I suspect everyone was on their best behaviour since it was the first night. Doesn't do to unveil your Inner Harridan right from the get-go. Timing is all.

BBC Radio Shetland gave us several advance mentions with hefty emphasis on the second half of the name, so that it came out like stch 'n BITCH, but whether due to that or due to the email campaign conducted by Shetland Arts or even the poster I drew, it worked. Twenty three women signed up to be counted. They turned up in the darkness of a rainy Shetland evening and sat down, then from baskets and bags, pulled out an assortment of wonders - Shetland shawls, Fair Isle socks, complicated things knitted on four pins ( they are called 'wires' here) then, somewhat intimidatingly, everyone got on with the business of knitting like experts. Everyone apart from me, that is. They were all so workmanlike, so professional, that I stopped blabbering like a fool and started counting frantically to cast on a double-stranded monstrosity of unevenly matched yarns then began to knit an 'easy' lace.

That bird never flew. That dog never ran. That lace doesn't exist. Easy? Oh, puhleeeeeaze.

Needless to say, I fell completely silent for about ten minutes of deep and total concentration, whereupon I couldn't stand not joining in with the chat going on around me, and that's when my 'easy' lace went to hell in a handbasket. Next but one to me was a Fair Isle knitter doing things that should be outlawed with three yarns, two pins and nary a glance at what her hands were doing.

Oh, weep. She even stopped and unhitched her 'makker's belt' and lent it to me to try and see if I could manage to knit any better with one of my wildly gyrating needles anchored in a belt. Hard to tell. I knit so badly, the only thing that I'm really sure would improve matters would be if I could have an extra pair of hands grafted on alongside the set I came with. Even then, I'm not sure that would improve mattters.

The evening was delightful, and having been one if its midwives, I felt really pleased and proud as our baby took its first breath. In the manner of the good fairy conferring her gifts upon the newborn princess, here are the blessings and wishes I would bring to heap upon its dear little head.
Long may it continue.
May it go from strength to strength, and may it hopefully acquire some male knitters to leaven the mix.
And if there is anyone out there granting wishes tonight - PLEASE can the magical essence of the Fair-Isle Knitter Who Didn't Look Down somehow rub off on me and transform me from being a cack-handed fumblethumbs into someone who knits beautiful and original things in her own lifetime. The 'in her own lifetime' is, I fear, key.

finally, six days to go

2007-10-08T21:32:00.000+01:00

Wouldn't you know it - after five weeks of arsing about with dialup, tonight the world of broadband made itself accessible. In short, I plugged in and it played, dammit. Shouldn't moan, but, oh, REALLY. Why now, when I have to go home in six days? All those nights I could've been logging onto all sorts of stuff that normally I wouldn't have the time to look at due to the demands of home and hearth. Well, heck.

However, I don't want to overburden this blog with photos, thus rendering it as slow to upload as...as a slow thing. As slow as I am on the last bit of a really boring hill. Do we have to? Are we there yet? Is this another bloody false top? God. Urrrgh. I hate hillwalking. My feet hurt. Can I take my rucksack off and pick it up later? Can you carry my rucksack? Can I lie down and make pathetic bleating sounds? Have you got any chocolate in your pocketses?

Yeah. That slow. So, having looked through my photos, I can say in all honesty, hand on heart that I am the world's crappest photographer. Landscapes are not my thing. I can do you a lovely bit of close-up grass, dripping peat bog or a nice cobweb, but anything further away usually has a drunken horizon and a distinct lack of focus. So. We won't be offering any of that, then. Except, I couldn't resist this bleak and colourless photograph of some dramatic stacks off the shore at Fethaland ; otherwise known as the walk with the big Bull.

Tomorrow is a Big Day. Tomorrow is the first night we roll out Stitch and Bitch in Shetland. Nervous? A little, but I'm hoping it comes together mainly because people are curious, friendly and have come along because of a shared love of the craft. Or the art. Or should that be the Craft and the Art? Oh heck. What to wear? And far more importantly, what to bring? I have six inches of boring dark green sleeve on my pins ( the Kaffe Fasset little circles motif reduced to a border thing) or I could come with yarn and pins and begin anew. Or...

And do I bring The Shawl so that everyone can fall about laughing at its gauche ineptness? Might be good for a laugh. Might get everyone to loosen up, if only to explain to me where I went wrong. So catastrophically wrong. Oh. My. God. Don't get me started... Perhaps if I talk my way through the shawl*, people would get some idea of where I'm coming from and why I think the idea of Stitch and Bitch is so brilliant.

Will report back tomorrow and if I can manage to take one decent photograph, will show and tell.

*Talk my way through the shawl? You could drive a truck through the shawl, so holy and mistake-riddled is it. Sigh.

elastogirl goes to Ultima Thule

2007-10-07T23:56:00.000+01:00

Finally hauled out the contents of a little cardboard box called the Pilates Bodyband Kit, subtitled 'for sad gits who delude themselves that nearly five decades of becoming one with your sofa, booze and fags can be undone by the mere application of the contents of this small box'. Yeah, well. I bought into it nearly two years ago and it has lain in silent reproach in a back bedroom which also goes by the other name of Mum's museum of unused body sculpting artefacts that we don't talk about.

So.

Must have been bored or a passing cloud drizzled a shower of diluted masochism instead of rain or something. I mean it's not like I spent the whole of this Sunday in navel-gazing, chocolate consuming and general lounging in a feckless fashion and was in dire need of Pilates to do penance for being so couch potato-ey. God. If only.

No. I was up early hurling kit in a rucksack, ready to hit the hills again, this after a hideously strenuous Saturday when I trekked the ten mile round trip to Uyea which is a tidal island of spectacular beauty, but on which one can come horribly unstuck if one gets the tides wrong. I arrived at high tide, so there was no chance of crossing over to the island, but just to gaze down, down, down to it ( did I mention that to get to the tidal bar you have to abseil down a slippy cliff? No? Guess what? Neither did my guide books, damn their eyes)

Anyway, I was pretty buggared before I got up early this morning and hauled myself over the island of Yell and onto the island of Unst and drove to the northernmost car park in the UK and walked out onto the headland at Hermaness. In the teeth of a gale. Across featureless peat bog of a particular stickyness to make each step weigh ten times more than it should. Then, with no warning, the peat bog gives way to sheep-cropped grass and then - whoa, jeez, to sky. Sky by the acre. There are no signs saying 'this is the Edge of all things' or 'mind out, fumbledyboots' or even '739 witless hillwalkers have fallen to their deaths here, so don't make yourself the 740th, eh?'

