The flyer had a picture of the sea on it, all I really needed to be tempted. The programme for the Fringe, the festival running alongside the Edinburgh International Book Festival and the Festival, is daunting in its thickness. I no longer even pretend I'm going to read it. But I do like to see... Continue Reading →
Back to My Beginning
This photograph of me was taken on the steps of the first house I ever lived in, a quarter villa in the east of Edinburgh. It's the first house my parents owned and the home to which both my younger sister and I were taken after our respective births. We moved away the summer before... Continue Reading →
A Long Hot Summer
The last time Scotland sweltered for so long under a relentlessly sunny sky was a significant summer in my life. I was eight and my little world changed dramatically. For three years we had lived in Dumfries, the Queen of the South straddling the River Nith. I have partial memories of living elsewhere but the... Continue Reading →
Home
Home, they say, is where the heart is. But what if your heart can’t decide? Places are very important to me and I have a tendency to become dramatically attached to them. There are many that have grabbed my heart but only three where I have left it. At forty I went on a journey... Continue Reading →
My Favourite Place
I like small towns with tight communities, places where you’re a marked woman as soon as you arrive or maybe just before you’ve thought of going. In spite of sprawling housing estates encroaching on the spaces between, Scotland still has lots of places like that. I’ve visited and fallen in love with many over the... Continue Reading →