Mavis's Shoe

Author of two novels and a creative memoir.

Saturday 5 November 2016

Real Remembrance


As I understand it, the red poppy signifies the blood shed in fields by young men in a war which was unnecessary and should never have happened. It was never about supporting our troops to go out and shed more blood, either their own or that of others, but this seems to be how the meaning of the red poppy badge has evolved: a political statement instead of a remembrance of the tragic and ugly realities of war.

So how about we don’t wear a red poppy this time but instead light a candle in the privacy of our own homes and think about all those young lives that were lost in these wars (and others not mentioned on the Imperial War Museum site from where the following information comes):

First World War, 1914–1918
Russian Civil War, 1917–1922
Irish War of Independence, 1919–1921
Irish Civil War, 1922–1923
Second World War, 1939–1945
Korean War, 1950–1953
Kenya Emergency, 1952–1960
Suez Crisis, 1956
Malayan Emergency, 1948–1960
Aden Emergency, 1963–1967
The Troubles, 1968–1998
Falklands War, 1982
Gulf War, 1990–1991
Bosnian War, 1992–1995
Kosovo War, 1998–1999
Global War on Terrorism, 2001–2013
War in Afghanistan, 2001–2014
The Iraq War and Insurgency, 2003–2011

And let’s also remember all the civilians on the ground, millions of them, who died incidentally in the name of preserving other civilians.

Remembrance of the dead is usually a private thing. Perhaps we should keep it that way.

Thursday 27 October 2016

Star Struck

This is the Dark Sky Park in Galloway, southern Scotland in broad daylight in late October. It was taken following tea, oatcakes and red Leicester cheese and, before that, an evening in the company of two strangers in the middle of a field in the dark.

Newton Stewart was the only area not covered in cloud on Saturday 22nd October. I was a day late for the peak of the Orionid meteor storm but still hopeful of seeing something, so I alerted the Balloch o’ Dee campsite to the purpose of my journey in advance of my arrival.

Feeling like Susie No-Mates, I hurried down there, hooked up and grilled my fishcakes. The van was glaring white and toute seule in the middle of a (dark) green field below a rise. Along the rise stood a gathering of horses, silhouetted against the twilight sky.
By the time I’d finished eating, Caroline and David, two members of the BoD fraternity, had elected to join me. We stood peering at the cloudy sky shielding our eyes from the light outside the toilet block. Realising our difficulty, David turned off all the lights and soon afterwards the clouds parted and we spent the next four hours gazing upwards at shooting stars, pale or startling, in all directions.

My eyes adjusted completely to the dark, a process that takes roughly 30 minutes all in. It’s a measure of my speedy city lifestyle that I haven’t stood still long enough in the dark for this to have happened in a while. The ocular adaptability made the swash of Milky Way distinct and the continued presence of the horses known. We positioned ourselves facing the area we believed Orion to be, the main area the Orionids would be visible, hence the name, but regularly scanned the 180° our necks could manage. It was an evening of delights and frequent gasping at the many shooting stars. We joked that the action was probably all happening behind us.
Conversation was easy, despite my not having met them before and I’m extremely grateful for their calm companionship. After a while, Caroline drifted home. David stoked a fire he’d made in a pot-bellied open stove and offered me a beer. I was chilled in both senses of the word and also deeply happy.

The fire had meant we could stay out longer, but it also affected our vision and made the sky re-darken, so after David went to his caravan, I circumnavigated the camper several times and tried not to look at the dying fire.

Orion crept over the horizon, yes, directly behind where we’d sat, distinctive and unmistakable, and I got to watch through my binoculars the rise of an orange half-moon to Orion’s north.

At last I stood staring north, thanking my lucky stars for such good company, for the beautiful place, the dark, the Milky Way and a fabulous way to spend my time, when one last bright shooting star shot from east to west in exactly the area in which I gazed. ‘Wow’ was all I could say, over and over, and over and over again.