Steep, it was. Beautiful, too. According to the os landranger map ( sheet 1, ref 600165) this spot in the middle of the back of beyond even rejoiced in the name of Toolie, but hey, Unst has a village called Basta and nobody has altered the roadsign.

Down at the foot of the cliffs the sea was lashing the rocks, but this was made all the more awesome by taking place in total silence. The guidebook had promised puffins, gulls and deafening birdsong, but today was too windy to encourage such clamour. I skirted the cliffs until I came across two sheep doing the Head-Butt of Doom over the exact ownership of a particular blade of grass - a dance which was likely to bring not only the sheep but me as well rolling and bouncing across the grass only to tip to our deaths on the rocks below. I carried on, but headed inland for safety. And on and up Hermaness hill under the harsh chatter of ravens trying to persuade me to ferk off and leave their territory alone.

And what a territory it is. The most northerly point in the UK. There's a tiny lighthouse ( Muckle Flugga) out there on the guano-clad rocks, and beyond that, there's a little rock called Out Stack and that is all she wrote. That's the North. The Northiest Northness of Northern Scotland.

So I turned back, headed up to try and find a tiny bit of shelter and toasted it's Ultimate Thulity with a wee dram. Then looked at my watch and realised I was going to have to leg it back to the car at a rate that wasn't consonant with navigating peat hags, but which might just get me back to the first ferry in time to make it and thus also make the second ferry back to Shetland.

So after a day like this, why the Pilates? I have no idea. The box held a video and three elastic bands. It signally failed to also hold a wee note saying Oy veh, and for this you paid how much? So I slung the video in and before I knew it I was in a world of Antipodean svelteness and new-age nose flutey music and I was doing weird things to my tush with a vast swatch of elastic.

Go figure. Some things you just can't put a price on...

a flight to Fair Isle

2007-10-06T22:15:00.000+01:00

I realise that 'fessing up to having been flown out to Fair Isle isn't going to earn me many friends among knitters, walkers or twitchers/birders, but hey. I was paid to do it, okay? Put that axe down, would you? And I guess if I mention that I met the last hand-knitter of Fair Isle sweaters to live on the island ( the sweaters made on Fair Isle are machine made, these days) and that I also met her lovely husband who spins the yarn for her on - take a deep breath - spinning wheels he makes himself, I imagine I'd better start running now. While I'm at it, I'd better change my name, burn my fingerprints off and go into the witness protection programme, hmmm?

Yes. I know how lucky I am. I had to keep on pinching myself as Annie and Stuart took me into their home and showed the kindness of their Fair Isle hospitality to this idiot from the South. I babbled like a fool, I yibbled for scotland and i generally behaved like a complete gushing twit, but I was stunned. It was like I'd been floating in space for years and suddenly was invited onto the bridge of the Mothership. It was as if time stopped, reversed and we were back in the 40's before the war. A time when Fair Isle was populated by crofters, knitters, spinners, shepherds and fishermen. Frequently all of these roles were played by individual people ; all of them - to use a hideous 21st C term - multitasking to get the day's work done. I'd wanted to meet a Fair Isle knitter because the woman who runs the yarn section in John Lewis in Edinburgh had raved about the Fair Isle method of using one hand to do the 'british' method of knitting, while the other hand busied itself with the 'continental' method. Presumably while one foot was drafting out War and Peace and the other was giving Shiatzu massages to the dog...whatever, I wanted to see this in action for myself.

So. On arrival at this incredible island which rears out of the sea, all vertiginous cliffs and green sward on top and deepcut geos, with, I swear, the shortest landing strip I've ever seen - clean underwear, anyone? - we were whisked off in an elderly white Volvo taxi to the school, a trip of approximately 2.5 minutes. The plane was miniscule - six of us, including the pilot, crammed, and I mean crammed into a tiny twin prop beastie, not unlike Icarus's prototype before he improved the design. Oh. My. God.

Handbags went in the boot/ trunk, which was, basically, the back of the plane with a tarpaulin stretched between it and the passengers. In with the handbags were boxes from Amazon dot co dot yoo kay, plastic kinder boxes full of food for the bird observatory on the island, cardboard boxes with perishables and cardboard boxes full of assorted foodstuffs and my portfolio with all of the roughs and some of the watercolour artwork for 'The Trouble with Dragons'. And a zip-up bag crammed full of picture books.

Fair Isle primary school was our destination. School roll - six. Nursery - three. Total island population - seventy plus assorted guests, birders, more birders and tourists who come to learn how to spin with Stuart and assorted indigenous spinners. The sun came out to welcome us, so my impression of the island is a tiny nubbin of green-topped rock, thrusting out of the sea, full of light and birds in abundance. Not that I saw a whole lot, due to being fully employed with all of the schoolchildren for most of the morning and some of the afternoon.

The children are the lifeblood of the island. When they grow up, they go off-island to high school in Lerwick. I asked the most imminent candidate for educational-exile how she felt about her upcoming uprooting. 'Can't WAIT,' came the reply. This beautiful child is the great grand-daughter of Annie and Stuart, knitter and spinner and wheel maker who allowed me into their home after I'd finished at the school.

Stuart's wheel-making studio is a back room in their house, full with a family of wheels made from irocco(?), walnut and even a recycled window frame. Wheels, I realised have the same character as violins - each one a personality of its own, each one a presence that belies their mere wooden nature. As we spoke, Stuart spun, showing how thick and how fine he could spin a yarn. Fiddle music on a stand behind him prompted me to say that my Dad makes violins, as does Stuart's son, Euan. He asked if I played, and I admitted yes, but very badly, to which he replied - oh, if you'd brought your fiddle we could have haed a tune.

