Author: veewalkerwrites

Vee Walker

This short story won the Fiction Prize for the Hugh Miller Writing Competition 2019 and was first published on the Scottish Geology website, which no longer seems to exist. I have added a few pictures for local colour! Recipe for Cinder Toffee available on request…

‘Well, he is not going to be happy with us, John.’ The speaker, a broad-faced, tweed-clad and generously-rumped male, did not for some reason sound altogether sorry.

The wall clock in the echoing stone hall outside the Edinburgh University office chimed the hour of their appointment. The friends sat awkwardly on a pair of wooden chairs rather too small for their bulk. Both had removed their deerstalker hats and were kneading them between their hardened and scarred palms, tattooed with grit from a lifetime’s work. Their draft report, all 800-odd pages of it, and the precious box of samples, took up a third spindly chair between them.

Although neither realised the other was imitating his own actions, each would reach out and lay a hand on the substantial mound of their findings, seeking reassurance as the moments to their ordeal ticked down.

Their mission had been quite plainly set before them several months before, in the very office of the British Geological Society (Edinburgh Branch) which they were about to re-enter. Professor Archibald Geikie, no less, had requested their presence. There he had sat, peering at them over gold-rimmed spectacles from behind his vast rosewood desk. He proceeded to fulminate at the upstarts who had dared to question the clear and the logical and indeed, to his mind, the natural order of things geological.

‘Geology is formed of layers, gentlemen!’ he had spat. ‘Immense layers which form over the course of aeons, but which must, logic dictates, follow the chronological settlement of all creation. What is geology save one sedimentary layer formed on top of another since the time of the Flood, as Murchison has pointed out so often.’

The younger of the two listeners unwisely cleared his throat to interject, ‘But… Lapworth?’

‘All his nonsense about those uppermost rocks in some dismal corner of the Highlands proving otherwise? Pah! Young Lapworth is merely spouting the heretical writings of his false idol Nicol. It is all bunkum, d’y hear me? Utter bunkum!’ John had found himself agreeing, more out of awkward politeness and the sheer force of The Great Man’s presence than assent.

His friend instead chose to hold his tongue.

‘You do not share The Great Man’s views then, Ben?’ John asked him, as they traipsed with relief down the staircase towards the damp, grey Edinburgh air.

Ben had smiled at John’s use of their ironic nickname for a crusty superior and shrugged. ‘Not that long ago, all Old Red’s theorising about fish growing paws and clawing their way out of the mud was portrayed as the ravings of a lunatic, remember? Now Darwin and everyone else seem to be in agreement.’

John nodded, thoughtfully. Hugh Miller – nicknamed Old Red for his beloved sandstone – had been a favourite of all their circle until his sad demise; a blend of gentle Highland rustic and touchingly devout self-taught academic. Ben shook out his black umbrella at the foot of the stairs, looking down and prodding the last step with the toe of his boot. ‘See, he would have liked that. Hugh’s sandstone used for the fine new university. He wondered whether we are becoming too greedy for the treasures of the earth. We take them without thought.’

John nodded again. ‘Greedy for knowledge too?’

‘Sometimes only insofar as it accords with one’s own views,’ Ben chuckled.

Once out on the Caithness flag pavement, he grinned at John from under his umbrella. ‘If I have learned one thing from my life in science thus far, it is that utter certainty of any scientific fact can be a dangerous thing,’ was all he chose to add.

John understood his friend perfectly. For upstairs, Professor Geikie, puce-faced with professional ire by the end of their interview, had been very clear in his instructions; all but ordering the two geologists to go and prove that he and his mentor Roderick Murchison were in the right.

˜

Six months had passed since their last encounter with The Great Man. He had penned several increasingly terse letters enquiring as to their progress, which they had felt it best to ignore. Now here they were once more.

They sat in silence until the younger of the two snorted, ‘How I should prefer to be back up on the road to Ullapool instead, eh Ben?’ The other nodded. Neither was in his natural habitat, there in that cold and echoing vestibule. They belonged instead among the rough heather and steep hillsides of the North-Western Highlands with only each other, and an occasional golden eagle, for companionship.

‘D’ye recall that day?’ Ben continued. ‘We’d paused to catch our breath after that steep section. Eyeing our meat-paste sandwiches made by the landlady in Cròic a Chnocain.’

‘Ah yes. The damp little croft overlooking the burial ground.’

‘Very poor sandwiches,’ reflected his companion, shifting his considerable weight from one buttock to the other, making his chair groan. ‘The same every day, too. The only lodgings to be had that near to the Crag, though.’

‘Certainly closer than that rather grand hotel. And she was a kindly enough old thing.’

‘No English, only the Gaelic.’

‘Fìor fhìor! No packed lunch on the Sabbath, remember?’

‘Ah, but that extraordinary sweet confection she made…’

‘Wrapped in brown paper.’

‘Quite delicious, wasn’t it? Made up for everything else.’

‘Indeed.’

Transported by their shared memory, the friends allowed themselves to recall that extraordinary day: again they felt the clean air and rain on their faces, again they heard the rattle of a ptarmigan from high on the slopes above the crag. They had been glad to pause for a while and rest, even if it meant consuming their forlorn meat-paste sandwiches. Lochan an Ais lay spread below them, its grey, rain-pitted surface broken only by a lone great northern diver, its plumage sleek and oily in the downpour. Cul Mor soared beyond, her face veiled in heavy mist.

‘A bitty dreich, as they say in these parts.’ John could feel the canvas bags which would contain their specimens for the day were growing heavy with rain already.

‘Indeed. But see how the wet brings out the fine pattern in the rocks, John.’ The younger man glanced at the speaker with considerable affection. How many times had he heard Ben bring out this phrase as mitigation for the most atrocious West Highland weather? He knew the debt he owed his old friend. He, John, had the technical skills: could sketch accurately, write plentiful notes and find a perfect turn of phrase to describe a specimen, but he was the first to acknowledge that it was Ben who had the eye. It showed in his paintings of the hills.

That morning the crag had shimmered in the bright light, every available rock surface wet. As he stared upwards, Ben’s head had inclined slightly to one side in a thoughtful manner which John had come both to anticipate and, occasionally, dread. ‘Up yonder today, I reckon, laddie. Perhaps we may reach the base of the cliff before we drown, eh?’ John was no longer a laddie by two decades or more; but Ben had been gently teasing him about his comparative youth for as long as he could recall.

