It has been longer than usual since I last posted as I was up teaching short fiction in the highlands. Next week I am off to the borders. I got a residency at the Hugo Burge Foundation (my first writer’s residency, so excited!) to finish a novel half set there. The reality of a writer’s life is in this week back home in Edinburgh I have booked myself up with catsitting for extra income( I am lucky to be able to go away for work too as I have a flatmate with a cat who can also look after mine, the dear Ludwig ).
At Moniack Mhor, near Inverness where I was teaching, they have a collection of books donated by the author Janice Galloway. Personal libraries are always the best and most interesting- they reflect someone’s eclectic taste rather than trends in the publishing industry or notions of a canon. This one had Kafka’s diaries, Chopin’s letters, bird and wildlife books, biographies of illustrious castrati, a collection of Bridget O'Connor stories I had been wanting to read among other great things.
A portrait of an orange cat overlooking the Janice Galloway collection.
Before going up to the highlands, I tagged along on a few outings with a friend and their family, looking for ideas for new stories. We visited Almond farm, which has donkeys and a little and charmingly shabby mining and everyday life( in a generally early 20th century way) museum which had a few horrifying mannequins ( the little ones weren’t afraid, I was) I suppose the two miners were at one point animatronic going by the exposed skull. I don’t know what the one still hatted was looking at before but now he seems to gaze baffled at his friend’s gaping, wired filled head. The pharmacist must have been someone else before, judging by the hastily glued on moustache.
We also visited Traquair house, which is the oldest inhabited house in Scotland. With a lime harling coating it looked, at a distance like a slice of Wensleydale cheese abandoned by a picnicker in the Tweed valley. The place was so old the main floor had cave like rooms where cows were kept in winter to heat the rest of the house, and most of the stone staircases were doll-sized. There was a room with Mary Queen of Scots paraphernalia, a priest’s room with a hidden staircase for escape-( this was and is a Catholic family, a group who have faced a lot of religious oppression in Scotland) and vestments which could be disguised as bedding, two wonderful little libraries, and bizarrely, to my delight, a room of dolls and dollhouses donated by a local woman, which added to the general eerie feeling (My friend really wanted to visit after someone they knew allegedly heard a ghost as they tired on the historical costumes meant for visitors, we did not hear any but were spooked by the sound of guide videos leaking from one room to another ) My favourite doll was the “three in one”. She looks anxious. I imagine the pressure and stress of being three dolls at once is immense. There was a photo album of all the dolls with their names underneath, which somehow made them seem more uncanny and alive.
A detail from one of the libraries.
In the yard there was a friendly pregnant goat, and a peacock. Farther off, in a field were some pigs we trekked to see. I feel like pigs are quite removed from our every day sight- more so than cows, sheep and chickens which you can see on any drive, and maybe it has to do with their uncannily human like qualities. ( We didn’t see any at Almond farm) These ones looked like wizened, animated warts and were happily rooting through the earth for edible treasures.
I was invited to London a few weeks ago to do a reading and took advantage of the trip to visit a church I have been longing to visit for a while- St Bartholomew the Great which is somewhere in between Smithfield’s market ( a lot of butchers worshipped at St Bart’s ) and the Barbican. I quickly developed a fantasy of living in the Barbican, not for the arty brutalist status, but so I could attend Sunday services in what is London’s oldest and longest running parish church. I hardly took any photos because of the ‘aura’ of the interior was so alluring, ancient crumbling bits mixed with contemporary art ( they even have a sculpture, by Damien Hirst of Saint Bartholomew) 16th century tombs, victorian tiles, the tiny doors which remind us people in the past were tinier, the organ like a wooden and brass lung . It is also the only place in London the Virgin Mary has been sighted. Nearby is also the charter house, both in an area of mostly new business buildings. It was novel to see things so old in London. I know London itself is very old, but most of what we see there is Victorian or modern or contemporary. London is like an ancient person who has had so many hip, knee and other replacements, they are mostly replacements, and finding Great St Bart’s was like finding its original and beautiful, wrinkled grey heart.
A 17th century tomb poem at the church.