Next time. I'm going to practice and practice till I can limp along behind him. Post-Shetland mission statement number one. Practice fiddle, then book ticket back to Fair Isle.

Stuart also mends sad and battered wheels, and he produced two tiny hanks of what looked like pale brown sewing thread. He'd found them wrapped round the business end of a wheel he was mending. They were yarn, spun so fine that they were thinner than one-ply which is the gossamer spider-web they knit shawls from in this part of the world. At this point I felt like some kind of blundering idiotic fumblethumbs who not only cannot play fiddle but can barely knit unless it's with yarn the weight of steel hawsers. To which Annie's advice was - practice. She also said that the kind of twin handed, twin method knitting produces unevenly stranded yarns across the back of the work, so she was not wildly impressed by my handwaving, blurty explanation of something I hadn't seen but had only been told about by the lady in the yarn shop in John Lewis.

Post-Shetland mission statement number two. Practice knitting more. Better. Finer. Faster.

I laughed out loud when Annie looked straight into my eyes and said - I wouldn't have tried to learn to knit when I was your age. She meant she wouldn't have had the patience to work her way up from fumblethumbs to faintly competent and then to her current phase of Zen Master Black Makker's Belt Order of the Gossamer Weavers at the Gates of Dawn.

She's right, but I like challenges. What she didn't know that as well as wanting to join the order of the Zen masters BMBOGWGD, I also want to rewrite their constitution, invent a foot-operated row counter, have a yarn named after me and save the world. Compared to which, learning to knit Fair Isle, stranded multicoloured, multiple yarn patterns that don't bunch up like an maiden aunt with haemorrhoids is a mere bagatelle.

We flew out of Fair Isle with three hand-spun hanks of yarn gifted to me from Stuart. One in Fair Isle white

(creamy white), mourit ( cafe au lait, but on the darkish side) and Fair Isle black ( the deepest, richest darkest cocoa with 70% cocoa solids dark brown). The hanks smell of air in the same way that air dried and wind-blown sheets and pillowcases do.

I know. This goes beyond luck and into a whole new territory. I am blessed.

what a difference a day makes

2007-09-30T23:41:00.000+01:00

I feel as if I've been to the ends of the earth, or back at the beginning of time, depending on your point of view. If only I could upload photographs I could show you, but due to the limitations of dial-up, you'll have to paint the pictures yourself, people. You're going to need a palette of sky blues and grassy greens, plus that particular shade of mediterranean turquoise more commonly associated with warm seas, but frequently found on the NW coast of Scotland. A clear, glassy turquoise, then. Cerulean blue and a hint of cadmium yellow ought to produce the colour in question. Last of all, an ashy volcanic black and a crisp foaming white like snow-in-the-sea.

A day of sun and shadows chasing across the widest skies. Walking on high clifftops on the oldest rocks in Shetland. Black rabbits scurrying away from our approach, sea birds turning below in an endless, effortless gyre. Conversation, laughter, some exceedingly bad jokes ( mine ) inelegant clambering ( also mine ) over a series of stiles and fences and assorted obstacles, all the better to gaze in awe at the dramatic coastline where the sea has shaped the landscape with almost unimaginable power.

I love walking on old volcanic rock - it's so grippy underfoot, offering no possibility of slippage for walkers of a nervous disposition. The sun came in and out, the wind-scythed grass looked like old velvet, the sea pounded and crashed below, occasionally booming like the one o'clock gun off the ramparts of Edinburgh castle.

Sorry. What the hell is that doing here, pray? Swiftly relocate head from Princes Street back to Eshaness.

Walking further inland we found a vast gash in the land, plunging down to a beach linked to the distant sea by a long subterranean passage. As the tide came rushing along the passage you could feel the boom rising up underfoot. The sea has found a way into the very heart of the land here, insistently pounding at its deep subterranean spaces until they surrender. I saw the sea at its most benign today, but later, over soup and bacon rolls ( a very Scottish Sunday lunch) I saw a photograph of a winter version of the same view we were currently enjoying under a September sun. The sea of winter is a very different beast. A feral, pitiless sea. A dark grey monster seemingly unrelated to the foaming, swirling turquoise beauty outside.

Shetland is doing its seductive best to capture my heart, and I am enchanted. Under this autumn's mellow sun, it's almost possible to forget that only a short time ago my world had shrunk down to a landscape carved out of various shades of deepest, forbidding presbyterian grey. At each turn and twist in the ribbon of road that winds from Northmavine to Sunburgh, every glimpse of the sea is a pool of light in the darkening landscape. The last of this perfect day turns to a pink dusted dusk on Meal beach and as the light fades we return homeward to the evening's slow collapse into night.

What a difference a day makes. Thankyou for sharing it with me.

on the battlements

2007-09-29T23:07:00.000+01:00

Definitely a night for wordless music and a deep whisky glass. Pass this one by if you haven't been divorced and have never had to do the merry dance of Sharing The Children. Really. Trust me. Scroll on down, this one's not for you.

For the remainder, all you battered and tattered little band of people who've had part of themselves torn away by an infernal engine called dee, eye, vee, oh, arse, well, heck, gather round, throw another log on the fire and help yourselves to whisky.

Finally tonight, after months of feeling that something was about to change, got a phone call from my ex-husband to confirm that he is leaving town and heading up North. In previous, hellish times, this would have been cause to crack open a bottle of champagne and toast his speedy departure, but now, with the our old battlefield grassed-over and the memory of the horrible wounds we inflicted, just that - a memory - it's odd to think that I'm the one left behind, manning the Fort.

The Fort is a depleted thing. Once a busy, thriving concern when the babies were small, now it's a ghost-Fort, with just three of us, my partner, my eldest daughter ( the youngest is thankfully too young to remember the Bad Old Days) and I, left to remember the battles, the troop movements, the no-go areas and all the ghastly fall-out that used to litter our path through the wreckage of a family life. Wind blows down the corridors, and litter gathers under the wheels of a rusting tricycle. These days, the Fort is surrounded by a land in which I have absolutely no wish to remain. So part of me is deeply envious of my ex-husband's escape bid. Part of me wishes that I'd been the one to move first. I heard, with a sinking heart, the real pain in my daughter's voice when she said - well at least you're not going to move away, Mum.

