At the start of this year, I decided to embrace my term as Writer in Residence for the Cairngorms National Park as a kind of pilgrimage. Certainly, I would be covering a lot of ground delivering the project, and that has proved true, and fascinating. More significantly, I knew I would be on a personal […]
Losing my wallet was the last straw. The final sign, if any were needed, that what I was really losing was my marbles. It was the climax of a catalogue of cock-ups and memory lapses, of a comedy of errors that had been playing out for several weeks, but long since stopped being funny. I’d […]
Driving to the first workshop of the year-long Shared Stories: A Year in the Cairngorms Project I was feeling bleak. It shouldn’t be that way and normally it isn’t. Normally, I’m excited about a new event or workshop series; maybe a little nervous about who will come and how they will respond, but as I’ve […]
“Can I throw her stick?” cries my godson J, careering down the path ahead of me with our golden retriever, Sileas, who got her Gaelic name from her origin family on the Outer Hebridean island of Harris and her love of every living person from God knows where, but seemingly God himself. She certainly never […]
“I don’t believe it!” Duncan cries, peering through his binoculars (or ‘bins’, as he calls them. I’m learning the lingo.) “Is that them?” Who? What? Where? We’re parked in my car in a layby several miles up Glen Feshie and I can only see a snowy expanse on the opposite bank of the river, broken […]
Here is an invitation: come with me on a journey into the Cairngorms. Perhaps, like me, you live here; perhaps, like I once was, you are a visitor. In some senses they are the same. Next to the deep time of the mountains, our sojourns here, whether a lifetime or a holiday, are but a […]