Impossible to photograph the dark, but this was the view in the morning:

And here's a panorama of Balloch o' Dee:
And their website: http://www.ballochodee.com/

Wednesday 28 September 2016

Jostling head

I’ve always been a split personality. But I don’t think I’m the only one. In fact, I think we all have different versions of ourselves which come front stage from time to time, or lurk behind the scenes pulling strings, or act as go-between linking your extrovert and introvert selves.

I also happen to think we need all the different parts of ourselves in order to function properly. Whatever. Because so many different things matter to me right now, I’m finding there’s a lot going on in the theatre of my life with lots of ‘characters’ all jostling for space at the podium.

This is possibly not the best way to introduce the fact that, as well as writing novels and memoirs, ghosting for others, editing dissertations for overseas students, facilitating workshops and so on, I have recently returned to my old counselling business. This is an incredibly exciting development for me. Last week I reread the text which made me fall in love with person-centred counselling all those years ago (nearly 20), Person-Centred Counselling in Action, by my old professor, Dave Mearns, and his colleague, Brian Thorne.

It has a boring title and a dull cover, but is an inspiring read and, like the student quoted on page 19, it has always read to me like a recipe for how to offer love (perhaps with a small ‘l’) to another person. ‘It’s about being free to treat other people in a loving way,’ she says. It’s a practical guide, and difficult to do, but I know from past experience that person-centred counselling really does work.

I had also decided to return to my earlier name of Sue Reid in order to keep Sue Reid the counsellor distinct and untainted by the madness that is Sue Reid Sexton, but those social media gremlins that rule the world now are having none of it. Therefore, I come clean: they are one and the same.

Except they’re not. It turns out they’re similar but quite distinct parts of me. For each to function fully they have needs which have to be met. They occupy different but similar spaces in my head. I am each one completely when I am actively functioning as either one or the other, such as tapping the laptop keys or engaging with a counselling client. Clients can rest assured that they have my full attention when I’m with them. With writing I’m in more danger or wandering off piste. It’s when I’m not doing either of those things that the confusion, and even discomfort, starts.

If I’m writing a novel, sometimes characters, situations and sentences float through my mind when I’m doing other things. If something interesting crops up, I jot it down in a notebook and continue with the washing up, still mulling. It’s a bit like sleeping on a problem. The work is going on even when I’m not consciously focussing on it. Likewise, the stories people tell in counselling often linger too. My mind wanders back to them in the days between sessions. Another counsellor once described it as people inadvertently ‘taking up residence in your house of counselling’. You can see how between these two very important activities, counselling and writing, there are a lot of ‘people’ milling about, many needing the attention of a counsellor, others of a writer. The distinction between the two is absolute, but I have only one brain.

While this is slightly overwhelming, it’s also interesting and stimulating. I’m hoping the various parts of my psyche, writer, counsellor, mother, facilitator, driver, editor and beachcomber, for instance, will sit down together and offer each other food for thought.

For more information on counselling click here.

Thursday 25 August 2016

16 in a Campervan

Earlier this year I attended a wedding in a remote part of Scotland. It was a second time around for both parties. The bride has four daughters, the groom four sons. The wedding took place amidst much hilarity in Kilfinnan Church and Kilfinnan Hotel. The blended, merged, and by all appearances delighted and newly formed family stayed in the giant (obviously) Kilfinnan House (replete with spa bath, sauna, table tennis, table football and pool table) where they all remained for the duration of the holiday/honeymoon.

Another couple and their son also stayed, and two daughters’ boyfriends, and I was invited to park my little campervan beside the house. Sadly, circumstances conspired against me so I only managed the nights before and of the wedding.

(The warmth of this family would make you weep). (Made me weep.)

Being the type of opportunist I am, I decided to break the record for the number of people I’ve had in that Romahome campervan. All eleven children of Applecross Primary once sat in there with ease, and on another occasion but with slightly less comfort, eleven slightly drunk adults from a Paisley book group crammed in there too.