Oh, but I so want to. All of me yearns to leave, to find an island or a highland place, far from aspects of our world that more and more I fail to understand or feel a part of. All of me wanting to leave but knowing that I can't. At least not yet. Not until eldest daughter has grown up and gone, and youngest daughter is old enough for a move not to be The End Of The World, Mum, how could you do this to MEEEEEEEE?

So. I can't have freedom, yet. I'm stuck here in the Fort, holding the damn thing. Why am I holding this Fort? It's not as if it's in any danger of imminent invasion. The sentries have all gone to get different jobs, and there's not so much as a single pitchfork left with which to defend the battlements. But instead I find myself like a hamster in its wheel doing an endless repeat cycle ; a seemingly endless patrol round the sodding battlements, noting bloodstains here and there, observing how the buckets of pitch we drizzled over the heads of the incoming hordes of Visigoths ( or perhaps just tides of luvvies, thugs and assorted wags ) have left their indelible stain on the stonework. Patrolling the battlements of the ghost-Fort, vowing that nothing will drag me up to the airy attic room where the children's clothes are stored, interleaved with tissue and lavender, stored as if by preserving wool and cotton I can somehow, preserve and save them, my children. The battlements are, in truth, a bloody chilly place to be on a dark autumn night. I'd far rather be downstairs with all of you, watching sparks rise up against the night sky ( the roof could use some repairs, I fear, but hey - it's a Fort and who among us can afford to repair a Fort-roof?) and sipping at a glass of whisky.

So why am I out here? Because inside the Fort it's suffocating. Because out here, I can't see much beyond the yellow sodium lights of the cage I feel I'm in, but out here, at least I can feel the wind on my face and taste the rain. And besides, in truth, I'm not really back at the Fort yet. I'm here, in Shetland, removed from all this Drama going on back home. But...

But I have to go home soon. Back to the cage I built. Or Fort. Or whatever you want to call it. The life that hasn't fit for years. The absolute aching loneliness of years and years and years of waving, and smiling and trying to communicate. Of sending out a little signal into the darkness and waiting for an answering one in return. Thing is, here, in Shetland, there's a distinct possibility that I've picked up some answers to my signal. Faint ones, sure, but answers just the same. Given more time, I could explore each and every signal and who knows, maybe the darkness might recede a little. There is life, Captain, but perhaps not as we know it.

But I have to go home soon. And the signals will grow fainter and I'll tell myself that they weren't really answers after all, and the howling loneliness of the Fort will descend again, and night after night, I'll be up there on the battlements, peering out at the distant sodium lights and remembering what it felt like to live, albeit briefly, at sixty degrees North.

So. Yeah. Tonight's cheery little threnody has been brought to you courtesy of Dee-Eye-Vee-Oh, arse with orchestral accompaniment from the nice Mr Bowmore of Islay.

generate to irritate

2007-09-27T21:40:00.000+01:00

For the past three nights in a row, my little shed on the shore has
woken in the wee small hours to the thrumming and rumbling of heavy
machinery. In the absolute silence of a Shetland night, such sounds
are magnified tenfold. Noisy nights could be expected if this place
was a vast urban conurbation, but it's not, it's a small island where
the sheep probably outnumber the humans. At the first sound outside,
I woke in darkness, wondering what on earth was going on. Voices,
splashes, sounds of metal ringing on stone and under it all, a
generator rumbling and coughing into life. In the pitch black of a
Scalloway night, my neighbour had turned on floodlights and could be
seen hurling concrete into a mixer with gay abandon prior to doing a
spot of recreational wall building and pickaxe wielding. He was doing
this a scant thirty feet away from where I clung to the edge of my
futon and profoundly dammed his eyes.

Monday night, the show began at 2 a.m and finished at dawn. Tuesday
night was a later performance, beginning at 2.40 a.m and finishing at
dawn. Last night it began at 3.15 a.m. and by then I was so sleep-
deprived and desperate, I climbed downstairs and phoned the police.
Curtain came down twenty minutes later. There were no encores.

Yeah, I know. You think I should have gone out and spoken to the
insanely insomniac concrete-mixer and pick-wielder myself. You think
it was a bit...cowardly and mean of me to sic the law on him? You can
see it, hmmm? You would've done that, eh? Got your clothes on,
grabbed a torch ( it's pitch dark out there - no streetlights - the
floodlights are for his benefit, not for community illumination) and
gone next door to remonstrate with a neighbour you've never met. A
very strong neighbour ( you should have seen the vast stones he was
hefting around - phhhwoarrrrrr) with a pickaxe. Yeah, right. Sure you
would.

So. Silence blankets the shore tonight. I'm flailing around in a
sleep-deprived fog, trying to stay awake long enough to draw a
cartoon promoting, announcing and introducing the first meeting of a
Stitch and Bitch group in Lerwick. I hope I have cojones enough to go
back to the shop where I was initially rebuffed for enquiring as to
the possibility of there being such a group already in existence in
Shetland. Go back to the shop and ask if they'll be good enough to
put up the poster that I ought to be Getting On With instead of
blogging...

The idea behind the S & B being that if you build it, they will come.

But if you build it in the middle of the bloody night, your neighbour
will grass you up bigtime.

rainy Monday evening

2007-09-25T11:44:00.001+01:00

It's dark, the day has been put away, the work all done - the
children tucked up with a long-distance word from their mama and I'm
wrapping myself around Martin Taylor's sleepy, smoky jazzy riffs for
late-night grown-ups and wondering if I'll ever get to be good enough
to improvise a few of my own. Today the fiddle part of Fiddle and
Pins was hauled out blinking into the grey daylight of a wet and
misty afternoon, actually a wet morning too and probably, after I
finish here, an unbelievably wet evening as well. Last night's concert
reminded me that music can be the best company ever, even if you're a
crap musician like me. One of the joys of electric violins is that
while I'm going through this hideously discordant re-acquaintance
with my fiddle, I'm near as dammit inaudible.

Trust me, this is a blessing. On an acoustic violin I'd sound ten
times more ferkin' awful than I do now. But now, I can saw away and
feel like I'm really sounding not too bad, mainly because all I can
hear is whatever genius I'm jamming ( I use this word loosely) along
with.