They worked methodically as usual, measuring, pacing, at times with the whole drenched hillside between them; at others, hunched head-to-head over a specimen, magnifying glass in hand. They spoke only in geological labels at such times:

‘Pipe rock. Perfectly clear, look there, and more here. Durness limestone too.’

‘Fucoid beds, Salterella Grits. Only what one might expect. The correct sequence. And yet…’ John searched for words which would capture the nature of these oddly compressed sediments.

They had spent months now working slowly around several other crumbling cliffs in the area. In fair weather and foul, they were up and out just after dawn, providing a generous food source for midges and the occasional tick, nourished daily by hip flasks of whisky, dubious sandwiches, and sublime confectionery. In pencil, in dozens of notebooks, they meticulously recorded their still-inconclusive findings. What they had found was a curious mix. Perhaps it was due to glaciation, this odd jumble of layers, they had thought at first. Freezing and thawing can crack and shatter rock. And yet each of them knew in the depths of his soul that the answer did not lie in a glacial event of mere thousands of years ago.

They paused to eat their dismal ‘pieces’, rendered even less palatable than usual by the steady rainfall. ‘John, I must be getting old,’ said Ben, rising even as he chewed from an area of limestone where he had crouched and been prodding. ‘I am feeling the damp in my bones today.’ For a fleeting moment John wondered if his colleague were suggesting they call a halt and retreat, but no such thing. ‘Come, a little treat. Let us warm ourselves by ascending fast to the foot of the crag instead. We might find shelter from the rain in its lee, too.’ He was up and off like the proverbial mountain goat, leaving John to pack the morning’s specimens and plod up the zig-zagging cragside deer track in his wake.

Ben’s cry rent the still air asunder. ‘Here! John, hurry! This is it!’

John had no need to ask what it meant. It was their Holy Grail, the conclusive proof – or disproof – they had been instructed to seek. 

John dropped the bags and began to scramble recklessly straight up, the flaky scree slipping beneath his feet. Ben was on his knees at the foot of the crag, as though at prayer. ‘At last, John. See? Clearly Pre-Cambrian, yes? Schists, great sparkling layers of them. And all so… so altered.’

John joined him in worship at the shrine, impervious to the wet now soaking through the tweed of his plus-fours.  He touched the pale gold outcrop with disbelieving fingertips. ‘None of this should be visible! It is surely millions of years more ancient than the Cambrian layers we recorded below?’

‘Yes, as though something has thrust the very burning bowels of the earth upwards, to raise them to the surface. Ye Gods, what mighty force can have brought this about?’ demanded Ben. He was pale now, shaking. John was at once more concerned about his friend’s wellbeing than their momentous discovery. He rummaged in his pocket and drew out the small packet of brown paper. ‘Here you are, old fellow,’ he said. ‘It’s a shock. Eat some.’

Instead Ben held a piece of toffee up against the hot-yellow, cold-bubbled rock before them. ‘John,’ he said unsteadily. ‘How do you think she makes this stuff?’

Puzzled, John replied, ‘Well. Sugar, clearly. Then…’ Light dawned. ‘Then, she must superheat it. Mixes in something else to change its nature, as it boils?’

Ben nodded, still staring. ‘I watched her once. Bicarbonate of soda. The mixture surges upwards in the great iron pot as a scalding, foaming mass, quite altered. Then she pulls it from the fire and tips it out on to a buttered tin tray to cool.’

‘And when it is hard,’ said John softly, ‘She borrows one of our hammers.’

‘Yes! Bang! Bang! Bang! Elemental powers, John. Pressure, heat. We have been seeing the rocks as too fixed.’

‘Exactly. Given sufficient force they can be changed, turned topsy-turvy. This proves it. Wonderful!’ said John, already pulling out his notebook. Then he paused. ‘I say, Ben. The Great Man. Lapworth…’

‘Yes,’ said Ben. ‘Quite. But we tell no-one. Not yet.’

They then fell on the rain-sticky cinder toffee with the appetites of men half-starved.

˜

At last they were summoned. John cradled the report to his chest as Ben hefted the box, its small yet irrefutable samples from Knockan Crag cushioned within.

Archibald Geikie’s voice boomed out of his office as they approached the door. ‘Ah, good-day to you both, gentlemen.’ There was no apology for having kept them waiting. ‘So, what have you brought me, eh?’

It was then that Ben Peach caught the widened eye of John Horne and, albeit fleetingly, winked.

Copyright Vee Walker 2019.

If you enjoyed this short story why not read Vee’s prizewinning epic novel Major Tom’s War, available as a paperback or e-reader edition from her publisher Kashi House 👇

https://www.kashihouse.com/books/major-toms-war-paperback

˜

I am an author – and of course I want everyone in the entire world to buy my books. Over the past weeks and months, though, I have come to realise there is such a thing as book poverty.

I currently want people to buy children’s books instead of my own because I am angry that any child today should not have access to lovely new books in school for financial reasons.

Teachers are striking for better pay and conditions but also for more resources for the kids they teach. There just isn’t enough money for books in schools.

As an author I undertake many school visits. Recently I visited a Highland primary school (which will remain anonymous – no school deserves to be stigmatised for not having enough funds for new books) and was shown around by a delightful but exhausted teacher who took me into the school library.

The content wasn’t great. Very few new titles. Some books were old school prizes from the 1950s. Some were passed-on school stock from elsewhere. Several had teachers’ names in them: teachers buying new books for their school libraries out of their meagre wages because it’s the only way they can replenish the library! One was the same ‘My Learn to Cookbook’ recipe book I was given myself aged about nine. It’s a fun cookbook, if a bit sugar and fat heavy, but I am now 61!

The amazing school staff doggedly wipe and sanitise and stick back together these poor old books as much as they can but some will vanish home, never to be seen again and there’s little to no budget to replace them. Books which have been in a library for years get to look like they have, too – slightly dingy, slightly battered, slightly forlorn. Let’s be frank: old and shabby books are boring.

As the teacher said to me, the kids deserve better.

If you don’t hook a child on books early in life they will never catch up educationally or emotionally. Fact.

I cannot be the only person to lie awake and worry that society is destabilising to such a degree that some schools will soon close entirely through staff sickness and shortages, just as it is becoming nigh-on impossible to find a medical practice in certain areas. If we dare envision a future where children no longer attend a school at all but roam the streets, and where those of us who are sick may not be able to rely on medical care, we are looking into the abyss next door.

I am not a celebrity, nor am I a super wealthy person and I certainly have no political influence, but I thought: there has to be something I can do that is positive in this hideous mess that we are in. And I racked my brains for a small thing I could try, and I thought of the school library and its old, battered, uninspiring books.