Post wedding, we managed all sixteen of us.

Here are the other fifteen (without me) including the tops only of two heads. In case you don’t believe me, go to this link and you’ll see the bride, then the groom, then the rest of the party leaving the van.
Sadly, Paddy the Irish Wolfhound declined to join in.



Later the pet duck was persuaded to leave her paddling pool and join me in the cab.

How many people can you get into a Romahome or other tiny campervan?

Wednesday 10 August 2016

Absent blogger ...

Oops! I blogged for someone else this time and didn't want to repeat myself here. Instead I'm adding a link about the rest of the trip to France.

(It was fab, btw, and I'd go back in a heartbeat. Unfortunately it would take more like three and a half days.)

The new blog is on the Books From Scotland website and is part of a special newsletter about travel. There's also a great selection of other books on the subject.

Thursday 7 July 2016

Je suis arrivée.

I left Glasgow for the south of France, a journey of over 2000 kilometres, in horizontal rain and fiercely gusting wind. This lasted for 300 miles. Trees were inside out, windscreen wipers going like the clappers and I was obliged to grip the steering wheel as if my life depended on it, which it did. This was an adventure, but a tiring one.

I had three audiobooks, but at 70mph could hear only snippets, particularly Dara O’Brain who delivers his punch lines soto voce. These frustrating moments were followed by deafening crowd laughter. Luckily I’d also brought Dvorak’s Cello Concerto which I used as karaoke and sang along.

Sadly, the American lady on the borrowed sat-nav was inaudible too and had no volume control, but she was clear, if bossy, and always kind when I went the wrong way. ‘If you can, turn around …’

When the ferry left for France, the sky was as blue as blue ever is. I met a friendly Polish lorry driver who bounces backwards and forwards between France and England once a week, living in his cab. He found my mini-lorry-shaped campervan very funny. The French were beating Iceland in the European cup in the open plan bar and a travelling brass band with a ginormous tuba lead the celebrations when France scored and the death march when it was Iceland’s turn. Much alcohol was consumed (not by me) and there were party games at the end including pass-the-drunk-Frenchman-over-the-heads-of-the-other-drunk-Frenchmen.

I also survived the drunk Englishman who was keen to introduce himself and point out several times, without falling over, that he too was travelling alone in a campervan, was single and the divorce was through and everything. He’d seen me hanging around in a layby in my campervan and in Newhaven during the afternoon, for which he immediately apologised, rather tellingly. This brought home my vulnerability in a van which is so distinctive. I asked him how he was getting to his destination. ‘In my huge motorhome,’ he slurred, ‘because I’m single now and the divorce is through and everything …’

I exited the boat, shot off into the night and drove for two hours until I reached a rest area.

The following day I negotiated French autogas which isn’t called lpg but gpl and has a different nozzle on the pump. I had a special adaptor but no idea what to do with it, but thanks to a kind worker at a service station, I mastered it without blowing myself or the service station to smithereens.

I drove all day. Shortly before bedtime the satnav directed me off the motorway, which was about to become a péage (toll road), and down a winding but beautiful road with a red sunset for a backdrop and a perfect layby set a little off the road to spend the night.

The next day I survived a traffic jam on the ring road at Toulouse to be reunited first with my daughter and then with my sister and her daughter.

But ten kilometres before the finishing line the windscreen wipers refused to budge. Despite the red sky at night, there was a large rain cloud hovering. This shroud remained through the following morning so I raced into town and after several attempts, found a garage who fixed it. I negotiated all of this in French, to no-one’s greater amazement than my own.

Je suis arrivée.

Friday 1 July 2016

Van(essa) goes to France

It’s ridiculous but true. Both myself and Vanessa Hotplate are in a state of disarray. We are travelling south through the whole of England tomorrow, then boarding a ship for France on Sunday evening. The journey is 2043km, or 1276.875 miles (to be exact). ‘Yikes’ is my new word.

