Western Isles Tour 4/5

Day Four! The weather has really closed in on us now, but still there is no denying the beauty of these islands, even in the wet. And there is no denying also the friendliness of everyone we meet here – including complete strangers – last night a family passing by stopped to ask if we needed directions coming off the ferry, and invited us to follow them so we found the way to our hotel.

We headed down from North Uist to Lionacleit where I spoke to around 100 S1 and S2 students in their fantastic theatre space. Among them was the son of the family who’d helped us last night, who immediately asked if we’d got there okay.  The session flew by and there wasn’t enough time to tackle everyone’s questions, sadly. Oh well, another time, I hope.

This afternoon we drove down to South Uist, passing some really pretty cottages, such as this thatched number whose roof appeared to be held down by rocks on a rope…

The venue for this afternoon’s event was Daliburgh School, where I spoke to around 50 P4-P7s. They were fantastic fun to talk with, five of whom helped me perform a short play with great enthusiasm, and then I answered as many questions as I could in ten minutes, ending with a good one. No children’s author can ever get too big for their boots, I think, because every now and again a young reader will ask something in all innocence which reminds you that, after all, you’re only some guy putting dumb ideas into a book, and nothing more than that.

Example?

‘Last question then,’ I said, and picked a smiling boy in the back row. 

Then came the question that put me back in my box.

‘Mr Sedgwick,’ he said. ‘Have you ever met any real authors..?’

Finally, here are some photos from today that really made me smile.

 

Western Isles Tour 1/5

This is the first of five mini-blogs describing my week long tour of the Western Isles of Scotland. The tour has been organised by ScottishBook Trust and very generously sponsored by Scottish Friendly (more about them later in the week).

Lady Sedgwick and I arrived in Stornoway yesterday, flying up from Glasgow in a tiny little twin-prop, with a view from the window like this:

We met up with the team from Scottish Book Trust – the inimitable Beth Bottery and the redoubtable Mike Merillo, who drive something akin to the Mystery Machine. It remains to be seen whether we solve any spooky goings on in deserted gold mines while we’re here, but in the meantime, we’re going to talk books to the young people of the Hebrides.

Today I felt like I saw both ends of the writing process: we visited two schools in Stornoway itself: the Isle of Lewis’s largest primary school in the morning, and the largest secondary school in the afternoon. We got a very warm welcome in both schools – here’s a shot of the signing queue at the Nicholson Institute:

After the events, we had a flying visit to see the standing stones at Callanish. Anyone who knows me knows that I love a fine piece of neolithic action, so it was fantastic to see the stones. And if talking to young readers is the very end of the writing process, a trip like this is, for me, the kind of thing that can prove to be the very beginning of a book. A book like The Dark Horse, for example, is based in this kind of landscape, and who knows yet whether my week on the Western Isles will lead to anything creative. Seeing all the windfarms here also got me thinking about Julia Green’s great book, This Northern Sky, set amongst just such a landscape.

Questions of my creativity aside, at the very least we saw a stunning example of someone else's. We were taking a bite in a café by the standing stones, and I was just expounding the idea to Mike that you learn something knew every day, when around the corner came a cat, straining on a leash. Strange enough, but we expected to see a person on the other end. When it turned out to be another cat on the other end, clearly straining in the other direction as hard as possible, we realised that here is the solution to the well-known expression of disorder: “herding cats”. The answer is simple – tie the damn things together.

Happy with this new-found knowledge, we headed back to Stornoway, where the only remaining problem is how you get round the fluffy roadblocks every couple of miles.