The problem with the sales is that when you walk around the stalls, you get that same feeling as when you’re ambling past the kennels at the Battersea Dogs’ Home. There are always those stallholders who are stuck in the  corner of the room/hall/enormous shed that is  constantly by-passed or there is simply nothing worthwhile buying from them (unless you’re in dire need of a tartan-covered brick to hold open a door,) who gaze forlornly at you as you pass them by, their pleading eyes saying “Please buy from me and take it home.” You know that to engage them in conversation would only result in you buying the wretched brick, so all you can do is return their sad smile and sidle on past…until you get to the next stall where the same thing will more than likely happen again.

I went to one of these sales last Sunday in a village hall where the passageway was so narrow that we had to traipse around in single file, trying hard not to catch the eyes of the ‘abandoned puppies’. There was one old lady with a stick and a very disconsolate face who,  disregarding entirely the flow of traffic, went the wrong way around the hall, tutting loudly every time she found her path blocked by another fellow shopper. I met up with her for about the third time beside a stall that was selling small knitted dogs, each retailing at the exorbitant sum of £100. The selling point of this stall was that you could order the breed of your own choosing and have it beautifully knitted up. The old dear gazed at the shelf displaying the dogs and shook her head. “Och, wid ye look at that?” she said despondently, “they dinna have ony Dalmatians!”

The girl behind the counter turned her gaze on me, her eyes saying, “Please buy one of my little Labradors.” Actually, thinking about it, they more resembled warthogs…or maybe it was just that she’d kept dropping stitches.

PS. Ha! I’ve been caught out! Turns out the person who invented the wellie cleaning box is in fact a farmer and he made a lot of money out of his invention! The Lloyds man helped his wife sell cakes. Oops! Well, listen, that’s what a writer does – fabricates everything!

I am sure, over the next couple of weeks, some of the writers will be putting up on Shortbread their own feelings about the course. So, if you have a thought about starting writing or need a bit of encouragement and mentoring on your present piece of writing, then I’m sure that a Shortbread writing course is just the thing for you.

Anyway, Florence, my youngest daughter, is there for her fifth year, working front-of-house at a venue called the Udderbelly, which is, believe it or not, a huge upside down purple inflatable cow. I’ve been over already to see a couple of acts – one was Free Run, which features the extreme sport of free-running – an hour’s worth of high octane entertainment, I can tell you – and the other was Michael Winslow, the guy who made funny noises in the film, Police Academy. Actually, I have to say that I met him after the show (that’s the glory of the Fringe – all the entertainers mix with the audience after their acts,) and he wasn’t that easy to talk to. I said this to Florence and she said, “Well, he does just make noises for a living, Dad.”

Florence always comes up with the right thing to say. Once, when she was eleven years old, she and I went to the local Tesco supermarket to buy something for supper. On the way there in the car, she was very silent and then said, “Dad, did you marry Mum for her looks or her personality?” I immediately remarked that it was a very good question, and then went on to explain that we were very young when we met, that we became really good friends and that she was (and still is, I have to say!) very pretty. “So,” I said, “it was a mixture of the two things.”

“Right,” said Florence. She seemed satisfied with my explanation because she didn’t say anything until we had completed our shopping and we were heading home in the car.

“Dad,” she said eventually.

“Yes, Florence.”

“I think Mum probably married you for your personality.”

Out of the mouths of babes….

If you haven’t been to the Edinburgh Festival, you should really try to get there. The atmosphere is quite incredible. Or, alternatively, you could read STARBURST…

I arrived back in time, but then consequently found that he had also made me an executor of his will, and the whole process of sorting out his estate took the best part of five weeks. Since then, other things have occurred which have got in the way of writing; my fellow director of Shortbread stories opted out, leaving me to find a new direction for it – that’s still on-going; a wild wind hit Scotland hard about a month ago and devastated an avenue of 250 year-old oak trees that arch over the main road at the bottom of the farm track. The local council maintained that half of the trees belonged to me, so, with every tree surgeon in Scotland engaged in clearing the widescale damage, I was left with little option other than to break out the chainsaw and get clearing. And then, on top of that, an elderly member of my family was not well, so that was another thing to deal with.

This is not a moan, actually. These things happen, of course, and ‘worser still happens at sea.’ But I haven’t yet got back to ‘zoning’ in on the book. It’ll happen – but not just yet.

