Bruce's spider

This being hogmanay, I thought a bit of verse wouldn't go wrong.

Bruce and yon spider

Robert the Bruce sat in his cave,

All he could see was the ocean wave.

He’d already been crowned with a crown on a throne

But then he’d been sitting on destiny’s stone.

Since then he’d fought battles six,

Hadn’t won only one and was in a fix.

He’d nothing to read, or games to play,

Only that minstrel who sang all day.

With nothing to do and no paper to write,

A spider came crawling into his sight.

He watched the fool,

As it tried to spool

A web from this side to that

Of the cave wherein he sat.

It tried and tried and he started to add,

The swings it took, the attempts it had.

That’s six he muttered into his beard,

Enough is enough is what I’d feared,

But the spider had more courage than him,

And set off again on another swing.

Just at that the wind gave a puff,

And the spider was carried far enough,

To catch a hold where it wanted to be,

And Robert the Bruce said, I see, I see.

Six is the number of the Bible’s beast,

So seven tries I must make at least.

Bruce went on to win renown,

To sit on the throne and wear his crown.

So whether in word or deed,

You wish to win, succeed,

If time and again you fail the test,

Take a tip from the spider who showed the best,

Don’t sit in a cave and wonder why,

Get out there and try and try.

Happy New Year

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Christmas cards and first novels

Well, the deadline for the twist story came and went and I didn't have it finished in time. Christmas interfered in the shape of Christmas cards and shopping. The cards took more than expected because I thought I would be clever and do a design for a cover, then add a Christmas story inside. I came close to giving up but managed to get it together. What the recipients felt about it, I have yet to discover. The story is in the web page under the title of The Innkeeper's Christmas Carol if anyone feels inclined to look at it. I enjoyed writing it as I have always been fascinated by the ordinary people who appear in the stories in the Bible. The cup bearer who knew Joseph, for example - how did he tell Pharoah about Joseph?
I'm not writing much just now but I have been given a book to review for a friend. My first reaction is that the author should have been given the same advice as me, - finish your first novel, put it in a drawer, lock the drawer and throw away the key. There is so much to learn, not just about how to plot and plan and have highs and lows but how to submit to an agent or a publisher and how much work there is in promoting it that rushing only results in frustration. I've written several, but the promotion and selling they need to make them a commercial success needs more energy than I can muster. The writing still fascinates me and I am working on a historical novel, but, like the one I'm reviewing, it's a bit of a thirty thousand word story shouting to get out of seventy thousand words and I am not rushing until I feel happy with it all.

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A Bruce's Welcome for a maid

What I am about to write was not fully revealed to me by my history teachers, nor by Nigel Tranter. I was like many others told that when Alexander 111 died, jis successor was to be a young lassie, the Maid of Norway, the daughter of a Scottish princess who had married into the royal family of what was really the Auld Ally. The lassie was to marry Edward, king of England's daughter and unite the kingdoms. What slipped under the radar was that, at the time the nobles were all waiting for the lassie to arrive, the Bishop of St Andrews, the head of the church in Scotland, a position made much of by Tranter, wrote in desperation to Edward - 'The kingdom is disturbed...Sir Robert Bruce is come with a great following...and on that account, there is fear of a general war and a great slaughter of men unless Your Majesty apply some speedy remedy.'
Of course, all the arrangements fell apart when the lassie died on the way to Scotland and that left the throne of Scotland vacant.
The Scots asked Edward of England to judge between the claims of Robert Bruce and John Balliol both swearing fealty to Edward to influence their claim, thereby giving away Scotland's independence. We were taught that Edward chose Balliol because he thought he would be easier to manipulate than Bruce, not that Balliol's claim was senior, being descended from the elder of two princesses.
We never heard that Balliol had renegued on his fealty vow and gone to war with Edward long before a Bruce took on that role, yet Ballio is portrayed as some kind of fool Scotland was glad to be rid of. He's made such a shadowy figure it's hard to get a decent picture of the man. If Bruce had backed him the way yon Jimmy, sorry, Good Sir James, The Black Douglas, backed Bruce, would Balliol have triumphed?
Following the story in this way makes one realise the killing of the Comyn in the church wasn't fuelled by patriotism but was part of a family feud. A kind of Wild West story instead of a grand noble quest.
Don't get me wrong, I love heroes. I just don't expect them to be John Wayne and squeaky clean and I don't like needless war being glorified under the name of Patriotism.