There is nothing difficult about this trip really. Just that it’s long I’ll be travelling alone and Vanessa is a very small quite elderly campervan. The van is in tiptop condition with new spark plugs, rewired sound system, full service and repaired lpg fuel tank. The AA (automobiles not alcoholics) are covering any breakdown and Tomtom has already worked out my route. I have a Scotland sticker for the bumper to indicate friendliness to the EU. What could possibly go wrong?

Sadly I forgot to pay the same attention to my own health and have jiggered my knee squeezing past clothes horses in my small kitchen. I can barely walk, but I can still drive, which is a relief. I have been advised to stop every so often for tea and waggle my leg under the table while I’m at it.

Many have gone before me in this travelling solo in foreign lands business. I will do my best to emulate them.

I have some paid editing to do, but otherwise this is a visit to family and an opportunity to get on with the new novel which has stalled at 19k words. Even the young novel needs a health check.

So, my washing is still drying in the rain, everything that shouldn’t be in the van has been removed and spread all over the house, and everything that needs to be in it is accumulating by the front door.

How will there ever be room for creative thought? I am massively excited. And also scared witless.

Thursday 23 June 2016

Knitting on the road

Dear protector of the humble campervan, please make this trip peaceful and easy and keep the mechanics of my van, the lovely Vanessa Hotplate, running smoothly. There is so much fun to be had at Woolfest in Cockermouth and I have an accomplice. This is, therefore, not a solo writing trip but a jaunt to the land of Angles and sheep.

We are leaving at the crack of dawn, or slightly after. We’re in Scotland where the dawn will happen at 4.30 am and 7 is about as early as I can do. Sarah Henry, my partner on this adventure, used to be a knitter, like me. Now she’s a spinner too. Her brother has taken to breeding Merino sheep. This is an unusual thing to do because Merino sheep are delicate souls and don’t like the damp British weather. Who does? But as he’s a vet he will know how to cosset these little souls and ensure they produce lots of lovely soft wool.

Sarah and I will stuff Vanessa Hotplate with sleeping bags, tea bags and other essentials, and five raw fleeces. We will then charge down the motorway to Cockermouth, unload the wool for selling, then go and buy other people’s finished yarn and fill up the van again.

Or rather, I will. Sarah not only spins wool into yarn, she also dyes it into the most amazing colours. Earlier this year, while we were the fabulous Edinburgh Wool Festival earlier this year, she bought me a spindle and promised to teach me how to use it. This is how she herself learned. She also very generously gave me a skein of her brother’s natural undyed Wensleydale and Leicester sheep yarn which I am going to use to make fancy Di Gilpin mittens.

It seems auspicious that there is some Leicester in there because Leicester features in my current work-in-progress about baby-snatching. Lester is a boy from Leicester. (Or is he?)

This is a selection of commercially dyed unspun wool given to me by a friend who is a felter. I'm hoping that using so many colours will help me learn to spin by clearly differentiating strands.

There will also be real live sheep at Wool Fest, although none will be travelling there in the van. (Phew!)

Meanwhile I am cleaning out the van, emptying the toilet, filling the water tank, draught-proofing the back door and generally tidying up. I don’t get many visitors, especially overnight ones, so this is going to be a total treat, as long as everything works ...

Tuesday 14 June 2016

Books are the biz

(Not a list of favourite books but some books that have been pivotal to my reading or illustrate what books can.)