If you see a poster soon in a bookshop which says #justonebook it means you can buy a child a primary school level book there – anything from early years to P7, fiction or non-fiction – and leave it at the bookshop. It will soon be collected, giftwrapped and delivered to a Highland primary school in desperate need of books. All the school will know is that it comes from ‘the magic book fairy’.

A very simple transaction in which you get to feel virtuous, a child gets to feel excited as they undo the parcel, a teacher gets a sense that other people care as much as they do – and I get to sleep just a wee bit better at night.

If you would like to know more about giving #justonebook to a Highland primary school then please get in touch by commenting below. Thanks for reading this 🙏🌹😊

Un récit d’amour de Saint-Raphaël écrit après un séjour magnifique dans la ville cet hiver. Merci aux Raphaëlois qui nous ont si bien accueillis 🙏🌹

Il y a des jours, vous savez, pas comme les autres. Des jours que le vent se lêve et met du désordre dans les cheveux. Des jours qu’un petit chihuahua blanc arrive pour vous pisser sur la chaussure.

Commencer avec le jour de la pisse n’est pas commencer au début. Au début je ne voyais que des couleurs flous à travers du gros papier bulle. Des fois des couleurs qui se bougeaient. Des couleurs qui, au début, n’avaient même pas de nom.

Je me trouva débalée après un certain temps dans une vitrine intérieure d’un grand magasin à Nice, en face du rayon mâquillage. Là, je ne pouvais pas comprendre grande chose. Certains objets, comme moi, restèrent fixe. Des autres, tout le contraire.

Je parvins lentement à comprendre que les objets qui bougaient marchaient à deux pattes mais aussi, des fois, à quatre.

Pour passer le temps je me décida à apprendre à lire et à identifier les couleurs.

Chris-ti-an Di-or. Gi-ven-chy. Bleu-blanc-rouge-vert-jaune.

Et, des fois, un deux-pattes passa qui portait son quatre-pattes dans une boîte à main Lou-is Vuit-ton.

Je n’avais pas de nom dans ce grand magasin de Nice. Je n’étais qu’un mannequin parmi maints. On ne se parlait même pas entre nous.

Après un certain temps on me brisa un peu le front: une étagère fut tombée. Je m’attendai à être soignée, mâquillée, parce que le mâquillage, ça doit exister pour couvrir les bleus et les blessures, non? Hélas, je me retrouva mal emballée de nouveau dans du gros papier bulle, et renvoyée.

Après un grand voyage dans le noir on me déballa encore. Je voyais un joli deux-pattes aux cheveux marrons qui portait beaucoup de mâquillage (la Roche-Posay, je crois bien) devant moi.

Je me trouvai immédiatement avec un nom grâce à ce gentil deux-pattes, bien que je ne comprenne pas encore tout ce qu’elle me disait: ‘Mais Keska elle est lourde, Keska elle est maladroite, Keska il m’a pris à acheter celle-ci aux enchères…’

Am-an-di-ne sur son badge devait être son nom à elle. Son petit magasin s’appella Préf-Modes de Saint Raphaël.

Amandine venda des robes des écharpes des chaussures. Je fus là pour l’aider. Je faisais mon mieux de les rendre bien quand elle m’habillait. Amandine m’installait, d’habitude, sur une chaise dans la rue, de façon détendue. Des fois elle me tournait vers les magasins en face (il y a le Driv-ing Hotel, Co-co-ri-ri, Les Bou-quets de la Côte d’Az-ure, et quelques autres). Je préfèrais quand Amandine m’orientait un petit peu plus en direction du grand bleu mysterieux au fond de la rue.

Il y avait aussi des messages sécrets écrits au trottoir de temps en temps, et j’en aggrandissais mon vocabulaire.

Ca fait du bien à moi, Keska, de me retrouver dehors pour la première fois de mon existence. Je pus ainsi regarder passer de près les deux-pattes et les quatre-pattes de Saint-Raphaël: bien différent des deux-pattes Niçois et beaucoup moins de boîtes à main Lou-is Vuit-ton. Mais il y avait des quatre-pattes un peu partout.

Ils étaient tous les deux, deux-pattes et quatre-pattes, assez bruyants et de couleurs variés. Je préfèrais les quatre-pattes, qui me regardaient dans les yeux et qui des fois me parlaient, en disant ouah ouah ouah.

J’étais quasiment sûre que ce fut les quatres-pattes qui faisaient les sculptures qui apparaissent quelquefois de nuit au trottoir. Je supposais que un deux-pattes dut s’emparer de son quatre-pattes pour lui serrer tres fort le ventre afin de créer un de ces petits miracles luisants en spiral.

Amandine était très bruyant, surtout quand elle hurla un jour: ‘adieu pour toujours espèce de connard’ à son rectangle et le jète sur son bureau en sanglotant. Ensuite en me sortant pour la journée elle marcha dans un grand miracle au trottoir et me fit ‘mais Keska, c’est que cette salété mais enfin…’ avec une voix pleine de chagrin.

A part les deux-pattes et les quatre-pattes il y avait des autres objets qui bougeaient à Saint-Raphaël, surtout ces objets carrés-roulants multicolores qui bougaient beaucoup plus quand il faisait froid l’hiver. Quand il faisait chaud et le soleil brillait ils n’allèrent nulle part, il y en avait autant.

Quand il pleuvait, Amandine se précipita pour me rentrer dans le magasin au cas ou mon plâtre ne fonde ‘comme le coeur de son ancien mari.’ Moi, Keska, je ne vieillis pas beaucoup au fil des années mais j’entendais souvent Amandine dire à voix basse que hélas, elle n’était plus bien jeune.

Pas loin de la boutique il y eut un autre magasin magnifique, Les Atouts à Toutou. Je voyais passer des jolis sacs en papier imprimés de son nom et d’un image d’un quatre-pattes. J’ai cru comprendre que les quatre-pattes s’appellaient donc des ‘tou-tous’. Après un certain temps, moi, Keska, je me rendais compte que je voulais un toutou à moi, un tout petit toutou dans un petit manteau écossais avec une laisse rouge et un collier diamanté tout beau.

Pour cette raison j’étais bien contente quand le chihuahua blanc arriva pour me pisser sur la chaussure. Amandine courrait bien vite en criant ‘non mais, Keska…’ mais j’y étais pour rien, enfin! Le gentil deux-pattes rêveur qui tenait la laisse (rouge, je notais bien) gronda son toutou en disant ‘Pas encore! Bad dog! Mais non, Pélé, non!’ Le toutou, qui portait un beau chapeau d’hiver (achété chez Les Atouts à Toutou j’en étais sûre) me regardait de travers et se marrait.