So, in a nutshell, this is what I learned from the experience this time;

a) White people do not walk along the side of the road like Kirsty and me – they all have Land Cruisers and appear unsettled by us doing this.
b) Kenyan kids don’t like to say thank you. They find it difficult, maybe even demeaning, so you just don’t push it with them.
c) You have to be so careful with what you buy for these kids. They cannot be made to stand out from the crowd or appear privileged, otherwise parents who are struggling to keep their family unit together might feel that their kids would be better off in the home.
d) Questions were asked like “Are you doing this to make yourself feel better? Are you a do-gooder?” We didn’t take that one any further. I just said that I was a writer – I think that says enough, doesn’t it?
e) Their church services are a complete riot. When the lesson is read, it is accompanied by a series of disjointed notes and drum and cymbal beats from young Dennis’s keyboard. These are relayed to the whole township by way of one of the largest speakers I have ever seen that sits outside the door of the church. After the service, the amplifier is plugged into a CD player, Dennis’s stuttering tune is replaced by Kenyan reggae, and all the kids traipse out in their Sunday finery and they dance for hours right there in front of the church – and boy, can they dance!
f) Visiting the local Sunday market to buy them all designer trainers (at £3 a pair), Kirsty and I stood outside (our pallid complexions would have pushed up the prices by at least 200%) and the kids went in to ‘bar-gain’. They would then come rushing out, tell us the deal they’d got and I would have a clandestine rootle in my wallet for some money and hand it to them with a solid shake of the hand, rather like tipping a hotel bell hop. It was pretty important that the transfer of money was not seen, otherwise vast crowds would have gathered. I came to be known as the Bank of Kenya.
g) My farewell remark to Ma Esther Mwiti, whose vision it was in founding the children’s home, was that the kids had left Kirsty and I both emotionally and financially drained.

Alice is going back in September and we no doubt will return next year. I suppose they’re really all family now.

I saw Gabi today – she’s four, by the way – and asked her how she was progressing with the project.

“Oh, I’m not doing you any more,” she replied, almost distractedly, “I’m going to do one on cup cakes instead.”

I was quite hurt, actually, until she said she’d give me one of them.

And what a brilliant experience it is doing these library events. They are well organized, the library staff are genuinely pleased you are there and grateful that you’ve made the effort to come, you’re not held to a strict time limit so you can head off on tangents if you want, and the audience, usually from 16 to 50 in number, most often contains representatives from at least three book clubs. Now, that is exactly my market, so in terms of publicity, these events are invaluable. A ‘popular’ author such as myself does not receive many invitations to attend literary festivals, so the library talks are an important opportunity for me to get my name out there.

But yet in every one of the libraries that I went to, I was the first author they had had visiting for nearly six months, and one of the reasons for this is that there seems to be a huge amount of liaison and form-filling for the libraries to do with the publisher before they can book an author. How many people do they expect to attend? Can they fully justify a visit from a particular author? And so on. No wonder they’re delighted when an author turns up – it means they’ve passed the test!

At a time when library closures are threatened (and will become a reality) throughout the country, we should be looking at every way to keep them fulfilling such a vital role in our communities, both urban and rural. Of the many thousands of writers and authors here in the UK, there should be this massive initiative to create author library visits on a regular basis, and this should be handled not by the publishers but by the libraries themselves. All that’s needed is a central library website where authors can book a slot to suit their schedules.

So what are the stumbling blocks? Mostly it’s the throwing out of the old system and implementing the new one, but another is encouraging published writers to get out there in person and engage with their readers, no matter how busy their own writing schedules are. Library talks are the ideal way of doing this. And just think of the help and support you’re giving them.

My son Oliver thought that it was swine flu, because he had exactly the same symptoms and wanted to give it the worst possible scenario, rather having man flu accusations thrown at him as well. And it really does conjure up images of a medieval bubonic plague, doesn’t it? I thought exactly that the year before last when all the news reports were saying that 75% of us weren’t going to live to see the next general election. Would we have missed anything, I ask myself? But the word ‘swine’ does seem to add a severity to the illness, leading one’s imagination to ponder on the sight of endless mass graves and the lamenting cries of ‘bring out your dead!’ I mean, the only time I’ve seen the word in print is in the Bible – or am I forgetting something here?