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A sting in the tale

I'm still twisting and turning about this tale with a twist or a sting in the tail for Writers' Magazine. I had three quarters of it written as a flight from the outback but the twist was weak and I gave it up. I'll get back to it another time. Anyway, I found another draft in my files but, while the twist was in the last line, it was more one of those throw away lines than loaded in the story plot. The story is too good to misuse so I dropped that for a better opportunity, went back to my draft files and found a tale about someone on a bowls club committee. If you're one of those people who don't like to let the team down and find yourself stuck as the secretary, treasurer, or competition organiser for a bowls, golf, football, sailing, WI, or any other kind of voluntary club, you'll relate easily to the story. A friend of mine who had been secretary of the Probus Club for thirteen years got so desperate he told everyone he was moving two hundred miles away the month before the AGM. The new secretary followed his example after three years. They both still live in the village and the new secretary is starting to look desperate. I've alreaady given too much away but I've managed to give the story a better twist.

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David and the aged warrior

How the Bruce connection at the time of Matilda and Stephen slipped through the net, I do not know but before we get to deeply into the lead up to Bannockburn, let me do a bit of time travel. You'll remember that the Empress of Maud or Matilda was the niece of David 1, King of Scots, and her right to the Throne of england was disputed by Stephen. David gathered a host to invade England in support of his niece. The host, a motley collection, especially the wild men of Galloway, gathered to plunder the north of England. They set off but when they got to Northallerton, according to Sir Walter Scott, an aged warrior by the name of Bruce, who had known David in the past and had estates in both countries, went into the Scottish camp and advised David not to fight. The Galloway men accused Bruce of being a traitor and, when David had second thoughts about fighting, accused him of cowardice and rabble roused the army to charge. Prince Henry of Scotland led the Scottish cavalry, broke through the English lines and started to hack their rear while the Galloway men hacked them at the front. Things were going well when a perfidious Englishman chopped off someone's head, raised it on a pole and shouted it had belonged to the King of Scots. Whether it was Bruce or not, no one seems to have noticed, but the Scots lost heart and, encouraged by the English longbowmen, ran off home. It was this aged warrior who begat the Bruce line.
To show how unpredictable politics can be, when the peace treaty was signed, except for Newcastle and Bamborough, the whole of Northumberland and Durham became Scottish. Which confirms that, sometimes, you get more from losing than winning.
Of course, you could say that, with typical Scots stupidity, David didn't move his capital south, in accordance with English tradition, but kept it at Edinburgh in what was the middle of his realm, and an opportunity to consolidate was lost.

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Twisted tale

Well, 300 words is submitted and I chose the hospital with the doctor who had been told by the patient not to tell his relatives he was dying. It's submitted, so I can't post it for a month or so. It still leaves me with ideas for the waiting room at the doctors, the lawyers, the law court, the theatrical agency, the dentist, the school interview, the Palace, and the remote airport. I have a story with a twist to write and thought I would try the remote airport. The pilot is a young woman but that will only come out at the end as the twist. I had thought of doing it from Meekatara in Australia but I'm not all that familiar with that and changed it to South Africa and Upington. There's a storm on the way and one of the passengers insists on leaving as he has an important appointment. To go round the storm they divert to Springbok and have to stay overnight. It's at that stage the man tells thee pilot he's going to be best man at a wedding and the pilot tells him not to worry, they can't start without them, she's the bride. Problem - Why does the Best Man not know her? She's English and met her intended when he was over on a sabbatical. Why are they  getting Married in South Africa? He only proposed when they were there. Why not go back to England? Her parents wanted to make a holiday of it.
I've had two tales from that list of where the waiting room was for 300 words and the story line of at least the lawyers, the theatrical agents, the school interview and the Palace have legs. Which goes to show the value of story lists written down so that they can be referred to.

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Bruce and the Honourable Thing

 Our history teachers taught us all about Robert Bruce and the spider in the cave but I have discovered the Bruce family themselves were spiders drawing people into their web. We start with 1066. It was not just England that changed following that event, but the whole island. No one is sure if de Brus came with William the Conqueror, or is the canny laddie waited till he saw how things were going and came with reinforcements but when he did come, he was given large estates in Yorkshire.

The next time I stumbled over the family, now Bruce, was when one, Robert, went on a crusade. (the Big Thing in those days. Try it now and you get locked up.) Robert became friendly with a chap from South West Scotland, the Earl of Carrick. Unfortunately, the Earl was killed. When Robert came back to Yorkshire he felt it was his duty to tell his friend’s widow the sad news in person. Rather a decent thought, what! Anyway, when he got to the Earl’s castle he found the charming widow unwilling to let him go and Bruce did the honourable thing. The story goes that she locked and barred the gate and forced Robert to marry her. A malicious rumour was started that by putting the blame on the countess, Robert avoided paying the fine he would have to have paid to the king for marrying the countess without the king’s permission.

So, now we sit with Bruce having estates in Yorkshire and Scotland. I’ve no idea how he came by the Tottenham property but he may have bought it for the occasions when he had to attend Westminster.