It does give me a completely illusory feeling of playing well, and at
this stage in the game, that can only be a good thing, because if I
could really hear what I sounded like, I'd consign my little black
bendy fiddle to its case and never let it see daylight again. So
today I've played along with Afro Celt Sound System, Charlie Haden &
Pat Metheny, Martin Taylor, Martyn Bennet and Jesse Cook. In my
imagination I'm up there in front of a wall of Marshall amps, speaker
towers, decks and...oh do shut UP, you at the back, I know I'm a sad
git.

Today the World of Real Work As Opposed To residency work sent an
email wondering if I'd had any thoughts regarding a cover for The
Trouble with Dragons. I hear the sound of distant whips, I fear. It's
odd, having crossed the tipping point of the residency and cantering
towards the home run enables me to hear what has largely been
inaudible until now. And what do I hear, pray?

Money talks
I can't deny
I heard it once
It said 'Goodbye'.

Amazing how I've managed to tune out the normal background hum of
money-related anxieties. I really feel about a million miles away
from all that nonsense. But, alas, we have to eat, shoe the children
and keep the roofs from blowing off, so perforce, I have to nail my
nose back to the grindstone. I mean I haven't exactly been taking it
easy, but I have taken time out to do stuff that feeds the soul
rather than the maw of Mammon. I don't want to give the false
impression that the residency has been one long sojourn in the Big
Easy, but I am all too aware that pretty soon I'll have to re-engage
with The Moderately-Sized Difficult.

Cue the Cajun music. Ma jolie blonde va gris maintenant. Zydeco
filles go wahhhhhh. Iko, iko stay here.

ms. mouse heads for the hills

2007-09-23T23:25:00.000+01:00

You know, I could get used to this solitude stuff. I rolled out of bed extra early this morning even though it was Sunday, trying to squeeze in a hillwalk before heading back into Lerwick to see two concerts, one of which kicked off at two thirty. Therefore, I had to lope up the hill at a rather accelerated pace and down again in order to get back in time to do a quick change from woman of the mountains into woman who listens to jazz in her lunchtime. Actually, not too much change there, except I never wear lippy on a hill...

So. Victorious, I am being. I climbed Ronas Hill ( Shetland's highest) in the teeth of a small hurricane. God, it was windy. And not from the carpark halfway up Collafirth Hill, but from sea level. The honourable ascent. And yes, it's only half a Munro, but hey - I was completely on my own, and even half a hill can kill you if the weather turns foul and you trip and break something. So. Me, myself and I plus an unfeasably heavy rucksack ( in which were an A&E unit, three Sherpas, a portable generator, a twin oven Tranga, three pounds of egg tagliatelle and 250ml of Perigord truffle sauce, a Siberian goosedown bivvy bag, a month's supply of 70% cocoa solids Valrhona, a Blackberry, three i-pods, one pair of circular needles and four balls of kidsilk haze yarn and a Nice Young Man) climbed the hill.

At the top I could see the skies rushing towards me were that shade of grey that promised serious precipitation possibly accompanied by a blanket of thick cloud obscuring all obvious landmarks. But I have a lush's tradition of having a celebratory swig of whisky on finally wheezing my way to the trig point, so, nervously and very, very quickly, I necked my malt and headed off, back down to safety. And not a moment too soon. Literally, once I was safely on the road down from Collafirth Hill and turning to say thankyou to all four points of the compass ( Oh, do stop sniggering at the back. I know. Ancient hippies r' us.) the heavens opened. Rain, wind, in quantities to be seriously alarming higher up the hill, but from where I was, just noisy, wet and forcing me into a kind of jog-trot ( tricky in hillwalking boots) to deliver me soggy but very happy back at my car twenty minutes later.

And later...a concert to celebrate the life of 'Peerie' Willie Johnson ( Shetland's beloved guitar player, who was known and loved the world over) with, oh bliss, Martin Taylor playing guitar with his band. If this is the solitary life, bring it on...

podless

2007-09-22T17:19:00.000+01:00

Okay. That's it. I'll have to come home.

Today, at the gym, my precioussssss noisypod died on me, and no
amount of rescucitation and restoring and restarting and reloading
can bring it back from the dead. I am, as I speak, digging it a very
small grave and will consign it to the great Apple in the sky just as
soon as I come up with an apposite piece of music to hum at its funeral.

All suggestions welcome.

A pod-less planet looks pretty bleak to me. Not to mention the sheer
impossibility of doing any exercise whatsoever without the noisypod
to fire me up and set me going. What? No music? Phwoarrrr. Fergeddit.
In that case, I may as well sit back on my couch in the potato
position and commence The Consumption of Chocolate. Tried to log on
to Apple and buy a pale, shuffling substitute, but couldn't even
manage to do that. Dial-up is crap for online shopping, a fact which
has saved me a fortune, but which, as of now, is a royal pain in the
ass. I want a pod, and I want it, if not now, then next week, weather
permitting.

I'm trying to make light of this but...inside I'm looking down the
long Black Tunnel To The Time of Complan and Zimmers. Is this the
beginning of The End? First the i-pod goes, then the i-sight, closely
followed by the i-deas and on and on, until the floor is littered
with teeth, hair, prostheses and the only thing left to look forward
to is when Nurse swings by to turn the l i-ghts out.