Every story has a bad guy. In my case it was my dad, who taught English literature at university level (although as I discovered some years later, he himself didn’t have an English degree). He forbade us Enid Blyton books, which were being enjoyed by everyone else, not on the grounds of their dodgy class perspective, racism or sexism, but because they were badly written. He would give me a book, Little Women by Louisa Alcott, for instance, with instructions to read it and come back with comments. Well. No pressure there then. No fun either.
Alongside this were school teachers who gave me dry Victorian tomes (some of which were actually very good) and told us to read one chapter, just one, for next week. This is counterintuitive. If a book is good you’ll be lost in it and find yourself unable to stop reading all the other chapters too. The exercise seemed pointless and not to be trusted. Again, the job was to have intelligent things to say, but not from the more sensible position of having read the whole thing. The consequences of not having intelligent things to say were generally, both at home and at school, humiliation.
After my dad died I found out he was actually a high achieving Classics scholar who had been thrown out of the Classics department for some unknown misdemeanour. He therefore taught and read literature instead - because he had to. He managed to pass the reading-because-I-had-to thing down to me.

But I knew other people read because they loved reading; simple logic told me this. So, in my mid-teens, I went to a public library, not a school one which had books with ulterior purposes, but a free public one where people went for pleasure and bus timetables.

No-one knew I’d gone to the library and no-one except the librarian knew what I’d done there. There was no judge (my dad) and no jury (the school). I could read what I liked and take out several books at once. If I didn’t like them I could take them back the next day and try another few. This was a very important development: I was learning independent judgement.

I was also learning how to read critically. Studies have shown that children who read early do well later on. This is probably because they learn independent judgment at a formative stage through reading and questioning books.

One book I remember from that time taught me I could travel the world through reading. It was When Rain Clouds Gather by Bessie Head. To my knowledge, I’ve never met anyone else who’s read it. Set in Botswana, the book opened up a whole continent to me, a new world with different challenges and values from my own. In that sense, it was indeed like a sudden shower after rain clouds have gathered.

In this way, I also discovered the short stories of Edgar Allen Poe and Saki. For me these were like the grown up version of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and those of Hans Christian Andersen which I’d enjoyed as a child. My mother was much kinder in her encouragement of my reading. Other gems from her I still cherish are the Flower Fairy books by Cicely Mary Barker with her beautiful delicate paintings.

My secret reading vice gathered pace. I discovered Kurt Vonnegut, laughed out loud in public places, and read everything he’d ever written. I borrowed books all over the place. I read Samuel Beckett’s Malone trilogy a few pages a night over a year. The narrative voice was so relaxing it
helped me sleep.

I finished nearly everything I started. This discipline was a hangover from my dad, but a good one. One notable exceptions was Ullyses, by James Joyce. I had enough confidence by the time I encountered it to know I had a reasonably efficient brain and that if an author lost me it wasn’t entirely my fault.

Then I became a mum and time was suddenly limited. I also had post-natal depression after my second child. As anyone who’s suffered depression will tell you, one of the great losses through this illness is concentration. Despite books being my salvation in hard times, I simply couldn’t focus long enough to read a whole book, or even a chapter, or even a page when it was really bad. And none of the books I found during that time seemed to reflect my actual experience.

A little later I wanted to know more about Scotland’s history and bought a John Prebble book, The Lion In The North, I think. After repeated murders to get to the throne and several bloody battles, I got very bored indeed and wondered what all the women were up to and why they never got a mention. I went browsing in the women’s section of a bookshop and found The Women’s History of the World, by Rosalind Miles. I now have two copies, one which has never been read and is stashed where no-one can pinch it, and another is for my daughters. The three previous copies I owned were all borrowed by friends who never returned them because they simply had to lend it to someone else who never returned it and probably lent it to someone else who never returned it … ad infinitum (I hope). The great thing was I could read this book in bits when I had depression because it was made of lots of little stories about what women got up to, what their role was, and their oft forgotten acts of heroism.

I also read to my kids at night, which I loved. Naturally these books were short and to the point, but often beautifully written and rhythmic. These were, I think, a joy and comfort to them and me. The Katie Morag Stories by Mhairi Hedderwick were massive in our house, as was Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? by Barbara Waddell. I also had Hubert’s Hair- Raising Adventure, a story poem by Disney writer Bill Peet which belonged to my older brother as a child. I can still recite whole sections of it by heart.