Je connaissais donc maintenant deux personnes nommées: Amandine – et Pélé le toutou.

Le deux-pattes s’en alla vite fait, mais Pélé m’inclina polîment sa tête en passant. On allait sûrement se revoir.

Le lendemain je voyais le même grand deux-pattes sur le trottoir en face avec un beau bouquet de fleurs-jaunes-mimosa de chez la fleuriste à la main. Il n’osait pas traverser mais il me regarda, fixement et pendant longtemps, avant de repartir.

Le lendemain, Amandine me sorta sur ma chaise et alors rentra au magasin comme toujours pour boire un expresso et regarder son rectangle. Peu après un grand carré-roulant sans-plafond arriva et tout changea très vite. Je me retrouvais deséquilibrée et ensuite soulevée brusquement par des mains puissantes apartenant à un deux-pattes qui portait une masque COVID. Et me voilà qui pouvait regarder enfin autre chose que la rue: le ciel bleu et le soleil et les nuages qui flottèrent tout en haut! Il y avait aussi des pins-parasol et je pouvais enfin, si de justesse, voir que le grand bleu mysterieux fut encore plus bleu et plus mysterieux de près.

Le deux-pattes masqué me bouscula pour me faire sortir du carré-roulant, et il me semblait qu’il dût me connaître déjà parce qu’il me disait ‘mon Dieu, Keska, j’ai fait.’ En franchissant une porte étroite avec difficulté et après une escalade d’escalier encore pire, me voilà dans une petite piece foncée avec un balcon minuscule. Là se trouvait un deux-pattes aux cheveux gris, assis sur une chaise en métale.

‘Papa, voila, maman est de retour,’ disait le premier deux-pattes, en train de hôter sa masque. Je savais déjà son identité en tout cas, parce que Pele le chihuahua m’a accueilli avec un ouah ouah ouah enthousiaste qui ne faisait pas du tout chien de garde.

Le deux-pattes gris au balcon se tourna et poussa un grand cri. Il vint s’installer à coté de moi dans son fauteuil à roulettes et me saisit la main. Ses yeux produisaient une liquide claire – je savais que les jeunes deux-pattes pouvait en fabriquer, mais pas les vieux aussi. Il m’appellait ‘sa Marguerite’. Pélé, assis à ses pieds, me fait un beau sourire de complicité avec un petit clin d’oeil. A coté de nous, dans un grand seau, un bouquet de fleurs-jaunes-mimosas rayonnant.

Après un certain temps j’arrive à comprendre que ces deux-pattes furent père et fils. Pélé venait s’assoir sur mes genoux le soir et m’expliquait beaucoup de choses à travers ses regards tendres et compatisants. J’étais si heureuse de me trouver chez Pélé, Florian et Papa mais je me faisais des soucis aussi. Comment Amandine allait-elle vendre ses robes ses écharpes ses chaussures sans moi, sa Keska?

Un jour j’entends le deux-pattes fils, qui s’appellait Florian, monter de nouveau l’escalier en m’appellant. ‘Mais, Keska, je vais faire?’ Il se versa un verre de liquide ambrée avec une main qui tremblait. Je regardais le gros titre du journal qu’il avait jété sur la table à coté de Papa et moi. Il y avait un image d’Amandine devant Préf-Mode Saint Raphaël: qui à volé le mannequin du Cor des Issambres? Florian fit des allers-et-retours le long du salon en gémissant, mais son Papa, lui, n’avait pas du tout l’air soucieux. Il me tapotait la main et me souriait en disant des gentillesses à sa Marguerite, comme toujours.

Le vendredi matin, on frappa à la porte en bas. Florian descenda et rémonta avec… Amandine! J’étais si heureuse de la revoir. Florian fut devenu tout rouge mais Amandine, toute blême. Elle disait quelque chose de très rapide dont je n’ai pu saisir que ‘ma copine vit tout près…’, ‘elle a tout vu…’ ‘les flics…’ et ‘espèce de perverti…’. Elle avait son rectangle à la main.

Florian, lui, ne put rien dire face à sa colère et essaya de lui offrir de nouveau ses mimosas. Amandine les arracha de ses mains afin de les jéter par terre et marcher dessus avec ses talons rouges, en faisant des gestes et criant à tue-tête.

Florian se mit alors à genoux. Je ne comprennais pas tout ce qu’il disait à Amandine mais il y eut les mots ‘toutou’ et ‘dèces’ et ‘maman’ et ‘démence’ et ‘pitié’.

Apres une minute ou deux, Amandine se pencha pour ramasser les fleurs qu’elle avait pietiné. Florian versa un autre verre de liquide ambrée et le donna à Amandine. Elle s’assit à coté de Papa et prit sa main. Il l’appella sa Marguerite, elle aussi. Je vis une goutte de liquide claire faire une petite ruelle dans le mascara (Clarins) d’Amandine.

Et bien, après un certain temps les choses s’arrangèrent bien. Amandine arriva chez Florian et son Papa avec une petite valise. Elle apporta comme cadeau la paire de chaussures que Pele avait pissé dessus. Florian les installa au jardin pour que Pélé puisse pisser dessus à son gré.

Maintenant je repars au magasin (toujours en passant par l’avenue du grand bleu mysterieux et des pins parasol) mais je ne travaille qu’à temps partiel. Le weekend on dit a Papa que je suis partie au marché ou à la Poste. En semaine je reste avec Pélé et Papa.

A cause de la publicité, les ventes d’Amandine ont quadruplées. Une fois que l’affaire du vol se transforma en jolie histoire d’amour, les Raphaëlois s’arrêtent souvent à coté de moi pour faire des photos devant Préf-Modes et pour s’acheter une robe, une écharpe ou une paire de chaussures.

Amandine me dit des fois maintenant: ‘Keska, il fait beau,’ et ‘Keska, la vie est belle’ et je suis tout à fait d’accord. J’ai deux noms et deux boulots et ça me plaît beaucoup. Et j’ai même un petit toutou à moi tout beau tout blanc avec une laisse rouge et un collier diamanté.

Un chihuahua qui s’appelle Pélé.

L’ecrivain Vee Walker est francophone et francophile. Elle vit dans les Highlands de l’Ecosse. Si ce récit vous a plu, pourquoi pas la laisser un petit message?

