Tag: books

The Black House

A murder mystery from which I learnt about some Hebridean traditions.

By Peter May

This is the first in a trilogy of murder mysteries set on Lewis, the largest and most northerly island in the Outer Hebrides. Black houses were the stone dwellings lived in by people across the islands until relatively recent times. They were known as ‘black’ houses because the fire in the middle of the main room and lack of ventilation led to them being constantly filled with smoke. The white houses that came along later were basically modern houses, with a hearth and chimney to allow the smoke to escape.

Edinburgh detective Fin Macleod is sent to investigate a brutal murder in the north of the island. He is chosen firstly because he is investigating a similar murder in Edinburgh and it’s possible it’s the same killer, and secondly because he is originally from the village in which the killing has taken place and speaks Gaelic.

Through a series of flashblacks told in the first person we learn about Fin’s early life on the island. These are intertwined with the present day investigation which is told in the third person. As secrets from the past are revealed Fin is dragged personally into the case.

The local men are about to leave on their traditional annual guga hunt. Guga are young gannets and as seabirds are protected under British law. However, an exception is made allowing the men of Ness to carry out their hunt once a year as it is seen as an important local tradition originating in times when the guga would have provided essential food throughout the winter when the weather was too bad for fishing.

The men are going to Sula Sgeir, a desolate rock out in the Atlantic. Once there they will be cut off from the mainland for 14 days until the fishing boat that delivered them, returns to collect them. The time on the weather beaten rock consists of long days of hard work and primitive living conditions. Fin took part in the guga hunt the summer before he left for university and knows full well what it entails. In the story his old schoolfriend’s son is about to make his first trip.

The book provides quite an accurate description of the tradition with just a few details changed – the number of men who take part is increased from ten to twelve in the novel, and the rock is never actually referred to as Sula Sgeir. Wanting to know more about the tradition I googled it and came up with this BBC web page  based on a documentary made a couple of years ago by Mike Day. The page includes a series of short videos which were quite interesting and helped me to see how close the book was to the reality.

Did I like this book? Yes, for the knowledge of the guga hunt I gained and yes it was an entertaining story. I didn’t like the switching from first to third person, though I could see the reason for this (kind of). I also wouldn’t class it as one of the best books I’ve read in this genre, but it’s certainly not the worst and so I probably will read the rest of the trilogy.

Swallows and Amazons

This is book #57 on the BBC Big Read list.

by Arthur Ransome

This book is number 57 on the BBC’s Big Read list and is a children’s book.

The Swallows are four children, John, Susan, Titty and Roger, who are spending the summer in the Lake District with their mother, baby sister and baby sister’s nurse. Their father is away at sea but has given permission by telegram for them to take a boat and a couple of home-made tents and sail off to an island in the lake to camp by themselves.

The children spend most of their time in a make-believe world where the lake is a sea with the North Pole at one end and the Antarctic at the other. They have renamed all the places around the lake and so the river leading into it has become the Amazon, the village has become Rio and a pool part way along the river has become the Octopus Lagoon. They use sailor/pirate/explorer words for everyday things and people. The local people are referred to as natives and the charcoal burners as savages; a snake is a serpent; lemonade is grog; they don’t go fishing, instead they go whaling.

The children quickly settle into a peaceful routine on the island, but then find themselves under attack by a couple of Amazon pirates. The arrow-firing Amazons are two sisters, Nancy and Peggy Blackett, who are also staying by the lake with their mother. The Amazons have their own boat and had previously claimed the island as their own. They do not take kindly to the intruding Swallows and the two sides declare war. However, they are soon united in battle against the mean Captain Flint (aka the Amazons’ Uncle Jim) who lives on a nearby houseboat.

Adventures follow and the Swallows and Amazons find ‘treasure’ which had been stolen from Captain Flint. This endears him to the children and he gives them his parrot and agrees to lead them on a bigger adventure the following summer.

The book was first published in 1930 and the story is set in the 1920s. It always shocks me a bit when I’m reminded of how big the gap between the classes was in those days and how the working classes would be treated as so inferior. This is the case with this book. The children, with their naval father and baby sister’s nurse, are obviously middle-class. The local farmers and villagers refer to them as Master Roger, Miss Susan and so on. When a policeman comes to the island to follow up a complaint from Captain Flint the Amazon sisters, who know him, are downright rude to him and talk down to him as though he is a naughty boy – ‘as long as you’re good we won’t tell your mother’. The policeman is frightened and chastised and hastily leaves.