By heart is an interesting expression. Some of these books had quite clearly taken up residence in mine.

Then I wound up a working single parent and when it got too much I developed insomnia. Again, a book was instrumental in my mending. This time it was a Dorling Kindersley book called Shells. Fundamentally, it is a picture book full of titbits of information about seashells from all over the world. I used to wander through its pages last thing at night and somehow this often lead to sleep.

Around this time I also began an intensive two year training course in counselling. While preparing my application, I read Person-Centred Counselling in Action, by Dave Mearns. This is a text book and has the most boring cover you’ve ever seen, but the first few pages had me hooked. They seemed to me to convey the very definition of love. This book, like so many of my favourites, was an affirmation of something I sensed but couldn’t articulate.

More love came in the form of The Secret Life of Bees, by Sue Monk Kidd. This is not romantic love but the kind of love that really matters. Of course, love comes in many forms and is often used as a disguise for something else. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Café by the unfortunately named Fannie Flagg is such a story. The book is quite different from the fabulous film, and even better.

When my bad guy dad died a few years ago I inherited a large part of his library. Most of this was dry old stuff that nobody wanted to read, but there were some hidden gems. The first surprise was Everything That Rises Must Converge (if that's
not a crazy title I don't know what is) by Flannery O’Connor. This is a book of short stories set in the deep south of America in the 50s which exposes the on-the-ground reality of race relations in that time and place. I then consumed several other books of short stories by, for instance, William Trevor and John McGahern to name a couple.

This lead to a taste for short volumes, whether they were novels or history books. Unless the story is very good and I want to wallow, I’ve usually got the measure of the author and their story quite quickly and want to move on.

One such short history book was I M M McPhaill’s The Clydebank Blitz which was my handbook when writing the novel Mavis’s Shoe. It’s short, concise, informative and readable.
A recent notable exceptions to this taste for short books was If This Is A Woman: Inside Hitler’s Concentration Camp for Women by Sarah Helm. Including notes, this is 823 pages of non-fiction and completely compulsive reading, though also deeply distressing.

At the same time as the MacPhaill book, I read Untold Stories by the Clydebank Life Stories Group, an anthology of recollections of life in Cydebank during WW2 which obviously covered the Clydebank Blitz. For a long time I’ve enjoyed reading oral histories. They confirm a quote by the American poet, Muriel Rukeyser: ‘The universe it made of stories, not atoms,’ and bring history to life.

When I started to write fiction, I had to stop reading it for the duration of each project. Narrative voices had a tendency to infiltrate my mind and sneak onto the page while I was writing. Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing was one of these whose narrative voice appeared briefly in Mavis’s Shoe. I left Surfacing for many years as a result and only returned to it this year. This time the influence of the voice suits the novel I’m working on. The book touched me deeply, so I read it a second time immediately after the first, something I’ve never done before.

A few years ago I took an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. Entrance is based on a portfolio and not previous qualifications. This is just as well because I don’t have
a degree. I have two diplomas and various other things but no degree in English Literature which you’d probably think was necessary. I therefore hadn’t read ‘The Canon’, or not all of it. But because I’d been following my bookish nose, I’d read all the obscure experimental weird things that no-one else had, like Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, and could also read the more traditional stuff with an untrained, unconstrained critical eye. I’m pleased to say I graduated with Distinction.

Other books that were important to me were the self-help book about giving up smoking whose name I’ve forgotten and the French dictionaries that used to hold up the front legs of mydesk when I worked in a room with a saggy floor. (Don’t try this with library books!)

Books are the biz. Libraries give them to you for nothing.

