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I am all too rarely able to make it along to the monthly gatherings of the Highland Literary Salon, and last night was one such occasion.  It was a “slam night”, which, far from being a chance to practice ones wrestling moves as I first speculated, was in fact a chance for participants to sign up to read a five minute extract of their work.  There was a huge range of style and genres, from poetry and children’s story to crime and romance, many taken from works in progress such as novels or short stories.  I think mine was the only travelogue, knocked together hurriedly yesterday afternoon.  Here’s what I presented.

Exposure of more than a day or so to Fife can inspire a certain kind of wanderlust.

Not the kind that leaves you hankering for the open, dusty road or lush sun-kissed beaches; but rather a more basic and urgent wanderlust that compels you want to be somewhere, anywhere, that isn’t Fife.

Thus it was that my wife Nicole and I escaped from a few days’ break in Fife for a day out by ourselves in Edinburgh.

I know Edinburgh well – work takes me there frequently, too frequently.  It’s a long journey from home, so Scotland’s capital is more synonymous to me for the heavenly smell of the breweries as you approach Haymarket station, crowded trains at the end of the day, and faceless hotel rooms, than it is for its famous icons and sights.

So what to do in a city where I now have a chance to explore without deadline or work commitment, to wander, digress and absorb at will?

Recommendations from friends pile in – the Camera Obscura comes top, with rave reviews of this sort of museum of lights and illusions, the highlight seeming to be 3D projections.  “You can fold up a bit of paper,” enthuses a friend, “and see a 3D bus ride along it!”

Staff, presumably, are well-trained in administering sedatives for those patrons for whom the excitement is unbearable.

On arrival at its door we decide against Camera Obscura – anywhere just a stone’s throw from the castle and enscrummed by armies of camera-wielding tourists is almost certainly a trap; the £9.95 entry fee confirms this, despite our unspoken acceptance that we are briefly, ourselves, camera-wielding tourists.

Instead, we take a wander up Calton Hill and take in not just the views outward, across the tightly-congregated histories of the Old and slightly less old New Towns, but inward too, to the curious jumble of architecture on the top of the hill itself.

Among them stands the National Monument, one of the city’s many Victorian-era Greek-style constructs that rendered Edinburgh “the Athens of the North”.  I must remember, should I ever visit Athens, to tell the locals how reassuringly familiar I am finding “the Edinburgh of the south”.  I’m sure they’ll see the funny side – the Greeks are known for their good sense of humous.

Not much humour greeted the National Monument back in the day, however, a project which ran out of money in 1826 and stands half-finished, a supposed “national disgrace”.  I found it no disgrace, personally, as I clambered up and walked between its few dark, lofty columns.  Like with the figurative glass, I take it as half-full, half-completed, like today’s Scotland.  And in a city that hosts the over-budget upturned boat that is the Scottish Parliament building and the hauntingly barren tramlines, the term “national disgrace” needs some context.

After further wanderings, and in a choice we’d regret, we find ourselves heading underground, on one of the city’s many tours of the streets that lie beneath the Old Town, cramped and disease-ridden alleyways and tenements, long abandoned, built-upon and for a time forgotten by new, grander thoroughfares above.

What I hoped would be a gripping journey back in time and a revealing exploration of a lost city, turned out to be a brief and cheesy tour of some darkened rooms laden with electricity cables and luminous “fire exit” signs, led by a woman in a half-hearted nod to period costume with an accent that was as many miles inauthentic as the years that separated us from the era we were implored to imagine.  The depth of our descent constrasted with the lack of depth of the history.

With no freedom to wander, the rigid, forced-cheerful tour was informative only insofar as gaining the hindsight that told us it wasn’t worth it, while the entertainment came inadvertently, in the form of an earnest American woman with some sort of ghost-hunting app on her iPhone, a fluorescent green radar spinning round and round on her screen, presumably not transmitting the message, which was of course that she was a deluded nutter and should stop pretending she was some sort of hipster ghostbuster.

Emerging back into the early evening dusk and drifted back to the bus station, none the wiser about Edinburgh’s murky depths and long past, we reflected on the tour.

Perhaps those 3D buses and folded bits of paper would have been exciting after all.

Tomorrow night is my book reading and discussion in Dingwall – 7.30pm at the Greenhouse, details on the events page.  Please do come if you can, and please don’t if you can’t. It is more of an “in conversation” format than a fully author-led format, so I’m looking forward to seeing what questions are thrown at me and where the conversation ends up.

Despite this, I have half an eye on my challenging event in June in Edinburgh, details again on the events page.  I’m a little more nervous and apprehensive about this, partly due to the unusual format and also due to the hardcore adventurers I’ll be sharing a stage with.

Thirdly, and just as a wee sneak advance teaser, I have another book event coming up in August which I’m very excited about, and I’ll semaphore you in due course once details are confirmed.

I was tickled to be directed by Fraser to this competition on the Bradt website – a travel writing competition with the theme “up the creek”.

I’ve no idea if they’ve been inspired by UTCWAM but part of me is sorely tempted to enter simply by posting them a copy.

I’ll not be doing, though – I have other writing to do, and am attempting to make the most of the long Easter weekend (and next week’s royal wedding-induced holiday from work) to make some progress.  So I really shouldn’t be wasting time writing this post.

Onwards…

Until my previous post earlier today, it was three weeks since I last blogged. Perhaps a record.