Bien que Keska et le toutou ait lieu à Saint-Raphaël, les personnages et les magasins sont tous inventés. Merci aux négociants des commerces qui les ont inspirées.

Le roman de la Grande Guerre de Vee, Major Tom’s War, sera bientôt lancé en édition française sous le titre Grande Guerre, Petits Destins.

Vee va passer les mois de janvier/fevrier 2024 à Saint Raphaël de nouveau et pendant ce temps elle a déjà proposé une résidence littéraire bilingue au lycée St-Exupery et à la bibliothéque de Saint-Raphaël.

Vee fait souvent des interventions auprès des clubs lectures et des atéliers mémoirs en Ecosse et en France.

Au plaisir…

http://www.majortomswar.com.

Look around you for a moment. How big is the room you are in? Imagine it smaller. Men come to wall up the door, while you stand, quiescent, inside. They leave only a tiny window through which all communication will take place and through which your food will be passed.

You will now stay in this room until the day you die, and they will bury you beneath its floor and then topple the walls over you.

The term mystic conjures up mediaeval portraits of female saints and others (generally painted by a bloke, and often a priestly bloke at that). These unfortunate women are generally depicted wearing flimsy, floaty garments, with arms extended upwards, eyes rolling heavenwards in the throes of orgiastic torment.

This very different portrait of two real mystics has been created by a woman, the Fife-based author Victoria MacKenzie. Her book has made two real mediaeval women of whose existence I had been aware, but whose own writings I had not read (beyond the famous …and all manner of things shall be well quotation from Julian of Norwich) relatable and human. All female human life is here: love, marriage, childbirth, loss, grief and Divine solace sought in different ways by very different women.

I enjoyed MacKenzie’s light touch in this work. No eye-rolling here. She allows the original texts to speak within her fiction, holds back from over-explanatory descriptions of the women’s lives, and therefore the reader’s imagination is permitted to follow its own meandering path to a personal conclusion.

I particularly loved the way in which the author describes Julian’s attitude towards entrusting her precious, forbidden book to her maid and gatekeeper Sara simply as a thought which frightens her. I am left to deduce for myself that Sara could easily be in the pay of the bishop for information on any transgression Julian might risk. Illiterate, Sara might also risk ripping up the manuscript and selling fragments as relics for personal gain (she would almost certainly have creamed a tip of some kind off travellers who came for an audience with the anchoress, for that was how the Middle Ages worked).

Julian may be an anchoress confined to a cell for two long decades, but she is no fool.

Likewise, Victoria holds back from telling us why strange, stubborn Margery chooses (or is chosen for?) her own harsh path. Various possibilities – trauma from childbirth, revulsion at sex, a desire to show what she can do as a woman in a male-dominated world – are set out on the table before us, but we are not forced to dine from any particular dish. Such restrained writing is very rare these days.

I had not realised that becoming an anchoress meant being walled up in a cell for life. The unfathomable horror of this voluntary emprisonment, the trials of adjusting to the confinement, and also the eventual advantages of contemplative isolation, are clearly and honestly presented here.

In the end Julian comes to understand her own smallness in the face of God through her confinement and takes comfort from it. Her remarkable journey of faith made me reflect on the way in which many of us are withdrawing from the world through sheer disillusionment: I no longer attend church regularly, no longer buy a paper, no longer listen to the news; I try to live a small life and focus on my family, my writing, my home and garden. The world out there is too flawed and frightening a place for me and for many others at present. And yet as Julian and Margery’s lives show, we cannot escape the place and time in which we dwell altogether, wherever we may hide.

Margery also appears to have died a natural death around 1438. Quite how she avoided being burned for heresy I do not know, but this remarkable read makes me want to find out more about both Margery and Julian.

For Thy Great Pain will be one of the most discussed literary fiction releases of 2023 and is an ideal book group read. Highly recommended. Preorder your copy via this link 👇

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/for-thy-great-pain-have-mercy-on-my-little-pain-9781526647894/

Vee Walker is an award-winning author and editor based in the Scottish Highlands. She has no affiliation with Bloomsbury publishing and this is an entirely independent review.

I suggest this blog is read only by those who have already read Alan Garner’s Booker-shortlisted novel Treacle Walker. As there will be as many interpretations of the book as there are readers, I would not want to spoil the experience for anyone.

When I finished reading Treacle Walker by Alan Garner for the first time, I confessed on Twitter to not having ‘got it’. This came as a shock, as I had expected to love it.

The response to this was interestingly polarised: some agreed with relief, others disagreed with a passion, but few could put into words precisely why they felt the way they did about Treacle Walker. One or two folk then went so far as to say said that they would not now buy the book because of my initial knee-jerk reaction. That really bothered me: I would hate to put any reader off buying any book, let alone a book by a favourite author, Alan Garner. All reading is subjective after all and even Garner himself is reluctant to say what his books are about, leaving that to his readers to determine. Encouraged by several friends on Twitter, I decided to persevere and try to fathom what it was that had made me react as I did.

To summarise, I found the book too divergent from my anticipated ‘treat’ read to enjoy. I found parts of it alienating – and in places it drew me back to times of my life I cannot recall with any fondness. I felt left behind by the crafted cleverness of the book from time to time and unsure whether the author would care about this – or the opposite. It was an unforgettable but unsettling read.

Alan Garner played a huge part in shaping my childhood and adolescent psychology through books such as The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service and Red Shift. Brought up in that 1960s/70s era of Garner and Cooper and le Guin. I believed (and beneath a thin veneer of sensible adulthood still believe) in the kind of magic they fashioned so well: the magic of parallel worlds and thin places; of primeval forces only partly understood by young people who have the power to act for good or evil, and who often have that choice forced upon them. (J K Rowling clearly read them all too, but let’s not dwell on that…)

Since then, other than his excellent memoir Where shall we run to, I have not read Garner’s more recent works, and this may well be my issue. I was hoping to revisit some childhood joys through Treacle Walker but what I got instead was something darker, something which has evolved far beyond: magic, yes – but this is omega magic, not alpha.

Treacle Walker is a deliberately spare and (I would argue) incomplete book. Chapters have gulfs of incomprehension between them, perhaps deliberately intended as disconnected moments of lucidity, perhaps not. I found myself wondering, churlishly, if anyone else would have been able to publish this slim volume at all, let alone make the Booker shortlist. These days it is the job of a battalion of agents and editors to make sure that a book emerges complete into the world: a whole ready-to-eat meat pie, not a bag of ingredients for pastry and directions to the local slaughterhouse. Garner has had the clout and the nerve to resist this pressure and to do what he wants but many of us are unused to such challenging and experimental writing as this. It made me think, but not always in a good way.