Thursday 9 June 2016

Latest campervan trip #2

After all the excitement at the pre-historic hill fort, I continued south until I saw a little road leading up and off the main carriageway. It was in fact a completely flat area, partly tarmacked and surrounded on all sides by trees. The noise of birds was delightfully deafening and occasionally I caught a glimpse of one or two in the trees. Those I saw were, I think, song thrushes and I also heard the squeak of grouse and all sorts of other birds I can’t identify. The spot was private and calm and once an hour I saw the roof of the train passing by just beyond a fence.


Loads of words got written and it seemed like a good place to spend the night, but first I had to satisfy my wanderlust and seek more laybys. I was being a ‘monkey-in-tree’ Buddhist, leaving something fabulous for the possibility of something miraculous.

On returning to the main road I found an information board directing me round the corner to Kinclaer Viaduct which the road winds under twice in a few hundred yards. This makes a delightful twisty corner and is also an indication of the terrain: tunnel one minute, viaduct the next, train on the horizontal.

Also on the info board were some of the wildlife to be found in the vicinity. These were barn owls, tawny owls, pipistrelle bats, long-eared bats, swallows, adders, slowworms, common lizards, deer and badgers. I wondered what it would be like to fall asleep to the sound of owls hooting.

Unfortunately, on this occasion I had reason to return to Girvan but I made a mental note of the spot.


However, the following day took me in a different direction, to a layby up a tiny back road. My chosen spot was half hidden by a hedge (thanks goodness as the weather was roasting) and got lots of work done there. But then panic set in. The dodgy petrol gauge had already got me into trouble earlier this year. Mobile reception was non-existant outside towns. I was deep in the hills. I checked the map and headed further inland, back to Dalmellington which my trusty map told me had a petrol station. On the way I bought bread in Straiton, used the community-run public toilets there, and carried on. But going straight on through Straiton doesn’t take you to Dalmellington. It takes you directly south to Newton Stewart. About half way along this beautiful road I realised there were no windfarm constructors, which there should have been, and began to slow down. Then there was a tiny road directing me back to Girvan. Drat and double drat. I was on the wrong road.

Newton Stewart had two kinds of petrol station and was very hot indeed. I immediately returned to the safety and cool of the trees on the mountain road I’d just left, sat by the road and listened to the birds. Aah.

But the muse was disturbed. I knew if I returned to the Kinclaer layby I’d spend the night imagining snakes making their way into the van through the little drain in my sink and the muse would run screaming. I knew I didn’t want to be four feet from the nearest campervan at the seafront in Girvan either. It was time to go home. So I went. But with 6,500 words more of the novel.

Latest campervan trip #1

Being the second overnight campervan trip of the year, packing the van was easy peasy. Also the weather was predicted to be hot, hot and hot so there was no deliberations over clothing either. I knew what I was doing. I was going to write the next section of the new novel.
Heading south, I found a lovely layby on the brow of a hill on a small road just outside Auchenleck. Great, except the little road seemed to be a cut-through for juggernauts. Continuing south I turned to Dalmellington then west towards Straiton pausing halfway for tea and to write, and finally to sleep.
In the evening I wrote an article in praise of libraries and watched the windfarm workmen zoom up and down the little single track road in pickups, vans and cherry pickers.

I wrote all morning, this time the novel: yay! And did a bit of knitting.



Thence west to Girvan and the seafront. Beyond the line of vans is a promenade and then the beach, the sea and Ailsa Craig, the island commonly known as Paddy’s milestone. Sixteen of these vans and caravans spent the night there with the apparent blessing of South Ayrshire Council who know we bring our dosh to their town. There is even a standpipe at the harbour if you know where to look and paying toilets. Vanessa is the little white van just right of the centre.

This is the view out to sea.

Girvan seafront is of course a car park and full of (very nice) people, so the following day I went inland and stopped for tea at the first available layby. It turned out to be directly above a 496m long railway tunnel linking Girvan and the port of Stranraer. The layby is also close to a small but perfectly formed prehistoric hill fort called Dinvin Motte. I stopped a passing farmer and asked permission to cross the field and view it and he nodded. Just nodded. So off I went. On the way I found this:

It's a gorgeously squiggly chunk of wool direct from a sheep. I had to bring it and some others I found with me.