All in all, I enjoyed the book though I’m glad I don’t have to teach the children – I think they’d be damned annoying and precocious in real life and I doubt I’d last a day with them before I’d be sacked for insubordination!

Climbing, archery and bad internet

There’s a lot going on at the moment.

So, what have I been up to? Quite a bit actually. Let’s start with archery.

The man at the archery club where I was going to take my Duke of Edinburgh students has let me down so I’m feeling rather miffed about it. I’d told him in my initial email before the summer holidays that it would be Friday afternoons from about 12.30. After several emails in which he’s sounded as though it might happen at the last moment he told me they can only do courses on Tuesday evenings. Arrgh.

 

After some frantic hunting for another activity I’ve come up with climbing. It all sounds very positive. The club can fit us in at the times we require. The students can gain their level 1 and 2 qualifications in indoor climbing and it costs slightly less than the archery. Only problem now is whether or not school will give me the funding for it. I don’t see what the problem is as I only need the money I would have had anyway for archery, but for some reason no-one will confirm with me whether I can go ahead and book or not.

 

Although I won’t be doing the climbing myself I’m sure to pick up plenty of tips for when I do get round to trying this for myself. I’ve put it on my list of things to do as some of my friends are climbers and seem quite obsessed with it. I thought I should give it a go to see what’s so exciting about it. Personally I’ve always preferred to walk and get from one place to another rather than hanging about (literally!) in the same place all day. But I know I shouldn’t dismiss something without trying, hence it’s on my list.

 

I’ve also been looking into doing my level 3 Basic Expedition Leader Award as this will be useful both for when I’m working on the Duke of Edinburgh expeditions and for when I get around to doing my Walking Group Leaders’ qualification. The course runs over four weekends and costs £325. As it’s work related school would pay for this so of course I’m very keen to do it. The course runs twice a year, once in the autumn and once in the early spring. The autumn course would be best for me, but it’s full. I’ve looked at the dates for the spring course and it looks as though I’ll be unable to do two of the four weekends. I’ll have to try to move things around a bit, but as some of them are holiday things and as working in a school I have to take my holidays at fixed times, it won’t be that easy.

 

Duke of Edinburgh issues aside, I’ve also been starting to think seriously about my own business. Ultimately I want to own my own hostel and I have very specific ideas about what I want. But now isn’t a good time economically to start that type of business and also it would need a lot of financial input upfront. As I don’t have any track record in running my own business I’d find it difficult to get backing for something like that. So I need to start with something that is cheaper, easier to make a turnover in the beginning and ideally is something I already know quite a bit about.  I’m thinking sandwich shops / coffee shops. Having worked in this kind of business for years when I was travelling and a student it’s the thing I know best. I’m starting to look around at businesses for sale to get an idea of prices and locations. I’m not in a position to do anything about it at the moment, but at least I’ve made a start.

 

I’ve downloaded a few books on coffee shops, sandwich shops and small business start-ups on to my Kindle. My knowledge is out-of-date and legislation and so on does change so I thought I’d better read up. By downloading the books I’ll also use my Kindle more effectively as I can use the tools for highlighting and annotating and so on, rather than just reading. This means I’ll be getting to know how to use one of my new pieces of technology and working towards achieving one of my 2012 twelve targets at the same time as reading up on businesses.

 

Another of my 2012 targets that I’m working on at the moment is reading 10 of the books from the BBC Big Read list. At the beginning of the year I set myself the target of reading ten books from the list thinking this would be easily achievable, but we’re now three quarters of the way into the year and I haven’t read any. I realise I need to get a move on if I still want to achieve this goal and so I’ve started reading Arthur Ransome’s Swallow and Amazons.

 

I’ve also been working on my book database. I’ve catalogued my books up to the letter ‘C’ and already have almost 1100 entries on my database. I knew this would be a mammoth task when I started it, so I’m not setting myself a deadline. It does feel good to be getting on with it though.