Wading into Treacle Walker felt a little like reading Kit Williams’ golden hare-hunt Masquerade for the first time: all the clues are there, reader, so now it’s down to you to find the treasure. As the reader’s own response directs the individual’s take on Treacle Walker, I was reminded of a favourite Freeman Tilden quote from the 1950s, meanings are in people, not things.

Garner also uses a great wadge of Latin early on, presented for some reason as an optometric chart. I am of the last generation to ‘do’ Latin at school, so could approximate a translation as I read, but I must surely be in a minority. How many readers must have given up then, alienated? Why does any book have to become a test of intellectual staying power? Bother to delve further and the same words are, apparently, to be found inscribed on the Philosopher’s Stone created by Carl Jung: very clever, but really, what is the point of it all?

Even though some way further on Treacle Walker approximates a translation of this Latin chart/inscription, he renders exilis as ‘small’ (which would surely be more parvum?) whereas its meaning here should be more ‘thin’ or ‘slight’. This thinness, this boundary between different worlds of consciousness which wear away as life draws to a close, is central to the book. Why say small here, not thin? Is it just to see if anyone notices a deliberate error? If so, at this point the double-bluffing cleverness of it all has lost me. This is a provocative book in the original Latin sense of the word, pro vocare, to call forth a voice.

I was also deeply uncomfortable with the voices – the painful memories – which reading Treacle Walker evoked for me personally. The final section I found I was reading with breath held and in dread.

Why? Well, treacle will always be bitter-sweet stuff. It is the slightly sinister aftertaste of Halloween scones. It is the sticky, dark interior of Christmas cake and plum pudding, loved by some, loathed by others. And anyone who has spent time with someone who is dying will know that the smell (or stink, for let words be nice) of death is sweet and, yes, treacly. It catches in the back of the throat. It remains in the nose and in the tiny cavities of the brain, for weeks, even months after the bereavement, so that long after you know you cannot, you think you can still smell it. Alan Garner must have encountered that smell of death on many occasions in his long life. It is not something often spoken of, nor is it something ever forgotten.

This above all, I think, is what made me reject the book at first exposure. I instantly read Joe as the soul of a dying man (and by extension the bogman Thin Amren as his body). Joe lives alone in a house which consists of just three rooms. (My own remembered childhood home is now a labyrinth of rooms and mock-Tudor timbering surrounded by box hedges. It smells of peas, and the giant summer house nearby of TCP. How about your own?) Early memories are richly sensory yet illogical. They are the last we review before we die.

This scene-setting reminded me of L’Enfant de la Haute Mer, The Child of the High Seas, the brilliant short story by the Franco-Uruguayan surrealist writer Jules Supervielle, where a child lives alone in an empty submarine village, a child conjured into life by a sailor longing for his family.

The chimney and hearth at the centre of Joe’s three rooms may represent a gateway to heaven, or to whatever comes next, at any rate. Treacle Walker – the boatman across the Styx? – and Joe face each other over its ‘cold ash’ – a nod to cremation and the phoenix-like cuckoo whose forboding song reverberates about the book? This hearth itself seems to represent sanctuary and perhaps the route from the limbo of purgatory to the next stage of the afterlife, but this, unexpectedly, is not where the book leads us. Amid the turbulence of dying, when Joe admits (Latin again – to allow to enter or to give in and comply) the possibility of death after it raps three times at his door, the chimney remains the still heart of the house – and Treacle Walker looks up it, with longing, in the final pages.

Joe, standing on the threshold of death, is then tested and judged as worthy in some way, from his selection of a small and insignificant grail-like chipped pot among much fine and fancy china. The pot contains a green-violet ointment, the colour of Treacle Walker’s own eyes. Joe’s dying is compounded with the frailnesses of early childhood – a lazy eye, being poorly, the need to stay out of the sun: heat and old meat don’t marry, says Treacle Walker.

That smell again.

The traces of ointment in the pot give the boy, quite literally, double vision. Joe now has the ability to see beyond the humdrum into a terrifying alternate reality where his very soul may be in danger. His troublesome Lindow Man of a body (Thin Amren) will not settle down to sleep/die and in the end Joe must stake him/it down with alder in the treacly bog. Even though Thin Amren greets him as his beloved – it becomes clear that Thin Amren sees Joe himself as Whirligig, an eternal energy which remains constant as life and time and water swirl around it – as good a definition of a soul as any. Thin Amren does not resist his final ending, but Joe still weeps as his old body drowns into eternal rest.

What larks.

There are allusions to morphine within the text too, notably the reference to giant poppies transforming from young greenery to rattling seed heads. As she lay dying, her passage soothed by morphine, my own mother thought she was walking through a pine forest. When they substituted a synthetic morphine at one point through shortage of supply, her dreams lost that natural quality which so comforted her in her last days. Morphine is just heroin in a white coat, after all.

The ritual of the donkey stone burnishes the threshold of Joe’s consciousness and gives him an illusion of control, but death continues to stalk him and eventually, inevitably, enters the house. The block capital comic-book antics of Joe’s subconscious – Wizzy and the Brit Bashers etc – I found as nonsensical and difficult to digest as the Roald Dahl/BFG-style neologisms, but perhaps that is the point – the dying brain is not logical.

This thin book is Dantesque in ambition. It leads us through a comic-book inferno and a boggy purgatorio but it is Treacle Walker, his own genie-like capacities reversed by Joe. Treacle Walker is enabled to continue to paradiso instead while Joe joyfully takes the ragbone man’s place as the ‘ferryman’, settling for an exploration of that thin place which lies between heaven and hell as his eternity.

Is this Garner telling us that that is where he will wait for us, once he too has crossed the final gleaming threshold?

I am still conflicted about Treacle Walker. I wanted so badly to love it and I cannot – but it has certainly been worth several readings to try to fathom why not.

It’s only little, but it’s a big book.

I would love to know what you made of it too?

I can recommend this fascinating RNIB podcast (which I have listened to after writing this blog) where Alan Garner is interviewed about Treacle Walker. Garner was a sickly child – he came close to death several times – who conjured stories from the bare white walls of his sickroom. Garner reveals the starting point of his book as the discovery of a real northern tramp named Treacle Walker who considered himself a healer (of anything but jealousy). Garner could not understand how this uneducated eccentric could have come to call himself Treacle, for treacle was once an ancient and long obsolete name for an antidote: how could he possibly have known this?

https://audioboom.com/posts/8199140-alan-garner-and-j-o-morgan

The thing about Her Majesty the Queen is that she looks very like my own late Aunt Liz. I have therefore always had the strangest feeling we are somehow related, although we are of course nothing of the kind. It also means that her family feels like my family, sort of, and I am interested in them, in a kind of distant cousin once-in-a-while contact way.