There are three rings of banking to the fort with two causeways to cross on either side if you want to reach the top. The dips between these concentric banks are deep. There was a small flat stone at the very top of the whole thing which I was nervous of standing on in case I was teleported to Mars without warning.

While up there I whipped out my phone and did a little video diary. It began with the van, a tiny white square in the distance, then panned round to a farmer on the opposite hill rounding up his cattle, then to an incredibly neat vegetable garden which on closer inspection turned out to be stone banking for the railway. Just at that moment a train appeared round the bend, a whole two carriages, then vanished into the tunnel. What uncanny luck! I immediately swung back to the other end of the tunnel to await its emergence and was soon duly rewarded. From this great excitement I did a panoramic shot to capture the whole green grandeur of the surrounding hills, speckled with farms and forests and, closer by, fields shared by cows and sheep all cheerfully cohabiting. Satisfied and elated, I pressed the stop button. Which turned out to be the go button because I’d pressed the wrong one earlier and captured nothing. Sigh and drat.

I had a strange sick feeling when I tried again, and of course, without the train and the spontaneity of my experience, it was never going to work. So I gave up. The point is, my job is to paint pictures with words. I should really stick to that. The great thing is I paint what I see either with my eyes or in my head, but from my words you see different pictures in your head. Isn’t that great?

I still think a video would have been nice.

Sunday 6 March 2016

Teeny Weeny Campervan

Writing on the Road: Campervan Love and the Joy of Solitude will be at the Aye Write! book festival in Glasgow on Tuesday 15th March at 6pm in the Mitchell Library. Books will be available for sale even though the official publication date isn't until 7th April. The description of the event doesn't cover the multitude of sins and blessings within the book, so come along and get the full flavour of my regular escape route to sanity and writing (arguably the same thing) in a tiny Romahome campervan.

Tickets are available here. You'll also find information about my accomplice, Lorraine Wilson. She too needed to escape from her daily life. Instead of campervans, she chose trains and spent three months travelling solo round Europe. It promises to be an interesting event.

The picture above shows my little Romahome in the foreground, my neighbours' copycat van to the left, and a removal lorry at the back which mine is trying to dwarf.

Thursday 21 January 2016

Writing on the Road: Campervan Love and the Joy of Solitude


While writing two novels, ghosting two memoirs for other people and working on various other bits and pieces, I needed to escape my hectic household and create some space to do it. As a mother of two and sometime step-mum of four, I realised my only option was to get into a campervan and have it function as a mobile office. It wasn’t long before this had become a habit.

Whether I’m by a beach with buzzards, golden eagles, deer, seals, surfers, other campervanners and dead fish for company, or in the hills around Glasgow, or France, my aim is to switch off the phone, get out the laptop and write.

Writing on the Road is not just funny (or sad) stories of campervan trips in Scotland; it is not just ‘Zen and the art of campervan maintenance’ (with stories of sweetness and light that will entertain or make you cry); and it is not just nature writing (with observations of wildlife in Kintyre, Assynt and other places on the western seaboard of Scotland). But if you enjoy reading about how books are written and about recovery stories from relationship breakdown, or about women travelling alone and all the things that can go wrong (and right), about strategies for facing fear, dealing with creepy crawlies and noises in the night, and about surviving all that life throws at you, then you will probably enjoy this book.

As well as chapters on writing, procrastination, meditation and creativity, there’s information on how (not) to buy a campervan, how to maintain it and what to do if you lock yourself out in the middle of nowhere just before bedtime.

I hope this book will inspire and encourage any would-be campervanners to get out there, get creative and enjoy the campervan life.

I'll be appearing at the Aye Write! book festival in Glasgow in March. Meanwhile watch out for my little van around town.