 

The other thing that’s taking my time at the moment is trying to get all my write-ups from over the summer transferred onto my blog. I found using my tablet whilst I was in the Hebrides a good way to get every typed up straight away, rather than hand writing and then typing up later, but I struggled to find internet access. In Shetland there’s lots of free wi-fi and I was expecting it to be the same in the Outer Hebrides. So I have all these posts that I wrote at the time but was unable to publish. I have lots of photos to upload too and really it should be quite straightforward and quick, but my internet keeps playing up and stopping and because I have a rubbish internet company I’m struggling to get it fixed. This means that often when I do have the time and motivation to sit down and starting getting things updated the internet lets me down. As I do manage to upload my posts I’m backdating them to when I originally wrote them otherwise it’ll just be too confusing for me when I look back over them.

 

Arabic books

I’ve bought a couple of Arabic books.

The other day when I was feeling all enthused about learning Arabic I got online and ordered a couple of books from Amazon just to get me started. I don’t have time to do a course at the moment so I thought books would be a good way for me to at least begin familiarising myself with the language. Today they arrived.
 

The first one is a child’s book – ‘The Usborne First Thousand Words in Arabic’ by Heather Amery and Stephen Cartwright. The slim volume is slightly bigger than A4 sized and consists of a series of double-page, full-colour pictorial spreads, each on a different theme e.g. the kitchen or the hospital. The main picture shows a large array of items in situ, whilst around the border there is a selection of the items which can be found in the main picture. These each have the relevant word written in Roman and Arabic scripts. At the back of the book is a dictionary with each of the words from the books written alongside the English equivalent. This seems to be a good book for me to leave lying around so I can keep dipping into it.

 

The second book is ‘The Arabic Alphabet: How to Read and Write it’ by Nicholas Awde and Putros Samano. This A5 sized slim volume has an introductory chapter on the language and then goes into detail about each letter and how to write the different versions of it. There don’t seem to be any exercises in it, but the letters are laid out in such a way that I can easily copy them to practise my writing.

I read a lot of reviews of different books before choosing these two. They both had plenty of positive reviews and they seem to fit my needs at the moment. When I improve, and when I have more time, I’ll look for a book which includes grammar and sentence structure and has exercises I can work on.

Getting closer to St Kilda

I’ve seen it from afar, read all about it and booked myself on a trip. Now I just have to get there.

I arrived in Harris on the first ferry from Berneray this morning and one of the first things I did when I realised I could get a phone signal was ring to enquire about trips to St Kilda. The lady I spoke to told me they’d had to cancel a trip because of the heavy winds – it wouldn’t be possible to land passengers on St Kilda so there was no point in the trip going ahead. The weather should improve over the next few days though and so she said she’ll ring me to let me know when a trip is scheduled. As my phone isn’t on very often she also suggested that I call again on Sunday to check. She seemed confident that the weather would be the only barrier to me getting to go and that there won’t be any problem with either too few passenger or too many.

 

I’ve been finding out quite a bit more about St Kilda over the past week. In Linacleit library and museum I picked up a copy of the National Trust for Scotland’s Site Management Plan for St Kilda 2011-2016. At nearly 200 pages long I couldn’t believe this was a ‘freebie’ and checked before taking a copy. But, yes it was. It’s made fascinating reading. As well as descriptions of the geology, flora, fauna, history and so on, it also details the issues with running the site.

 

For example, since the 1950s the MOD (Ministry of Defence) have leased part of the island. Their presence does a lot more than provide a rental income. They take responsibility for providing electricity, sewage and waste disposal systems, water supplies including hot water, and medical personnel, all of which are used by Trust employees and volunteers when on the island. They also provide accommodation for visiting researchers and official visitors and deal with the bringing in of supplies. Also very important, they provide a year round presence on the island and so deal with security and ‘policing’. The National Trust only have staff on the island during the summer months and before the MOD’s arrival vandalism could and would occur during the winter months by people arriving with their own boats.

 

If any environmental disasters happen at the times of year when no NTS staff are present they can also deal with them quickly. An example of this occurred in 2008 when a deep sea fishing vessel ran aground in a storm, and about 8 tonnes of diesel oil escaped to sea. Because of the storm NTS staff were not able to reach the island for two days. In the meantime MOD personnel had put the action plan for such an event into prompt practice and prevented what could have been serious consequences for the archipelago.