Opened a little red box posted from home and discovered two posies of
sweetpeas, only slightly crumpled after their long journey to
Shetland. This tender gift reduced me to a state of hiccuppy sobs,
which I'm sure was not their sender's intention. Sweetpeas now
gracing my table in a teapot, their petals unfolding in soft shades
of pink and lilac. A little reminder of a garden that is still
blossoming a long way south from here.

deafening hush

2007-09-17T14:15:00.001+01:00

Sunday afternoon, growing a tad bored with the utter silence of my own company, I set off again, ever intrepid, up a hill, across a trackless peat bog/ heath, compass in hand, in search of a high ridge walk marked on my map with a clearly drawn dotted line. This dotted line, or its equivalent, an obvious track, was guarded by not one but five mangy sheepdogs who came running to surround me in a faintly menacing huddle. One of the collies had a single glaring blue eye, which did not reassure me of its owner's good intentions. Another of the collies was the same size as a bear. One of the collies turned out to be a vast black labrador. Hey. There were five of them and one of me, so being a wuss, I took the road less travelled. I did the nonchalant very fast powerwalk away from the dogs and took an alternative uphill path. This meant forging my own route, compass in hand just like yesterday, eyes peeled for signs of BULLS. After a morning of rain, today's wet landscape was dotted with variations on the malevolent tussock*. As I leapt and splashed my way across this moonscape, I wondered , not for the first time, what the hell I was doing spending a lazy Sunday afternoon engaged in such strenuous pursuits. Then the sun slid out from behind a cloud, the beautiful wide seaview opened up and I remembered why I love walking the high airy places.

The silence, the solitude and the wide open spaces are breathtaking. The alone-ness is okay too - not what I'd choose, given my 'druthers, but a similiar solitude to the one that I've lived with for most of my working life. Just because I recognize it, doesn't mean I like it, though. Alone-ness can so easily shade over into loneliness. Yeah. It was bloody lonely. Across a narrow channel of water lay Burra, the last place my colleague Harry Horse looked out on before he killed first his terminally ill wife and then himself. That kind of enormity and terrible finality made my view of his beloved landscape all the more meaningful , and also all the more lonely not having anyone to turn to for a simple human touch - a hand on my hand, an arm around my shoulders. Something to pretend that we are not alone. Even if, in truth, we are.

Sat on a rock and drank Lapsang, ate oatcakes, blew nose and pulled myself together. I looked out over the top of the ridge to the fragmented landscape of many little islands, stacks and nameless rocks, each standing alone, all of them linked by the waters of the pale blue sea. I'm guessing that Harry was beyond any form of connection, beyond being able to reach out and say - help me, I'm drowning. I'm guessing that his wife was his lodestar and that he simply could not bear to find his own way through his life without her.

The sun on my face and the wind in my hair remind me of the promises, the miles and the life I still have to live. Travelling hopefully. That's what I intend to aim for - not the arrival, but the journey itself.

*These are clumps of grass which protrude from the swamp, seem to offer firm footholds but the moment an unwary walker commits to one of these babies, it tilts sideways forcing you to overbalance and slide into the swamp.

true north

2007-09-15T23:37:00.000+01:00

Had an intrepid day today. Screwed courage up to the sticking point and set off, map and compass in hand, to go to Northmavine and beyond, to the point of Fethaland. This was sparked off by having finished ( at least I think I've finished, but hey - we've been here before a few times before, she said without the faintest hint of bitterness) the copyedit/rewrite of Witch Baby v. 48.93.00. Let's move swiftly on, shall we?

So. I'd spent waaaaay too long staring at a Mac screen and wanted to blow some cobwebs away (plus somehow lose the pungent aroma of curry which had enveloped my good goretex ever since I unwisely took it with me to dinner at Gurkha's Kitchen). I made a flask of tea, grabbed oatcakes and an apple, the relevant o.s. sheets and headed out into the grey.

Drove and drove and drove like a geriatric version of a boy racer with Afro-Celt Sound System throbbing inside the car. Drove past Mavis Grind ( pronounced 'grinned') a famously narrow neck of land separating the Atlantic from the North Sea, carried on and on, across moorland, into a wilderness of grasses, heathers, lochins and convoluted coastlines. Sadly, the best views out to sea had their full complement of fish farms, but hey. The road ran out at Isbister where it was time to boot up and get out there.

Gulp. Map in hand, off I went uphill only to find a gate barring my path. No problem, except the gate bore a BEWARE OF THE BULL sign.

I have to explain that phobia no. 2 in the Debi list of things-that-freak-me-out is cows, bulls and other bovine lifeforms which have to be passed on walks. Phobia no. 1 is mountain ridges with what to me looks like lethal exposure on either side. This said, I would walk back up a Munro with evil ridges that I'd just descended rather than cross a field of cows to my car. I am petrified of cows. Look. Don't sneer like that. I had at least one of my children without any pain relief whatsoever, so I'm allowed the odd irrational fear, okay?

So. I turned round and found an alternative pathless route, skirting chasms, crossing squoggy marshes, tacking back and forward from coast to hill and going up and down and up and down needless ascents and descents until I finally hauled out my compass and realised what direction I should be heading in. All became clear ( ish) .The landmass across the sea on my right was the island of Yell. The sea frothed and crashed against the coastline and I imagined being wrecked off those unforgiving sheer cliffs, and how you'd not be able to escape the sea, and other cheerful thoughts. This was to overwrite my even more cheery thoughts about the BULL which probably hadn't read the notice on his gate and was undoubtedly ambling happily on the rocks and hills over my head, just waiting for a ditz in blue goretex to climb up and Make His Day.

Then I saw the path ahead, and the map fell into place in the way that maps have never done for me before, and I began to feel like the Intrepid Brave Pathfinder instead of the Lost Lady Writer. Picked up my pace and headed north to where the path ahead dropped spectacularly to a view of seas, and a green island (Fethaland) joined to the mainland by the thinnest neck of rocks and grass. Met an Irish couple at the last but one gate, clambering into waterproof trousers and hats. They'd heard the weather forecast and were dressing accordingly. They also had seen the BULL, a highlander with big horns. Gulp. I'd been trying to convince myself that rumours of his life were greatly exaggerated, but here was proof that he LIVES.

Onwards. Down to the sea, where I saw an otter loping across a meadow, and then to a pile of vast rocks flung along a sand spit, which form the neck of land joining the island to the mainland. The Atlantic beachside was dramatic and magnificent, windswept and forbidding at the same time. There were poignant reminders of human frailty in the path of Time's great entropic eraser: collapsing dykes and cottages standing as the last evidence of there having once been a thriving human settlement there - apparently the ruins are those of the summer-houses of deepsea fishermen, abandoned in the nineteen forties when, presumably they had better things to do than catch fish. Took loads of photographs, climbed up to an unmanned lighthouse, carried on a bit beyond onto grassy clifftops where the faint path petered out completely. Being a wuss, I felt sick with vertigo looking over the edge to the rocks below and the stacks jagging out of the sea ahead, so I turned back south.