I have met HMQ three times: twice on board HMS Belfast (and on the first occasion her train was late and she and Prince Philip had clearly had a contretemps – he asked me where the nearest pub was, and I took him to The Old Thameside I think, and he had a Guinness – but that’s another story); and once when on the security detail for a royal Garden Party at Falkland Palace. It was a sunny day and she was wearing an emerald green hat and dress.

The thing about HMQ is that whatever one’s opinion of the monarchy, she is Always There, and she always has been, in my 60+ years of existence. She is however looking very frail now and I suspect she may not Be There for very much longer.

And so much will change when she is not.

I do not label myself a Republican or a Monarchist. Labels are dangerous things. These are just people to me. Like it or not, however, we are all of her era; we are all Elizabethan.

I approve of some aspects of monarchy and deplore others. As a tour guide in London (my first job out of uni) I witnessed at first hand the extraordinary tourism pulling power of the Royal Family at Buckingham Palace and Horse Guards Parade and Kensington Palace and Windsor Castle. They – she – were the reason why many had come. French tourists whose forebears had decapitated a monarch would hang off the railings, eager for a glimpse of a member of the Royal Family.

When I have met The Queen she has always been charming, good at her job, appearing at the visit or opening or gala or garden party, rotating her three questions (‘have you come far?’, ‘have you been waiting long?’ and ‘what is it it that you do?’) with apparent sincerity and warmth. Some of her offspring I find less warm, less sincere.

The British Monarchy is a curious anachronism, but because it is a British anachronism it sort of works, if a tad weirdly in the 21st century. Holding the top job – being Queen – has however become a life sentence of service – and some might say of servitude, which is only one step above slavery. Once her uncle, Edward VIII, had abdicated and her father became King, the future Queen Elizabeth II became the slave of our nation.

Monarchs lose so much when they come to the throne, often even their names (HMQ was fortunate to keep Elizabeth; her father lost Bertie when he became become King George VI).

The Queen is an intelligent and politically experienced woman who loves her dogs, horses and family – probably in that order at present. She may appear to have immense wealth and land and privilege but can do little with any of them. Her life is mapped out until the moment she dies, regimented by the day, by the hour, by the minute. There is little room for spontaneity. And now, clearly, she is limited in what she can do by pain. It is no fun being old. It is even less fun being old and The Queen.

What would her life have been like as a minor aristocrat married to a naval Lieutenant? A life spent in the quiet shires, wearing wellies and tweeds and headscarves, raising an occasional racewinner’s cup? As she herself might say, it doesn’t do to dwell on it.

When I think of HMQ, I am torn between admiration for a dutiful life well lived in the service of the nation; and deep pity for the life she has not been able to live, a life of ordinary sociability and small pleasures.

After her will (presumably) come King Charles III, who will try far too hard to be a good king, and who will therefore prove controversial and unpopular. His shorter reign will at least enable Prince William and his family to live a life more ordinary, more shielded from the public eye for longer, until William too becomes King in middle age.

It is William’s son George who bothers me the most. Will this chubby little boy grow up to have absolutely no say in his own destiny, like his great grandma? How do you say to him that he must reign until the day he dies? That level of expected servitude in a little boy cannot be something to be proud of as a nation. To me it all feels grotesquely TrumanShowesque. Imagine the conversation: ‘when I grow up, I want to be an astronaut… or a fireman… or a lion-tamer…’. Awkward pause. ‘So sorry, darling, but you will be a King, and a King until your death, when your son or daughter will be crowned.’ Even abdicated kings have hellish lives at the hands of the media and those who believe them weak or feckless.

I do not think either politicians or members of the ‘Firm’ as they themselves refer to it, should be expected to behave as paragons of virtue. The former should try to run the country well and the latter to become good representatives of our nation both at home and abroad. That’s it.

The media feeds on all aspects of the monarchy, adoring the conventional, shiny ‘Kate ‘n’ Wills’, deploring ‘Harry ‘n’ Megan’ for choosing to step off the regal conveyor belt, salivating over the misdemeanors first of Charles and then of Andrew. Most unite in fawning adulation of The Queen herself, but the papers and the TV coverage have all but destroyed her family. The hypocrisy of this is staggering.

If only we had inspiring, charismatic political leaders as an alternative media focus to the Royal Family but we don’t. The coverage is relentless. Even the Independent ran a drearily speculative piece on who was sitting next to whom at a Jubilee service. It’s vile. I am not in the least bit interested in who who has fallen out with whom, still less in who princes or politicians may choose to sleep with (so long as their partners are A. human, B. consenting and C., of legal age).

If people in ‘high places’ ever lie, I would like them to be honest when found out, but this today seems almost impossible: lying is the default position. Lying has wrenched our country from the safety and prosperity of Europe. Lying has lost a referendum and won an election. It is now the norm and we are living with the malign consequences. Worst of all, this lack of accountability is what children – including small royal children – will grow up believing is acceptable.

The way the Jubilee is being used for political and nationalistic capital worries me, but I would not like to deprive The Queen of a period of celebration for her life’s work either. God knows we all need a little fun after years of sickness and fear. I may be more soggy sagging homemade bunting than rows of regimented Union Jacks printed in China, but I still hope Her Majesty The Queen enjoys – and survives – her special weekend.

P and I married back in 2019, a happy Hogmanay gathering of friends and family. We had booked a Queen Mary 2 (QM2 to her friends) literary cruise in 2020 as a honeymoon, part organised by the Cheltenham Literary Festival. After lengthy discussions with CLF and with Cunard, the new paperback edition of Major Tom’s War was due to be the book club choice on board.

In March 2020, however, COVID hit and everyone’s world, including that of Cunard (part of the massive Carnival Group) changed.

Every time since that initial cancellation it proved feasible to rebook a cruise (and it was any cruise at that point to be honest, he wasn’t fussy) P. did so – Transatlantic, Canada, Suez… I had to witness his disappointment (and feel guilty at my own relief) every time it was cancelled. Until this year I just did not feel that the benefit would merit the risk of sailing.

So here we are at last on our four-times-postponed honeymoon, having once more ‘crossed the pond’. As I write this we are chugging down to the Caribbean on board the last ocean-going liner in the world, the Cunard Line’s QM2.