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From the Empress of Germany to Robert Bruce

So, in our walk through the history of our island, here we are with Henry Plantagenet sitting on the English throne. His mother, the dowager Empress of Germany, no less. His grandmother  Scots by birth and his father French. A man of mixed race you might argue. Henry’s second cousin, sits on the throne of Scotland, so, when Henry marries the girl from Aquitaine, the family control the Atlantic seaboard from the Orkneys to the Pyrenees. Now why was I not told that the Plantagenets had Scots blood in their veins at school? Because we were too absorbed in making sure we were true Scots and nothing else?

If we’d been told, we’d have known we had a connection to Richard Lion Heart, the one who was saved by a medieval Tom Jones, and his brother John, who, as we know, had his little ways, and sometimes no one spoke to him for  days and days and days.

The obvious question is which of them had the stronger share of Scots blood, the galant and ferocious Richard, the man with the Highland temper, or the miserable dour John.

I have , of course, glossed over the fact that Alexander 1 of Scotland had married Hery 1’s daughter, but it is time to mention that Alexander 11 of Scotland married King John’s daughter, and Alexander 111 married Henry 111’s daughter. As a result, by the middle of the 13^th century, and getting close to Robert the Bruce, the  Scottish royal line was well stocked with good English blood.

What price Brucie?

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What Shakespeare missed after Macbeth

As it is so intermingled with characters in his play Macbeth, I’m surprised that Shakespeare didn’t follow Macbeth with what happened to Duncan’s prodigy for they have a story as twisted as anything he could have devised. During their seventeen year stay in England while Macbeth ruled Scotland, the Norman’s invaded. When William the Conqueror died, his son, Henry , after battles and betrayals, took over as King of England.
In the meantime, Edgar, the Aethling, Harald’s rival for the English throne had gone to Scotland and married the daughter of Macbeth’s successor Malcolm, known as Canmore. From this marriage came a daughter, who had, through her father, direct links to the old English royal line.
Henry decided it would be a good political move to wed this lass and change her name to Matilda.
From that marriage came a son called William and a daughter called Adelaide.
Adelaide married well, to the Emperor of Germany, no less, but the Emperor died and Henry recalled his daughter and renamed her Matilda.
Then, with the White Ship disaster, young William drowned, and Matilda became the only legitimate heir to the English throne. Henry married her off to a Frenchman, Henry of Anjou, nicknamed Plantagenet .
Henry tried to ensure there would be no arguments over the succession when he died and managed to get agreement that Matilda would take over on his death
However, when the old man died, a nephew, Stephen, jumped in and took over as king. It sparked civil war and Malcolm charged down to help, Stephen was captured and locked up.
Shakespeare hinted that Malcolm’s descendants would transform into the Stuarts and we know how headstrong they were, so it is not surprising that ex-Empress Matilda proved too ‘Royal’ and, when Stephen was let out, the aristocracy promptly got rid of Matilda and put Stephen in his place.
Like Duncan, however, Matilda had the last laugh because her son Henry succeeded Stephen as Henry Plantagenet and began that dynasty.
This is one of those tales that make nonsense of the idea of Scottish history and English history separated by a line on a map. I’m sure the girls in my class would have preferred that tale to Magna Carta and Simon de Mountford. I certainly would and I’m surprised it slipped through Walter Scott’s sieve as well. It’s a real blockbuster and better than ‘The Other What’s-her-name Girl’. I’ll have a go at this story one of these days.

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Macbeth and the Empress of Germany

As it is so intermingled with characters in his play Macbeth, I’m surprised that Shakespeare didn’t follow Macbeth with what happened to Duncan’s prodigy for they have a story as twisted as anything he could have devised. During their seventeen year stay in England while Macbeth ruled Scotland, the Norman’s invaded. When William the Conqueror died, his son, Henry , after battles and betrayals,  took over as King of England.

In the meantime, Edgar, the Aethling, Harald’s rival for the English throne had gone to Scotland and married the daughter of Macbeth’s successor Malcolm, known as Canmore. From this marriage came a daughter, who had, through her father, direct links to the old English royal line.

Henry decided it would be a good political move to wed this lass and change her name to Matilda.

From that marriage came a son called William and a daughter called Adelaide.

Adelaide married well, to the Emperor of Germany, no less, but the Emperor died and Henry recalled his daughter and renamed her Matilda.

Then, with the White Ship disaster, young William drowned, and Matilda became the only legitimate heir to the English throne. Henry married her off to a Frenchman, Henry of Anjou, nicknamed Plantagenet .

Henry tried to ensure there would be no arguments over the succession when he died and managed to get agreement that Matilda would take over on his death

However, when the old man died, a nephew, Stephen, jumped in and took over as king. It sparked civil war and Malcolm charged down to help, Stephen was captured and locked up.

Shakespeare hinted that Malcolm’s descendants would transform into the Stuarts and we know how headstrong they were, so it is not surprising that ex-Empress Matilda proved too ‘Royal’ and, when Stephen was let out, the aristocracy promptly got rid of Matilda and put Stephen in his place.