So when the television news was leading every day with stories of panic buying of vaccine, I thought of ringing up the Ministry of Health Marketing Department (is there such a thing?) and suggesting that they give this globe-slaughtering virus a more cosy, friendly name so that their reports didn’t constantly frighten the living daylights out of everyone.

I thought that ‘piggy sniffles’ was rather nice.

Okay, that’s enough about health issues, although I will finish off by blaming it for my not having wished you all a very happy 2011.

Funny thing is that that sentiment is not universal. The other day, I travelled ten miles to dig out a community which had been stranded for five days. As I inched my way slowly up the road, throwing bucketfuls of snow to the side, I noticed a woman standing at her gate, watching me. As I edged past her, she came out onto the road behind me. I flipped up the back window of the tractor, expecting to hear expressions of grateful thanks. Oh, yeah? She stuck her fists resolutely on her hips and said, “You do realize that this is just going to turn to ice and we’ll all fall and break our legs!”

A couple of nights before that, I and another farmer were clearing the main street of the local village. I watched a chap park his car just where I was about to clear away the snow. I got out of the tractor and said, “If you just move the car for a minute, I’ll clear that away and then you can get parked right in by the pavement.”

“I don’t need your bl..dy help,” he replied. “You’ve just made a b….y mess. It was fine until you did this.”

“We are just helping, you know.”

He glared at me with huge aggression in his face. “I’ve just told you, I don’t need your bl..dy help!”

Extraordinary that he didn’t think for one moment that it would have been the easiest thing in the world for me to dump two huge bucketfuls of snow, one behind and one in front of his car! I didn’t, of course. That’s not what it was all about.

But there are other nicer stories. Kirsty was coming back from London the other day by train. It was always going to be a hairy journey back, but she did make it to Edinburgh with only one forced change of train. But then there was nothing going north, except to Inverness via Perth, so I said I’d pick her up from there. As soon as she was on the train, they announced that there was a train stuck some way ahead of them, but that it would probably be cleared by the time they got there. Actually, by the time they got there, there were three trains stuck in front of them. So they sat for four hours, not knowing whether to go back or go forward. And I was hanging around in my car, not knowing whether to stay in Perth or go across to Stirling. Eventually, I drove to where the train was stuck and parked up about two fields’ distance from it. Kirsty rang to say the heating had gone off in the train and it was beginning to feel quite chilly. I didn’t tell her that the outside temperature was registering – 16 degrees in my car.

Eventually, the train was shunted back, the driver having to get out every so often to unlock some control box so that he could change the signals. Kirsty said that every time he found the right key, a huge cheer went up in the train. They then did an unscheduled stop at Dunblane so that Kirsty could get off and I wouldn’t have to go all the way to Stirling to pick her up. As the train pulled out of the station, Kirsty turned to wave and it was wonderful to see every one of the 100 + people on the train wave back enthusiastically. Most of them were having to get on coaches in Stirling to continue their journey to Inverness. I hope they all made it safe and sound.

Camaraderie in the face of adversity, festive spirit, whatever – some people just can’t deal with it. It’s their loss, I fear.

I went north to Dornoch on Wednesday to set up internet in Kirsty’s house up there. I think that driving on the A9 at this time of year is one of life’s great pleasures. There are constant articles in the press about it being ‘one of the most dangerous roads in the UK’ but I’m afraid I don’t think so. Okay, there had been snow, but the road was completely clear, meandering like a black ribbon through the glistening white hills on either side. The police are constantly on the look-out for speed merchants, but I think the greatest problem with it, and why there are accidents on it, is that it is an exceptionally dark road and often impossible to pick up on-coming traffic when wanting to overtake. It would be very interesting to see if accidents could be reduced if the police were to make the use of headlights obligatory on the whole length of the road from Perth to Inverness, but then, of course, speed is easier to ascertain with the technical equipment that they have to hand. There is one of those illuminated traffic signs just as you leave Perth which should constantly say ‘Use your headlights on the A9’, but it usually says something quite irrelevant like ‘Traffic hold-up in Edinburgh’ which is some 60-odd miles behind you!

Surely we could just do a trial run for a bit, couldn’t we? It wouldn’t take much policing. The motorists themselves would soon let you know if you didn’t have your lights on!

Anyway, the internet is working, the shower head rail has been replaced, and all’s well in Dornoch. I left in falling snow and everything looked very seasonal and very beautiful.