 

In 2009 the MOD considered automating their base on St Kilda and withdrawing all personnel. This would have had a dire effect on the preservation of the island as in this time of cutbacks the NTS would have struggled to cover the costs involved in providing all the necessary services themselves. Fortunately the MOD have continued to keep their base manned but the NTS have realised their withdrawal could happen and so are working on contingency plans in case this does ever actually happen.

 

I’ve also bought a couple of books on St Kilda. I’d looked at these books in several shops but at £35 each considered them way too expensive and resolved to do an Amazon search when I got home. They’re the type of books I might have difficulty finding however. Whilst in Benbecula, I called in at MacGillavray’s, a renowned shop for selling everything from sweets to furniture to jumpers and has a good collection of local books and second-hand books. I didn’t see anything I fancied in the second-hand section but I did find the two St Kilda books I’d been looking at reduced to £20 each. This is still a lot of money and so I hummed and haa-ed a bit but then decided to go for it. So I’m now the owner of two rather heavy tomes. I’m glad I’m travelling with a vehicle and not backpacking!

 

 

Leaving North Uist to go to Berneray on Wednesday I spotted a road sign pointing to a St Kilda viewpoint. Luckily there’s rarely anyone behind on these roads and so I slammed on my brakes and did a quick turn. The road wound up and up towards the MOD listening station (or whatever it is). Just before the top was a layby with a telescope and a panorama depicting what was in view. St Kilda could be clearly seen even without the use of the telescope. Much clearer than when I saw it from Heaval. As I drove back along the coast road heading north I kept the islands in view for a while.
 map
So now I’ve seen them from a distance a couple of times, learnt lots about them, and put my name down for a trip. This wind had better die down – I’d be really upset if I got this far and then couldn’t go!
St Kilda

Book Database

When you have a lot of books you need a system to organise them. I have a lot of books. I need a system.

For years I’ve catalogued the majority of my books. I started with one plastic box with a set of 4×6 inch index cards. I now have 6 absolutely stuffed boxes. I include fiction, travel writing, biographies, ‘academic’ (e.g. history, anthropology, religion), poetry, current affairs, etc. What I haven’t included are books such as recipe books, travel guides, dictionaries and so on. There’s also the question of when does a pamphlet or booklet become a book and deserve a card in my index box? I’ve always been a bit stuck with this one.

I write the name of the author or editor at the top of the card in red ink. Underneath I list all the books in my collection by that author/editor in blue or black ink. If a book has more than one author or editor I note this in brackets after the title and have a separate card filled out for each author or editor. The cards are then filed in alphabetical order of surname.

This has always been an effective way of keeping track of my books, but now I’m starting to wonder if I need to go digital. A few things have prompted these thoughts. One is my recent purchase of a Kindle. If I have a book on Kindle should I add it to my catalogue? Or should my catalogue solely be a way of keeping track of the books that are sitting on my shelves? Also, I’d quite like to know how many books I’ve got. I used to be able to look along my shelves and count them. That’s not that easy any more. And with six stuffed index boxes, counting titles written on cards isn’t that practical either. And anyway, a lot of my books aren’t included on the index cards such as my three shelves of recipe books, or my two shelves of travel guide books.

Something else that has got me thinking recently is the proliferation of sites such as Shelfari and Goodreads. I’ve had a bit of a play around with both and I like the idea of them. They have so many categories including the date you finished reading the book, if you have loaned it to someone, what rating you give it, and so on. There’s also space for a synopsis. As much as I like filling things in and ticking boxes I know I’d never have the time and patience to do this for all my books. And although I like the advantage of being able to access my book database from anywhere in the world, there’s also the disadvantage of not having complete control over it. What if the website ceases to exist? Or if it morphs into something I don’t like? Or if a charge is introduced? So although I’ll put a few of my books on Shelfari and Goodreads, I’m probably better with my own database.

Last night I started playing around with Access on my laptop. I’ve set up a basic database and started entering books thinking of categories as I go. There’s no point me having a ‘date read’ category as for most of my books I’ve no idea of the exact date I read them. So instead I’ve included a box that can be ticked if I’ve read that particular book. I’ve also got tick boxes for whether or not the book is fiction, if it’s edited, if it is has more than one author and whether I have a paper copy, a Kindle edition or both.