Like Duncan, however, Matilda had the last laugh because her son Henry succeeded Stephen as Henry Plantagenet and began that dynasty.

This is one of those tales that make nonsense of the idea of Scottish history and English history separated by a line on a map. I’m sure the girls in my class would have preferred that tale to Magna Carta and Simon de Mountford. I certainly would and I’m surprised it slipped through Walter Scott’s sieve as well. It’s a real blockbuster and better than ‘The Other What’s-her-name Girl’. I'll have a go at this story one of these days.

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After the trenches

Well, the Remembrance Day services for the centenary of the end of WW1 are still on but will fade into the background in the next few weeks. But what of the aftermath? I had several single lady  teachers who were unmarried because the young men they might have wed had been killed in Flanders in WW1. One of them formed the heroine of a novel I wrote to honour schoolteachers. The government had promised the lads going off to fight, a Land Fit for Heroes and I used that as the title. Those dear ladies took their class as their substitute families and treated us with great kindness and understanding.
Of course, the land fit for heroes never materialised and drifted into general strike and depression and teaching during those years must have tried those women's resolution but they carried on and educated those who would stand up in 1939.
In later years, I was taught by men from WW2 and, again, was treated with great understanding, they seemed to relate to our teenage rebellions and taught us to love their subjects, including Shakespeare and history.
It is as a result of those experiences that I remember the wars nd those who suffered, not just in the trenches but in the years that followed.

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AFricans and mixed race Remembered WW1

IN the midst off all the hype about remembering the men of the commonwealth in WW1 I hope no one forgets the men of mixed race who fought under General Smuts in Kenya and Tanganyika. Those men insisted on being included and fought not only in East Africa as the Cape Corps but also in Palestine and were later sent to restore order in Egypt when the dockers went on strike. After a hard fight and a blistering march they came singing into camp and the general commented, the only men who would come in singing after the time they have had are the Cape Corps.
They also fought at Tobruk in WW2.
I learned about these in the village of Pniel near Cape Town, a village that ignored Apartheid and got on with life.
With the Cape Corps in East Africa were unknown thousands of tribesmen who acted as bearers. While the dead of the whites and the Cape Corps are recorded, no one knows how many bearers were killed, died of fever, or were eaten by lions. They have no memorial and the unknown soldier is also for them.
I promised to write the story of the Cape Corps and have written the prologues but, to my shame I have not tackled the war on the Rufigi River.

Oor Wullie or Why French William came to Britain

The Portuguese went round the Cape of Good Hope in search of the spice trade. Columbus sailed west to develop trade with Japan. Cabot went back to Nova Scotia because he thought there was gold there. Why did William the Conqueror invade Britain? Because he wanted a piece of the action in the North Sea. The North Sea was at that time the busiest trading area in the world; iron ore, timber, amber, furs from Scandinavia; tin, lead, copper, wool, from Britain. All France provided was wine.
BY ignoring Cnut's empire historians miss the influence it had on the Norman invasion. There are tales of how Harold went to France to pay homage to William and tales of how Edward the Confessor naming William as his successor but none of it explains why William wanted to leave sunny France for a wet and windy Britain. If all he wanted was land, surely he'd have gone south or south east to the Riviera. How many Frenchmen retire to Cleethorpes?
Anyway, there were several claimants to the throne, was it ever different until Victoria. There was Edgar, the Atheling, with the most obvious claim, there was Harald, who had outlawed his brother. That brother and Edgar, who was Malcolm of Scotland's brother-in-law, joined up in Scotland, they could hardly go to France, could they? These two got together, convinced Malcolm to charge down into England while Harald was under threat from William. They tried their luck at Stamford Bridge. As usually happens at Stamford Bridge, the Scots lost, but then Harald had to rush down to Hastings.
I always thought that was pretty much it but it turns out that William turned on the Scots and Malcolm submitted to him at Abernethy. I went to school in Scotland but nobody thought to tell me William the Conqueror was at Abernethy. It was of course the capital of the land of the Painted People, the Picts. The local church was founded by an Irishwoman, St Brigit of Kildare - not one of the raiding Scotti from Ulster.
So what are the people of Abernethy? Viking, Norman, Irish, Scots, or Picts? Maybe just British.

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Cnut

Our school history jumps from Alfred the Great to 1066 but there is a lot going on in the interim. For a start, Cnut, the Viking, appears as if by magic, defeats Edmund and becomes the first Viking king of the Anglo Saxons. In fact the one who really unites the country.

In my researches I found one gem from the past in the form of a letter written by Cnut himself that makes one wonder, with Brexit boiling, if people have changed all that much.