Back down at the ruined settlement, I stopped, sat down, drank two cups of Lapsang, ate two oatcakes and felt complete. There was the possibility of BULL out there, but at that moment, the now, the ever-present perfection of that instant in time was as good as it was going to get.

The rain rained, the wind blew, the BULL lurked, but I found my way back along an almost invisible path which leapt out at me because I was mapreading. Yee-haw. Compasses rock. The mist descended, just enough to make me almost weep with terror when shapes of beasts reared out of the distance, but in the skewing of scale that occurs at twilight, they turned out to be sheeps not BULLS. Thank the lord.

The apple I ate in the shelter of my car, the apple of victory over map co-ordinates, northings, eastings, boggy bits and BULLS, was the best apple I've eaten all year.

paper ballerinas

2007-09-13T21:36:00.001+01:00

Okay. Got my groove back. Or whatever it's called.

Wrestled with demons yesterday, then beat them into submission. My efforts were aided by the arrival of a small box of apples, individually wrapped in tissue paper, each picked off trees on the West coast and posted before the dew had time to dry. Opening the box released a perfume of apples so intense I could almost imagine myself standing beside the trees, watching as each fruit was picked. These old varieties of apples are my favourite part of the late summer harvest ; a part I'd thought I'd missed by being here, in Shetland.

This morning, the herring gulls were a strident chorus of feathery shriek alarms, waking me long before my alarm gave its digital chirrup. When the gulls land on my roof, they're only a few inches away from where I sleep in the rafters. They sound heavy ( man ) as their pink feet crash onto the tiles. Seen up close, they are enormous, their beaks viciously yellow, their heads performing exorcist-like rotations as they scan all incoming traffic for its calorific value.

Over dinner last night, I learned the art of turning a napkin into a ballerina. Yeah, I know. For this I travel over seas and oceans? Actually, yes. For this gentle transformation of trash into keepsake, I think it may well be worth going the distance. But since you're being so sniffy about it, then I won't tell. Suffice to say, all twelve of us at the table had a go at folding, tearing, tweaking and twisting our napkins into these delicate little paper ballerinas. So pretty were they, that our Nepalese waiter returned our table with a fresh stack of napkins and asked to be shown how to do the ballerina thing too.

Since then, I've made a few ballerinas, but my ones look as if they have gout. Or a goitre. Or elephantisis. They bulge in all the wrong places, which, as anyone who knows me will attest, Will Not Be Tolerated. Bulges R Not Us. I'm working on achieving the perfect, long-legged, curtseying, wide-skirted version. In paper, not flesh, although if making perfect paper ballerinas has a knock-on effect on my bulges, then hey - bring it on. I may even sneak out and buy a whole sinful packet of napkins to practice upon, all the better to achieve perfection.

Talking of which, I'm trying to work through the last edit of Witch Baby which must be the final edit v. 48.9.13. Part of my problem with this edit is that the copy-editor's comments are written in the margins in the smallest type I have ever seen. I waved it under Donald's nose and we agreed that whatever it is, it has to be waaaay smaller than 9 point, which means that my eyesight is frankly not up to the job. Peering and blinking and, I have to confess, occasionally cursing like a sailor, I'm trying to get to the place where I can go - FINIS.

Every time I think I'm there, the light changes, the shadows rush towards me and the cool, clean water I was about to dive into turns out to be sand. I am so very weary, and it's so very disheartening to discover I still have miles and promises and all that Frosty stuff to go. And I can't get on with discovering what I'm going to write about in response to being here, to allow whatever that may be to rise to the surface until I've finished with v. 48.9.13.

So. Note to self: Brains will be cudgelled. Eyeballs will be forced into focus. Will nail self to chair until it's done and dusted and then....

then I'm going to go and walk for a very long time, hopefully up something high, or, if that's not possible, along something beautiful, and I'm going to attempt to put myself into a suitably receptive frame of mind which, I'm hoping, will allow whatever's out there to arise and show itself. At least, that's the plan.

beyond

2007-09-12T16:37:00.001+01:00

I have to hope that there's more to life than the evidence of my
eyes. To hope that there is a greater world beyond the temporal,
beyond the world of the senses, beyond this world of 'stuff'. Some
days I can believe in the vision of an emerald green beyond; other
days I shudder to think that the home planet and all her wriggling,
striving, breeding billions are all there ever was, or will be.

Today, your upbeat narrator has some difficulty in finding any joy in
counting herself as part of the human race. Today, I am revolted by
my tacit collusion in the horrors going on in Iraq. Had I not been
reading the Guardian's recent extracts from Naomi Klein's new book
'The Shock Doctrine : The Rise of Disaster Capitalism' I could
cheerfully have continued forgetting that every day since Iraq was
invaded, there has been a dirty war rumbling away on the other side
of the world.

In the interests of my own mental health, I am quite good at
forgetting. Some things are too foul to bear too much daylight being
shed upon them. Some things are too shameful to be spoken of.
Forgetting is easier, tidier and allows me to sleep at night.
Thankfully, I don't have to deal with this kind of stuff every day of
my life or else I would be unable to continue with the simplest of
things.

Like drawing breath.

Every time I fill my tank, every time I turn on a light, every time I
buy some manufactured item without an impeccable pedigree ( hand-
crafted from local ingredients, grown organically, harvested by well-
paid workers, minimally packaged etcetera ; though the 'sourcing' of
such faultless items is an exhausting task in itself, so sometimes I
lapse and buy something with a potentially dirty history) every time
I connect ( as a consumer) with the world of big business, I am
connecting with the same world that is raping the people and the
country of Iraq.

Ergo - I am part of the problem. Therefore, I am responsible. Tracing
back the lineage of suppliers of our everyday goods can lead to the
uncomfortable truth ; we are all part of the problem. With the best
will in the world, some of us have been buying goods from the same
companies who are making billions in the 'rebuilding' of Iraq.