Other categories I’ve included so far are the author’s name and the title of the book and three ‘genre’ categories. In these I’m entering if it’s a children’s book or a thriller; if there’s a particular Scotland or Peak District interest; if there’s a theme running throughout e.g. dogs or biscuits; and so on.

As I’ve only just started working on this, I’m not sure how it will end up. Will I finish with some really elaborate database, or will I give up after a few weeks and go back to my index boxes? If I do continue with the digital database I know I’m probably looking at a few years to get all my books catalogued sufficiently and appropriately. Ah well, no point in doing things by halves is there?

Stephen Booth and the Chinley Book Festival

A tiny book festival and a talk by one of my favourite authors.

This afternoon I went along to the first ever Chinley book festival. It hadn’t been well advertised – I only found out about it when I saw Stephen Booth mention on his website that he would be speaking at it. A google search didn’t turn up much more information. I arrived not really knowing what to expect but hoping that the Stephen Booth talk wouldn’t be sold out as I’ve wanted to attend one of his talks for a while now. 

Chinley is a village in the Peak District not too far from Chapel-en-le-Frith. Booth’s books are about two police officers who are based in the fictional town of Edendale in the Peak District. They have an alarming number of murders to solve and their cases take them all over the Peak to many real locations as well as fictional ones. 

The book festival was rather small scale, but then I wasn’t expecting a Derbyshire equivalent of Hay-on-Wye. One hall had a few stalls including one which had second hand books for sale very cheaply. I bought eight. Another stall was advising people on the advantages of e-readers and had a Kindle and a Kobo to show people. After talking to the lady on the stall I’m finally thinking seriously about getting one.

My entry ticket which cost £1 included a free drink, so I had a bowl of broccoli soup and then indulged in a piece of banana cake with my free coffee. There were tables and chairs set out in the middle of the room so I was able to sit with food and coffee and peruse my new books. 

At 3pm I went to another hall a couple of minutes away for the talk. I think most of the talks had been quite poorly attended, but Booth’s talk had about 40 people in the audience. As the hall was only small this was quite a lot. He talked for the best part of an hour and it was really interesting. He spoke about how he decides on the locations for his books (the 12th is coming out in June) and why he has a mix of real and fictional places. He realised quite early on that the locations were really important to his readers and that many readers try to work out either where the places are that the fictional places are based on or where the places are that he only vaguely refers to and doesn’t actually name. He gets lots of emails from readers who go to specific places just because they are in the books. 

I can understand this. Although I wouldn’t go out of my way to look for a telephone box just because it had been mentioned in a book (as one reader did), if I was near that telephone box and someone pointed it out to me, I’d be quite interested and would probably take a photo. 

All in all it was quite an interesting talk and I was glad I’d made the effort to go.

Silent Spring

It’s the golden anniversary of a book that was one of the most influential of its time.

By Rachel Carson

I first came across this book more than 10 years ago when I read a mention of it in a friend’s Open University course materials. It was suggested background reading for a course on the ’60s. It went onto my reading wish list but I only got round to getting myself a copy recently. This year celebrates 50 years since it was published, so I suppose it’s as good a time as any to read it. Unintentionally it was actually quite appropriate to be reading it in Germany as the Germans got more than a few mentions.

This book was the first of its kind – a real wake-up call to society, pointing out the issues and problems caused by a fast-growing reliance on pesticides. It was highly influential in the fledgling environmental movement and really makes me wonder how ‘green’ conscious we would all be today if Carson hadn’t written this book. It probably helped that the ’60s was also the era of the hippie and a book like this would have fitted right in with hippie culture.

Carson, chapter by chapter, talks us through the different pesticides; how and why they were invented, how they may have seemed to work at first, but how the ‘pests’ they were supposed to kill soon adapted and become resistant. A real example of Darwin’s survival of the fittest and evolution in action.

She points out how many unintended species had their populations decimated and in some cases were completely wiped out. As many of these species of insect, bird or fish are either a food source to ourselves or are natural predators to the ‘pests’ this was disastrous. The pesticides also had a detrimental effect on human life causing health problems and even death to many people who were exposed to them.