... I spoke with the (Holy Roman) Emperor himself and the Lord Pope and the princes there about the needs of all people of my entire realm, both English and Danes, that a juster law and securer peace might be granted to them on the road to Rome and that they should not be straitened by so many barriers along the road, and harassed by unjust tolls; and the Emperor agreed and likewise King Robert who governs most of these same toll gates. And all the magnates confirmed by edict that my people, both merchants, and the others who travel to make their devotions, might go to Rome and return without being afflicted by barriers and toll collectors, in firm peace and secure in a just law.

The more I read about the man, the more irritated I became over how he was ignored in my school history.  I learned of him in an art appreciation class talking about a poem about some old woman trying to sweep the Atlantic Ocean out of her front door, yet here is the king whose empire stretched around the North Sea; in other words, the major trading area of the time. Think of it, amber, ivory, fur, iron ore, timber, from Scandinavia, tin, copper, lead, wool, from Britain, all trading with Germany and the empire of the Tzar, possibly even the Far East through the Caspian and Black Seas.

Pie in the sky? If I jump a bit to the days of Braveheart Wallace, when the Scots wrote to the outside world telling them Scotland was free and open for business, they didn’t write to the French or the Venetians, they wrote to Hamburg and Lubeck, their old trading partners across the North Sea.  

Back to Cnut. The Scots paid homage to him, not just Duncan’s father-in-law, Malcolm, but Macbeth, who killed Duncan, not in his bed as Shakespeare made it, but in open battle. For the next seventeen years, not Shakespeare’s weekend, Macbeth was king of Scotland. A settled Scotland that allowed him to visit the Pope in Rome and return, still King of Scotland.

In the meantime Duncan’s sons had run off to England, where they learned how the English court ruled and took those ideas north when they returned to Scotland.

All this, yet a time ignored by the conventional teachers of history in preference to battles and royal marriages.

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The Viking alternative Silk Road

I made a mistake in the last blog mentioning the alternative route to get silks into Europe was up the Danube. It would be easier to go through the Mediterranean but there may be a way up the Volga or the Dnieper from the Caspian or the Black sea to St Petersburg or Riga. Too circuitous, you say. Well, it was worth carrying silk all the way from China on horseback, why not use the Eastern European rivers wherever possible and mule trains over the rest to the Baltic and Western Europe. I'm sure the Vikings were capable of thinking that through. 
For historical things, my problem is that I worked for a multi national mining company in a department looking for new business. When the price of copper went up there would be a panic effort to find copper deposits. It irritated me that no one seemed to think every other multi national was doing the same thing and the projects would come on stream together, depressing the copper price. I did my best to convince people that the best approach was to think that with a higher copper price, people would be looking for an alternative and our efforts should be directed at finding what that would be and investing in that.
Which brings me back to history. People are inclined to find several pieces of evidence to support one theory and ignore other possibilities. I'm not a history buff but I did study the history of the Cape Route to the East and only found out that the Phoenicians had sailed round Africa in a throw away note by Herodotus that the Phoenicians had been lying when the said they sailed through the Pillars of Hercules, turned left and journeyed until the sun changed sides. How many throw away comments like that, notes that contradict established theory, have been ignored by historians. Did no one from Russia ever chase a Caribou across the ice in the Bering Strait and 'discover' America. Did no sailor ever slip down that continent's west coast and find the Isthmus, slip across and find a way from the west to Europe. Is there somewhere a business invoice from a Japanese businessman to show, like the Phoenicians over the route to Cornwall, they kept the route to Europe secret until some fool found his way round the other way?   
You may not believe it but all this study of trade and trade routes led to Drover, the story of the drover and his lass and the droving roads in Scotland.

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WHere did the Vikings get weapons?

Let's take a look at these Vikings. They come in boatloads, all armed with two swords and a battle axe yet it is only the nobility that can afford proper weapons in Britain and Western Europe. What's the difference? Massive iron ore deposits in Scandinavia. When you look at the North Sea area you begin to understand why it created such powerful groupings. Tin, copper, lead and a wee bit of gold from Britain, Iron ore and timber from Scandinavia and through the Baltic, down the Danube to the East.
To dismiss them as slave traders is to sell them short, just as to assume they were pure Norse. On a lengthy voyage, some crew members would die and be replaced by slaves. The first time the normal crew went ashore and stirred up the wrath of the locals, it would be obvious to the slaves that if they wanted to survive they had best grab a sword and join in with the crew.
Of course they were fierce, can you imagine sailing down past Scotland's west coast to the Irish sea among Highlanders, mad Welshmen and fight loving Irish without being fierce? There again, can you imagine a wild Highlander or Welshman or an Irishman not wanting to join in and go looking for senioritas to capture, never mind gold and loot?
The picture of Vikings we have been given by historians is of a grim death dealing masochists but in any group that is a the fanatical minority, the bulk would be adventure loving chaps, who enjoyed a good fight, like some soccer supporters today.
Let's stop thinking about people in history having different appetites and desires to us and enjoy our heritage as human beings and begin to worry about what happens when Europe has no natural resources to offer the world.
The Photo is of an Irish uncle, appropriate for this time of remembrance.

