It’s always a good thing when looking back
to remember the days and weeks and months where life was wonderful and well
worth living. There have been some black days this year, mostly to do with the
health of family members, and the stresses and strains of work, and the worry of
how to cope with everything – these I choose to say nothing more on.
I went on holiday at Easter time to Malta.
We have a timeshare there, a gift from a relative. I had always resisted going,
remembering how my parents had talked of their holidays there – it didn’t sound
like my cup of tea. In fact, I loved it. And Easter was the perfect time to go.
I had heard it could be uncomfortably hot (which is an oxymoron in my book) and that the food was pretty awful, and this was
not my experience at all. I had the best plate of calamari ever in a wonderful small
fishing village sitting in the sun, the sea almost at my feet and boats in
rainbow colours bobbing on the water. And the evenings were beautiful, watching
the sun going down golden over walls of Valetta, and drinking crisp and salty prosecco from long-stemmed glasses and feeling all the cares of work and the world slipping
away. Wonderful.
Then the start of summer found me in Rome – two holidays
abroad in the one year! I was tagging along with my wife who was there for work. I had a few days to myself wandering around the city and then a few
days doing it over with Annette. I had never been to Rome before and again it
was not somewhere on my list of places to see. Having been, I don’t know why it
wasn’t. It was amazing and high points included the cafes and everything old and seeing the Bernini sculptures
in the flesh (and that’s a reference to the skill of the artist in rendering
marble into ‘flesh’ – see ‘Pluto and Persephone’ and Pluto’s right hand
grasping the thigh of Persephone - breathtakingly beautiful! And ‘Apollo and
Daphne’ – and Daphne transforming into a tree before your very eyes… incredible, and
doubly incredible that the artist was in his early to mid twenties when he
completed these!).
In the summer I also found myself overnight in
London, doing a reading of one of my stories in the Barbican Library – yes, THE
Barbican. I was there to collect a couple of prizes for the inaugural Brittle
Star Magazine writing competition. The fiction section had been judged by David
Constantine – yes, THE David Constantine. And he judged my story to be the
winner and another of my stories to be worthy of third place. I loved doing this reading and feel it was one of my best.
Still in the summer, I also won the William
Soutar Prize and got the opportunity to do another reading, this time in a
lecture theatre in a library in Perth. Zoe Strachan was the judge of this
competition and she had some very nice things to say about my writing and the
reading was so much fun.
I was published in lots of other nice
places this year, too numerous to mention, and my writing has been muddling along. I didn’t,
however, get down to any big projects and that must be my task for
the year ahead. I still have a finished first drafted novel that needs some attention.
Annette has been busy doing units from an Open
College of the Arts degree course and she has done some pretty amazing work.
Ben, despite some health scares, is back on his feet and feeling positive about
the future. Daniel is busy working for Generator in Dundee and taking the work
very seriously. Sam has been doing some theatre work and starred as MacBeth in
an adaptation of the Shakepseare play - produced by a former pupil of mine. Sam
then did a thing on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe and some of his fellow
thespians bedded down with us for the summer. So the family are all doing well.
I am sure there have been other high points
and they will come to me as soon as I post this up. It is enough to say
that 2014 was a good enough year and 2015 is likely to be even better. Happy new year to you all.