Many of the pesticides seem to have been invented by Germans. The irony of how they are now one of the most environmentally conscious nations on the planet was not lost on me. I did wonder why though – is it because they had pesticides before anyone else, did the damage before anyone else, and so got cleaning up before anyone else? Or is it because they feel guilty? Or do I need to be more cynical? They were the forerunners in producing the pesticides and so made lots of money from them. Now they’re the forerunners in cleaning up the mess (they sell a lot of solutions apparently), so they’re still making lots of money.

Reading the book you wonder how people could have been so stupid. ‘This pesticide we tried has killed lots of fish we used to like to eat and harmed a lot of people and the insects are still as abundant as ever. What shall we do? Oh, I know, let’s use an even bigger dose of pesticide’. But of course it still goes on. Do we never learn?

As an alternative to pesticides Carson proposes importing natural predators, but with hindsight is this a good idea? Could the imported predators create problems of their own?

The book starts to seem a bit repetitive after a while, but then I’m used to hearing this. At the time of writing it was something completely new. It was revolutionary in its time and changed the way people thought. That we take the environmental movement for granted now and use words like ‘eco-friendly’ and ‘green’ as part of our normal vocabulary is a measure of it’s impact.

Carson was trained as a scientist and researched many scientific papers for this book. However, it is written in a way easily understandable to a layman, which of course helped it become so popular. After researching and writing about cancer inducing pesticides and chemicals it is another irony that she died from cancer in 1964 a mere two years after publication. How sad that she never got to see the impact her work has had on the world.

The Killer’s Guide to Reykjavik

This novel set in Iceland doubles as a guide to the country.

This is another book that I read around the time I was last in Iceland. Here’s the review I wrote of it at the time.

by Zane Radcliffe


This is the first of Zane Radcliffe’s books I’ve read. I enjoyed it so much I immediately ordered his other two off Amazon.


The main character Callum is a successful Glaswegian internet entrepeneur. He sells his travel website and moves to Reykjavik to live with his Icelandic girlfriend, her daughter and mother. Both Callum and his girlfriend Birna have skeletons in their respective closets which lead to Birna’s daughter being kidnapped and/or killed (I’m trying not to give too much away).


As well as a great story the book really is a ‘guide to Iceland’. Radcliffe interweaves numerous facts and lots of information about Icelandic culture, geography, food, beliefs and so on into his story. If I’d read this book before visiting Iceland the storyline would have stood out much more than the guide part of the book. But having spent a month there last summer I can really appreciate just how much information he has melded seamlessly within the story.



Get more information on the book and the author here.

Lonely Planet vs Rough Guides (Iceland)

A comparative review of the Rough Guide and Lonely Planet guides to Iceland.

June 2010

I bought the latest Rough Guide to use as a guide book for Iceland on this trip. I was only going to Reykjavik which I already know quite well and so didn’t really need a guide book, but I never need much of an excuse to buy books.

I chose the Rough Guide as it was more up-to-date than the Lonely Planet (ok, only by a month which probably makes no difference at all) and I’d used the Lonely Planet last time and fancied a change. Whilst in Reykjavik I looked at other people’s copies of the more recent Lonely Planet.

I usually like Rough Guides, but have to say that I wasn’t too impressed with this one. It seemed to be lacking information. Places I knew were in the Lonely Planet and just wanted to check my book for the address, couldn’t be found in the Rough Guide. This would have been ok if there’d been alternative places in the Rough Guide, but there didn’t seem to be. Also I noticed a few mistakes. For example, the Rough Guide refers to the Downtown Hostel as the City Hostel, and the City Hostel as the Reykjavik Hostel.

2007
May 2010

When I looked at the more recent Lonely Planet it seemed just as good as the older one I had at home. I didn’t need to use the Rough Guide for travelling around the country, but my impression is that it wouldn’t have been as good as the Lonely Planet for this either. So it’s not that the lesser Reykjavik section is balanced out by a much meatier rest of the country section.

But the best guide book for Reykjavik has to be The Real Iceland by Pall Asgeir Asgeirsson. I bought this whilst I was in Iceland last time and it has lots of quirky information in it, such as the addresses for each of the Sigur Ros band members and the address for Bjork’s mum (as well as for Bjork herself, but it warns her son can be bad-tempered if you turn up on the doorstep). It’s only a slim little book (so nice and light to carry around) but is really informative and I’d highly recommend anyone heading to Reykjavik to get hold of a copy.