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Burned cakes and Vikings

After Patrick and Columbus,came the Vikings. According to my history teacher, wild savage men who did terrible things to the people of Britain. Somehow they came to Lindisfarne out of the mists of the North Sea. What mystified me was that they should be lucky enough to land on an isolated island full of treasure. It turns out that these Vikings were originally merchants trading in amber, fur and walrus ivory, and it was most likely that the traders went back to Viking land and told them the Brits stored their gold and silver in churches with only men in frocks to guard them and that brought the soldiers. Have we any of our own empire building to confirm this kind of thing? There is the East India Company. It started as a few trading posts and, within a hundred years had become a private army that controlled a sub-continent. The Brits just did it on a massive scale. The story goes on that Alfred the Great and his sons had chased the Vikings out of Britain about a hundred and fifty years later. Can you imagine what effect the Americans who came here during WW2 would have had on the population if they had stayed for a hundred years? Mixed race wouldn't look at it! Not only that but the Vikings who came in the first lot would not be over keen to share what they had fought to get with the late-comers, so the whole history book story seems a bit dubious. If you've ever argued with a sea-side boarding house landlady, you'll know what I mean and can sympathise with Alfred when his landlady spoke to him about burning the cakes and understand why the epic tale has survived for so many years.

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In the last years of the Roman occupation, it seems Britain was still pagan, with druids cutting mistletoe and curing all kinds of ailments with frog spittle and duck feathers. Then a lad called Patrick was taken prisoner and sent to the galleys as a slave. This Patrick was a bright lad and learned all their was to know about the new religion, Christianity. When he escaped he to Ireland and did a kind of Moses thing, waving his staff and sending all the snakes rushing into the sea. That made him famous and he started preaching about this new religion, not the way the Romans thought about it with a Pope in charge, but something the Irish could accept. He was all for a system where, even if they were joined by the same belief, each little valley or glen had its own priest, who gave the local chief advice on how things should be.  The Scots, I won't call them Scotti, heard about it when a chap called Columbus took up residence in Iona, an island half way between Ireland and Scotland. (Columbus went there because there was nothing to fight over as there was in Ireland or the Highlands, and he could have time to think.) His religion seeped down the west coast to Wales but didn't get much further because the lords in the South of England didn't like this business of local chiefs doing as they liked. They had wide flat lands and could make sure everyone who lived there did as they were told. When the Pope sent a missionaries to teach the people how to be proper Christians, the missionaries organised a meeting in Whitby to get everyone to agree on whether Patrick and Columba, or the Pope, were right. The only people who could get there were the people from the south of England, you weren't going to struggle down from Auchterarder or across from Pontarddulais, so it was naturally decided that the Pope was right and they should all be Roman Catholics. Which set up the situation that grew into Methodists in Wales, Presbyterians in Scotland and Anglicans in England, all believing the same thing in different ways and burning people to prove they were the peace makers and to prove that, while God gave life, he had authorised them to take that gift away.

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What happened to Nero from Yorkshire

I was taught that the Romans left Britain in 410 AD to go to defend Rome. Well, it seems the army was about 500,000 strong and maybe 100,000 were in Britain, so where did they all go? 500,000 soldiers crowding into Rome all at once? They must have been standing on each others heads.The ones that had been in Britain and elsewhere for four hundred years  would have women and children, so we are talking more than a million refugees all cramming themselves into one walled city in Italy. No wonder the Italians are unhappy about the present influx. Did the Brits who had joined up go away, or stay behind. Was it like the aftermath of WW1 with all the young men gone and more women than men in Britain and more men than women in Italy? There really are a million stories in this, not stories about wars and heroes but tales of families left behind. Were all those soldiers killed, or did they go home and become outlaws. The Roman empire moved to Constantinople so, are the present immigrants the descendents of Roman soldiers trying to go home? Maybe one or two could claim British passports because their ancestor was the Yorkshire servant of a centurion in 45AD. This new fad of DNA history could backfire in ways we didn't expect.