That's the same country we destroyed from the ground up. It exists
beyond the grey images on our television screens. Or, should I say it
existed. Now it's a war zone of our own making. Every time we filled
our tanks, we were part of it. Every time we did nothing to stop the
war. Every time we silently colluded, turned away from the carnage
and taught ourselves to forget. Every time we self-medicated with the
many drugs we use to keep our forgetting at an acceptable level. We
read on, skipped channels, scrolled over the bits about collateral
damage and turned instead to the accounts of a houseful of human
puppets jerking about to the dictates of the media.

There's an obscenity at the heart of our society that fills me with
horror. Every time I connect to the internet, my inbox fills up with
foul matter which I am forced to wade through to get to my work-
related emails. This is the same foul matter that we wade through in
our newspapers and televisions in order to get to the stuff which
interests us. We are drowning in a sea-tide of foulness, and slowly,
inexorably, we are developing an ability to ignore it, to tune it out
and not to let it upset us. We are slowly adapting to a climate
change within the human spirit. This kind of adaptation is dangerous
in the extreme. For if we lose the ability to empathize with our
fellow-humans, then we lose part of our humanity, and that, as
history has shown, is very bad news indeeed.

Only connect, someone once said. It's one of my favourite
instructions for how to live this life. Connect ourselves to every
living soul, connect to our beautiful planet, connect to the fact
that we are all part of one vast, living organism. All of us,
connected. Each of us responsible for each other.

movies and shakers

2007-09-10T23:05:00.001+01:00

An air of exhaustion hangs over my little shed by the sea. Too much
excitement for one weekend, or for one girl. Regrets have I none.

As well as doing two full-on children's events* at Wordplay
( Shetland's annual book festival), my past four evenings have been
spent hurling food down my neck in time to leg it across Lerwick in
time to watch special screenings of several films curated for
Screenplay ( Shetland's first film festival) by Mark Kermode. Mark's
next venture almost as soon as he lands back on Blighty is to fly
out to the US and interview Neil Young of the nasal voice and less-
than-cheerful-subject matter songwise.

Yeah. That Neil Young. Anyway, watching Mark's choice of films and
hearing the directors and editors of said films come up on stage
after the screenings to talk to him about their work was utterly
fabulous. Although I was dragging myself back over the hills to
Scalloway at ungodly times of night under the red and unblinking eyes
of the windmills, it was well worth it. Even the films I didn't like
were worth staying up to watch. Much in the same way as writers and
books are demystified by seeing authors at book festivals, so too
were the films and their auteurs. Ken Russell was programmed to
appear, but was taken ill shortly before the film festival began. His
editor Michael Bradsell came, though, and talked long into the night
about what it was like to be involved with making such screen
classics as 'The Devils' and 'Women in Love'. Both shown in their
restored, uncut, director's cut version.

I won't bang on and on about what that was like except to say that
the banned orgy scene in 'The Devils' faded into near risibility
beside some of today's tamer episodes of that godawful live-action
television series which I refuse to name. Mhmmm. That one. Actually,
come to think of it, Ken Russell actually appeared on said godawful
etcetera. Make your own connections there.

Also saw Ian Rankin-inspired 'Reichenbach Falls' ( weird seeing Ian's
beloved Edinburgh used as a backdrop when I'm in Shetland. Did not
feel even remotely homesick) which was a neat bit of entertainment
made on two quid, three buttons and a paperclip. Heard the director
and producer discuss how one goes about putting together seventy-five
minutes of film on an impossibly tight budget. Also saw 'The Flying
Scotsman'; the true story of the young clinically depressed cyclist
who cobbled together a racing bike made out of old washing machine
parts and went on to break world records with his Frankenstein creation.

Also heard some astonishing poetry written in response to the work of
several craftspersons. In some cases these collaborations were true
marriages of heart and mind - a poem about a selkie, with all that
implicit elemental erotic imagery coupled with the lush softness of
a hand-felted piece cut to resemble seagrasses. To call this a scarf
and the words a poem, is to miss the point, I think. Then there was
a bookbinder who bound a brutal and brilliant work about war into the
form of a ziggurat which unfolded, accordion-like to reveal series of
black and white pared-down images illustrating the escalating menace
in the poet's words.

Then had my socks blown off by singer-songwriter Lise Sinclair's
launch of her cd 'Ivver entrancin' wis'. And it was. As was I.
Utterly entranced by not only Lise's voice, but the songs for voice
and cello and harp which she had composed and sung in response to a
selection of poems, old and new. Collaboration across the disciplines
appears to be key. As one who has worked for her whole life on her
own, I find the notion of working closely across the artforms to be
pretty revolutionary. Obviously, I don't get out much, or even enough.

Then there was the crack in the green room. Or should that be
'craic'? What is the Shetland equivalent? I think those were some of
the best conversations I've ever had in my entire working life. Damn.
It was so good you could've bottled the spirit and sold it as a
Distiller's Cut. Normally, the green room is the last place you'd
want to be before an event, except when you're performing, there's
nowhere else to go. Whooooo. I've been in some hideous ones -
watching famous authors getting hammered on bathtubs of champagne,
famous authors turning up with their own homeland security, famous
authors air-kissing anyone they think they can use, famous authors
demanding drugs, famous authors being famously prick-like...yeah,
well, you can imagine how gruesome that can be. Compare and contrast
the green room at Shetland where a tableful of persons with literary
pulling-power were discussing their favourite soups and how we could
all give up the daily grind down the word-mine and initiate
Shetland's inaugural Soup Festival.

My ribs hurt from laughing so much. My throat sounds like I've been
chewing gravel. The bags under my eyes have got bags...and I confess,
I haven't touched the fiddle or the pins all weekend.

Tong peas is what I say.

* By full-on I mean Little Red Riding Hood ( the Shetland version
would sound something like Peerie Rid ) taking a shark to her Granny,
who lives in a concrete hut (with some resemblance to a public
toilet) a long way away along the beach. The beach and the hooded one
were mine, but the rest came from my audience of loudly inventive
persons of small stature.

The other part of full-on was a small excursion into live dragon-
birth complete with grunts and heavings. Hey ho. All in a day's work.
Nnnnrgh, uh, uh, uh, nnnnnrghhhh....pop, waaaaaahhhhhhhhh.