Fit for Heroes

With the last two posts I'm in danger of becoming a 'when-we'. The trouble is I have met so many wonderful people, not just as a journalist but in ordinary life. I wrote used one, an old teacher as a model for A Land Fit for Heroes and then added two to the cover, my mother as a young girl and an uncle who was one of the wonderful people. My wife liked the cover so that is four on that one book. I also remember some who were unconventional and their early lives are recorded in the same book. They became intermingled, bits from one attached to bits of another and a little of a third and through that, they grew into the characters who make up Cairndhu. I enjoy devising a plot but the real fun ios when those characters take over the tale.

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Butterflies

There are white butterflies dancing about outside my window. I can't tell the difference but I  understand they are trying to find a mate. Unlike in my young days (at the time of the Suez crisis and the Korean war), the females seem to be just as frantic as the males. Of course, then it was the young ladies who looked like butterflies, our uniform was grey flannels and a nice tie, not too gawdy, but colourful. At the Palais, a drink meant orange juice, or Appletiser and if you'd had a dram to give you Dutch courage, you smelled of peppermints and the young ladies knew why. I tried to create the atmosphere in Sadie's Boy but only managed a sniff of the perfume.

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No ordinary people

Where did all these ordinary people come from? I was in a coffee shop the other day, sitting next to a young lady and her Grandmother. From their conversation I realised how life has lost it's gloss since I was a young man when the young lady mentioned a chap's name and the granny asked if they had moved in together. In my day she would have asked if they were lovers, which would be something special, whereas living together so ordinary even octogenarians do it. It's like the Green Door behind which we wondered what went on, as Frankie Vaughan sang, - with social media, you get it in video, so why bother to go in? These days you take out an equal, who presumably pays her way,
in my day, you took out someone special and treated her like a princess.

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About people

I love writing about people and I came across the following in a chat with a friend. A chap from the south of England was engaged to a Glasgow lassie and went north to visit his new proposed in-laws. It was all right when they talked to him one on one but when they got together, he couldn't understand a word. As he stood at the edge of the group his fiance came to make sure he was all right. 'You didn't tell me you had a twin sister,' he complained.
'Twin sister?'
'She was talking to your Dad just now,' he pointed out.
'That wasn't a sister, that was me,' his fiance told him.
The moral is, learn the language before you go to Glasgow, snow awfa hard, or in other words, it's not awfully hard.
Oakhaven may be in England but it is about people.


www.sullatoberdalton.com/books/welcome-oakhaven

Welcome review

As you would expect from someone who has spent a lifetime in small communities, Sullatober Dalton’s, Welcome to Oakhaven, is set in a village. The plot is well constructed with several twists that leave the reader curious about what happens next. The characters that fill the plot are well-drawn and living in a village, where people have several roles, allows Sullatober to make them many sided.
This is the start of a review written for Welcome to Oakhaven, which I think sums things up although it excludes Elaine's grandson and her friend Cassie, both of whom can create chaos.


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World Cup Nothing

There was non need for things like cameras and video analysis to judge for penalty kicks at the football pitch where I grew up. The pitch was in the flood plain beside the river and, when our team played the village next door, any referee stupid enough to make the wrong decision over penalties was likely to get a quick bath if the constable didn't intervene quickly enough. The World Cup had nothing on it for excitement and I had to include an incident at one game in Sadie's Boy.

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McPherson's daughter

Drover was written on the back of my wife talking about the father of an adopted aunt, who had been a drover before buying a pub in Glasgow. There's a lot more to McPherson, However. His daughter Mary married a sea captain. There were few jobs just after WW1 and her husband tried to be an insurance sales man. Like me, he wasn't a roaring success and when into a pub one day to get a drink. In the pub he met a man looking for a captain with a Suez canal ticket and got the job. He took the family to Australia, where Mary bought a farm, called it Moidart after McPherson's home glen and made it into a model farm. I met Mary once and she was fascinating.

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