I am not a natural cruiser and so my condition of travel for a long journey this time was that I work my passage! I brought my laptop, which I have never done before. Writing and blogging as we travel helps me feel less indolent, less guilty. On board QMII (and no other cruise ship) one can still feel like a voyager at sea and not a tourist.

I suppose I feel about QM2 rather as I feel about HM The Queen, Elizabeth II. Both are the real deal for me; QM2 is a true monarch of the seas, and not some jumped-up -commoner-princess cruise ship. While I cannot possibly comment on the proportions of her (real) Majesty’s bottom, QM2 has the deep keel of an ocean-going liner, complete with a reinforced icebreaking hull, just in case.

Beside her, bog-standard cruise ships are just so many multi-storey hotels at sea: my nautical father might have referred to them disparagingly as ‘flat-bottomed b*st*rds’. We have tried many of these too, including Cunard’s other two luxury vessels, Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth, but we come back to the QM2 when we can as we feel at home here.

People change when they board QM2 and it is a joy to witness. Often tetchy and tense from a long journey, the lines of the face will soften as the voyage unfurls. On gala nights one dresses formally for dinner (as rare now as the correct usage of ‘one’): stiff backs straighten and sore feet glide in spangled silken slippers across the dance floor. It is a small and just-about-still-affordable miracle.

For me QMII is particularly special because I boarded her in Southampton 2010 with the tiny itch of an idea for a book in my head. It had been tickling away for years but I had never had that precious period of time or that amount of spare head space to scratch it. I had not really planned to write, but did so, and found myself wandering around the ship begging sheets of plain white A4 paper from kindly crew members. I wrote a chapter longhand, then another, with one of the trusty black and gold Cunard pens (long since consigned, I suspect, to history by post-COVID cutbacks). Soon the Pursers’ desk team were handing me a pile of sheets of paper before I had even asked.

No surprise then that my books invariably feature travel by sea, on vessels ranging from horse transport across the English Channel on a converted dredger to P&O rustbuckets out of Calcutta and even, yes, Cunard First Class from New York.

Like Her (real) Majesty, QM2, launched in 2004, is understandably feeling her age. There is for example a strange metallic grinding sound emanating from above our cabin (which Cunard will keep calling staterooms, a misguided Americanism here when room proportions are modest and there are thousands of them on board) which may be a lifeboat scraping against a bulkhead. Such things may irritate for the first 24 hours, but after that become part of the soundscape of the ship. I’ll probably even miss it once I am home. The odd blind is broken. Rust is showing along many decks and seams. The hull is flaking paint. Maintenance is ongoing, and she is only sailing at 2/3 capacity.

This is also partly due to COVID of course. We wear masks onboard constantly unless in the cabin or eating/drinking, and thank God we do – it keeps everyone safe. In the first few days self-appointed mask vigilantes roamed the passenger lounges snarling at elderly ladies who removed their mask in what they deemed to be the wrong location. The psychological scars left by Lockdown run deep but after the first week the miracle of the cruise begins to work and it seems to have stopped happening.

In spite of testing at the ports and repeated antigen testing on board (in The Queens Room, previously only associated with elegant afternoon tea and ballroom dancing), we do have a few COVID cases on board. Everyone holds still as the announcement is made after the latest tests. Bing-bong. Would Mr and Mrs Geoffrey Burton of Deck 11 and Jane Smith and Peter Jones of Deck 5 please return to your stateroom and ring the Purser’s Office on 22200 (in order to have your holiday ruined for the next week or so…).

Collective exhalation when everyone else learns they have been spared.

Infected passengers are moved to an isolation quarters with a balcony. These isolation cabins are discreetly tucked away aft (wind direction?) behind storm doors usually only closed in very rough weather, which means some lift exits go nowhere. Meal dishes are delivered to and removed from little tables outside the doors. We have seen an occasional crew member in full HazMat spraying down a vacated cabin. All this is praiseworthy and vigilant activity on the part of Cunard and does not dent our cruising pleasure one iota.

There is of course still a small risk that those incubating COVID on arrival (ie who only just tested negative at the port) will transmit it on board. We sanitise hands before eating every time and only remove masks to eat and drink yet still it seems to spread among us. Access to certain islands – Curacao, Dominica – is apparently limited to Cunard trips only, but that appears to be the only restriction still in force.

It is a real delight to find that the ship is packed with staff and the legendary QM2 service is unaffected by economy in staffing levels. I would rather eat slightly more repetitive food and slightly less tender beef and see dozens of nationalities in employment – over 60, I think the chatty and charming Azerbaijani Captain Azeem Hashmi said. Mentions in despatches so far to Ukrainian sommelier Sergey, his family stuck in Odessa; friendly egg chef Sheryl, who treats everyone at breakfast as individuals; the long-suffering Commodore Club bar staff who no longer dare serve P his single malt whisky over a tumblerful of crushed ice; and the diminuitive Rosalina who rules her guest cabins with a cheerful rod of iron (and keeps hiding any shabbier undergarments, but I don’t hold that against her).

As I write this the ship eases her way (well offshore to avoid the northbound Gulf Stream) southwards into warmer seas and skies. New York was bitingly cold. After our stroll around Central Park we stood and awaited the Macys Shuttle back with flurries of snow cutting short each breath.

The weather can be unpredictable Transatlantic so onboard speakers need to be a resilient lot as I know from personal experience. A mixed bag this time: a slight surfeit of a charming retired NASA director; not enough of a fascinating prison governor; a rather embittered Titanic bandsman descendant; a posh but not entirely engaging Chelsea Flower Show garden designer; and an intriguing lady adventuress so excited about the tales she has to tell that she was slightly falling over herself to get them all out (will buy one of her books).

There is still a slight feeling of the second-eleven about the speakers and entertainment on board. It may be that the A team is as yet reluctant to travel. And speakers are only as good as their presentation skills – as I know from experience. Those who inflict death by Powerpoint and read aloud dull and text-laden slides should be keel-hauled pronto.

My only target for now on this outbound leg of the journey, however, is to write a chapter a day – and so far I am 28 chapters into The Patiala Letter. A conundrum I had faced at the end of the plot has just been neatly solved by a chance conversation about RMS Titanic with a charming couple encountered on Deck 8.

So God bless QM2 and all who serve and sail in her.

Major Tom’s War was first published in hardback in 2018 but the editions I recommend are either the ereader edition (2019) or the paperback (2020). All are available from my publisher http://www.kashihouse.com and other online retailers.