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Roman VAT

I have a Scottish upbringing. Maybe that's why I am sceptical of glib explanations. I'm told the Roman legions, with their shields making a tortoise to cover them from rocks or spears or arrows fired at them were terrified of the Scots and particularly the Picts of the Western Highlands and that is why they ran back and cowered behind Hadrian's Wall. I can't see either that, or the tale of the Picts gathered together a great army. The Picts were a mixture of McDonalds and Campbells and McLeans and Macbeths, all stealing and squabbling among themselves, so what really happened? The Roman's found tin in the south, then copper further north, then lead, zinc, a bit of silver and some gold in southern Scotland and that explains Antonine's wall to protect that. What happened then was that the money men in London complained about the cost of the lead etc. it was costing. The agents explained they paid for the stuff in Scotland but the couriers got robbed in the border country and it all had to be bought back from the robbers at Hadrian's Wall. At that point the London men sent word to pull back to Hadrian's Wall and buy from whoever brought the stuff. If it was the producers, fine. If it was the robbers, that's life. Now, that seems are more likely explanation than the legionnaires being terrified of a bunch of naked, blue painted screaming savages.
Since the gates in the walls were also places where duty was collected, it may be that there was too much smuggling across the firth of Clyde (unlikely what?) and it was easier to control at Hadrian’s Wall. Which means that sales tax started with the Romans and even in 43AD, there was no escaping VAT.

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Picts Scots and Romans

As I pursued the research for the history talk, I was surprised to find how many people in England believed the Romans only went as far as Hadrian's wall. In fact the Roman legions marched up beyond Aberdeen and the King of Orkney submitted to Claudius at the time of the 43AD invasion. They built Antonine's Wall between the Clyde and Forth before pulling back to Hadrian's more southerly version. In researching this I found that the names Picts and Scots, which I had believed stretched back into antiquity came with the Romans; Picts being late Latin for a barbarian painted people, which explains the legend of Brits being painted blue, Scotii being the Roman's name for a bunch of Irish pirates who kept Scotland's west coast province of Dalriada in terror. The Painted People were still taking off plaids and shirts to charge half naked at the Redcoats in 1745, by the way. All of this goes to confirm my wife's uncle Ken's warning not to get involved in family history or you'll find you are related to tinkers.

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Phoenician travel insurance

In my research for that talk on the history of the island Britain I found that Cornwall had an almost monopoly on the supply of tin in the ancient world. In fact they had a rule that no-one would work more than a quota. That kept the price high, like the diamond industries Central Sales Organisation today, but the restriction forced the Romans to send Julius Caesar to investigate and when he got back with a trade agreement he was given a triumph; military opinion inclined to look on his 'invasion' as a military disaster. The amusing tale was that the Phoenicians kept the secret location of Cornwall from anyone for at least a thousand years. One Roman ship following a Phoenician was led to disaster by the Phoenician grounding his vessel on a shoal and lring the Romans to a similar fate. The Phoenician escaped and his loses were repaid from the Phoenician treasury - fully comprehensive travel insurance that PAID OUT!

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Julius Caesar

I did a talk on Wednesday evening about how the history of Scotland and England are so interconnected that studying one without the other, loses so much colour and vibrancy it is a pale reflection of the real thing. The research into our joint history was fascinating and began with how Cornwall's monopoly of the ancient tin trade brought Julius Caesar to investigate. When I asked a history buff about Julius Caesar, I was told his historical 'invasion' of England was no more than a scouting expedition and hardly 'Veni, vidi, vici'. I seems that the Roman senate, worried about the growing demand for bronze, sent Caesar to look into the state of the market. From that, I deduced that the real reason he was given a Triumph in Rome was that he went back with a Trade Agreement. Over the next hundred years, the senate became even more worried, decided they needed to own the production capacity and authorised a proper invasion. My researches into that revealed that the wave of Rome's legionnaires washed against the bens of the Scotland's Western Highlands and that even the King of the Orkneys submitted to Claudius at the time of the 43AD invasion. Not only that, but Roman galleys swept the North sea of pirates, so there was enough trade along our East coast at that time to be worth a pirate's time. Not the usual picture we have of England and especially Scotland being overrun by naked blue painted barbarians. I got started on this after researching the old drove roads of Scotland for Drover and finding their extension was down into England and the markets of the south.

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After the show

I'm back from Bonnie Scotland where the heather grows. That's the start of a song lyric, I just have to find the rest. I went up for the village flower show. The hot weather earlier had pushed everything and most of the outdoor blooms were a bit ragged but you now what gardeners are, they always seem to be able to produce a show. The old friends are beginning to slow down but can still find something in the border for a show entry. I thought the rock bun judges were 'blin', the second prize bun was just a scone not looking like a rock at all. I complained but the judges were deaf as well as blind.

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Flower Show

I'm going up to the village flower show next week. Unfortunately a lot of the houses are now occupied by people who commute to Glasgow and don't have time to get really involved and it's not like the old days when someone ate another's carrot from their display and got them disqualified but a few old friends are still there and make a point of turning up for a chat. Unfortunately, we're all too old for a proper jig afterwards but can still manage a dram. I love writing about the kind of characters that were around in the fifties and the event led to Jinks and Broon and Best in Show.

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Cooking for one

I wrote Welcome to Oakhaven to entertain my wife. That's her looking at Table Mountain. Unfortunately, she died three years ago and before she taught me to cook. Which means I have had to learn to cook for one. She made all kinds of delectable dishes needing multiple pots, which I cleaned and which left me terrified of any recipe that needs more than two pots. My kind of recipe is the one she used for shortbread. You chuck everything into the bowl and switch on the mixer. Just don't switch it on too fast or the ingredients explode and get thrown all over the kitchen, which is worse than cleaning multiple pots.

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Caffeine free

A friend  of mine was feeling the need of a restorative but had his mother-in-law staying so didn't want to have anything she might criticise and went into one of the new coffee shops. He asked for a coffee. The attendant asked him what kind he would like, pointing to the long list of varieties he could choose from. My friend looked at the list, couldn't see anything that looked like just coffee and left, even more stressed than when he went in.

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Sunburn in Oakhaven or Cairndhu

One of the things I like about writing village stories is that they bring out memories to people. this recent spell of hot weather reminded me of one of those episodes that many people can recall. A teenage friend got sunburnt one day and couldn't sleep. He went to the bathroom cupboard to get some calamine lotion to cool it down. The bathroom switch was one of those with a string you pull, make a CLLLICK and waken the whole house, so he probed around in the dark, found a bottle and rubbed the liquid on. Ten minutes later the whole house was awake anyway as he scrabble back to the bathroom and turned the light on to wash the stuff off. When he looked at the bottle it was Deep Heat.
More like Best in show than Welcome to Oakhaven, but Elaine's grandson would be a candidate for that story.

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Luck of the Irish

People ask where story ideas come from, then tell you something like  - we were in Ireland and Father decided we should go to Sunday service. We shuffled into a pew, James first, then me, then Mother and Father. James was talking and not paying attention and when he sat down there was a crumpy noise. When he felt under him he pulled out a flattened bowler hat. There was a grunt from behind and we all looked round to see a BIG Irishman glaring at James. James slipped out when the prayers started and everyone had their eyes closed. It could be either Oakhaven and Mrs Boniface with someone, or Broon in Cairndhu!

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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.


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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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Review of 1820

It's no longer 1820 but The Weaver's Tale a historical tale based on the events around my old area in 1820. At school, I heard all about Henry VII of England and how astute he was, although he had nothing to do with Scotland except that his daughter married well and the result was a grandson, James VI, who took over from the other Elizabeth. What I didn't hear about was the ruction in our own district labelled The Last Armed Insurrection on Mainland Britain with banners calling for Scotland Free or a Desert. Hardly something you'd miss! I've dragged the hero of Drover and his shepherd Deaf Davie into it all and it doesn't look bad, just needs some TLC to bring it alive.

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Bernard Cornwell

I've just finished The Flame Bearer, glad to find Utred was at last back home in Bebbanberg but found the battle scene at the end a bit too long and unrelieved by Cornwell's usual moments of stress relief. Maybe I've read too many of his books and am comparing it too much with my favourite,The Burning Land, but I'm just me. What I've done to help me write is to read passages I really admire now and then to remind me of the standard I am trying to reach. I also use P. G, Wodehouse, C.S. Forester, and bits and pieces of poetry, Burns and St Agnes Eve or The Deserted Village, for their descriptive power. I'm not as good as any of those but, one's does one's best as in Shadows in the Veldt.
People have commented that the flag on the cover of Shadows in the Veldt is not the German National flag, it isn't, it's the Kaiser's Imperial flag, the one they flew in WW1.

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Scottish Independence

I mus give a talk to the local historical society in September about the inter-relation between English and Scottish history. What I see is that events in one country influenced what happened in the other. The best example is the way in which James VI became James I of Britain,
but there are many other examples. In fact, central Scotland has always had more in common with northern England's coal mines and shipyards, than with the Highlands. The romantics who believe in a kind of Walter Scott myth would disagree but Bonnie Prince Charlie and Scott's hero, Alan Breck Stewart, had no wish to free Scotland, what they wanted was to have Charlie's father on the throne in Westminster and unite the two kingdoms, under him. I'll get round to the Act of Union another time.

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Bible Spin-offs

I'm really sorry the first time I heard the old testament stories was from a volunteer Sunday School teacher. Now that I write stories myself I wish I had read them written by Stephen King, Bernard Cornwell, or J.K.Rowling. I know Joseph was turned into a musical but we all knew what happened next. The suspense that one of those novelists could have created when Joseph was sold to the caravan, or when he turned down Potiphar's wife, in the hands of an accomplished novelist would be intense. For that reason, I often turn to the Old Testament for ideas. I'm rarely disappointed; there are so many sub-plots just waiting to be explored - like how did the butler tell Pharaoh he knew of a dream analyst?  You don't just go up to the guy and say, 'Hey, Jimmy, I ken somb'dy that can explain all that nonsense. You shouldna eat cheese before ye go to bed.'

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