Not that I have ever committed to any frequency on here, but the absence does reflect a similar lack of finger-to-keyboard when it comes to other writing, and most acutely the sequel to Up The Creek Without a Mullet which is my primary project at the moment.

For some months now I’ve been struggling with it.  Some reasons for this are due to the busyness of life of late, but others are more specific to the process – a mixture of scant notes in places (the trips I am writing about were before the book was a realistic idea), poor mental recollection, some less than exciting parts of the trip that I am struggling to make interesting while keeping authentic, and not a little general blockage in the creativity department.  All these factors combined on one particular part of the story that has led me to pretty much grind to a halt.

Not having the oomph to write has never particularly concerned me before, mind you.  I’ve always reckoned that if you can’t write, don’t – better to say nothing than to force something out that isn’t coming naturally.  If what you’re writing isn’t flowing, then go write something else.  And given time either the urgency of the deadline, the guilt of laziness (yes, it does happen) or a spark of creativity will get things going again.  It’s just a matter of time.  However, this spell of inactivity has been really quite a while, and diversionary tactics – such as picking up some other threads of travel writing I’ve been committing myself to, or putting thought into my forthcoming events – haven’t been productive.  Nor do I think I’ve had the wrong music to write to: I nearly always work well to something like the blurry, gently evocative Boards of Canada or Ulrich Schnauss, where not just tracks and albums but entire discographies merge into one hypnotic background chill.

Thankfully, though, I’ve been putting metaphorical quill to parchment a lot this past weekend, and have begun to make some real progress on the second book.  I can’t quite put my finger on what has motivated me, as I haven’t had any particular lightbulb moments or changed the approach I’ve taken.  However, there’s a chance it might be the good weather we’ve been having lately – the sort of weather it would be perfect to get out walking or cycling in, but from which I can very easily be distracted from making the most of, even by the prospect of writing. Mind you, we did get out last weekend for a lovely walk at Glenfeshie (see the photo above) – to me a previously unknown part of the world, but a place a relatively short drive from Inverness.  The joys of living in the Highlands.

Of course, I may not be fully out of the woods yet.  Perhaps in a day or two I’ll have ground to another halt.  Hopefully not, though.  It’s about momentum, I find.  Build up through the gears, build up a head of steam, and you’ll get there.

Slowly.  Perhaps.

You might remember me recently reporting that I will be presenting at a Night of Adventure – the first Scottish date in a long-running series of charity fundraisers organised by Alastair Humphreys in aid of Hope & Homes for Children.

Details are have now been confirmed, and you can find them here (and here on Facebook too if you’re that way inclined).

It’s £14 per ticket, which sounds like a lot of money, but not only is it all in aid of a fabulous cause, but you also get to be inspired by the adventure, achievement and energy of nine great hardcore marathon runners, swimmers, cyclists and explorers such as Mark Beaumont and Alastair Humphreys himself.  And then me bumbling on about mullets.

Gulp.

It’s been a busy and packed couple of days.  I got back last night from an overnight trip that saw me take in Dundee, Stirling and Cupar for work, involving seven different trains and time spent waiting on freezing platforms in illustrious highlights of the Scottish rail network such as Perth and Ladybank.

I suppose for someone privileged to travel such a lot for work, I should have more to report from my trips.  But the sad fact is that I normally have neither the time nor inclination when in work mode to do much more than go to where I need to be, do what I need to do, and then get home.  My eyes and ears are always open to fun or interesting things that surprise me along the way, but they are rare and more often tweeted than blogged.  Moreover, for reasons I’m too disinterested to identify, I’ve not been taking many photos of late, wherever I am.  Photography is one of those funny things that you really can’t push for fear of it becoming a burden of low-quality output.

Rather like writing, really.  Progress has been slow with this lately, although I don’t worry too much – urgency and panic over looming deadlines has always been my biggest motivator. Attempts to analyse and resolve any sluggishness are rarely reinforced by any pressing imperative and are thus pointless.

If that all sounds somewhat morose and downbeat, then perhaps it’s a reflection that I am slightly grinding to a halt after a busy spell, and it’s good news therefore that we are off on holiday tomorrow for a week and a bit to the Western Isles.  I will most definitely take photos.

And to provide some final cheer, here’s something truly outstanding to read: spoof reviews of Mr Men books on Amazon by a reader who treats the stories as insightful philosophical metaphors.  Take Mr Messy, for instance, where the review begins with the words:

If ’1984′ or ‘The Trial’ had been a children’s book, Mr Messy would be it. No literary character has ever been so fully and categorically obliterated by the forces of social control. Hargreaves may well pay homage to Kafka and Orwell in this work, but he also goes beyond them.

…and another review presents the following analysis:

Mr Uppity is no Marxian analysis, no Leninist prescription for class action. As always, Hargreaves’ inherent and essential conservatism comes to bear. His critique of the bourgeoisie comes not from the proletariat but from the feudal aristocracy. It is the authority of a king that places limits upon Mr Uppity’s excesses, as his usurpation and arbitrary exercise of power has violated ‘the natural order of things’. Hence the protection the masses are dealt in response to this transgression is paternal, and they receive it as subjects not radical agents of change.

Bet you never considered these dimensions to the stories when reading them as a three year old.  I certainly didn’t.

Things have been quiet for me on the events front lately, but two forthcoming talks about all things “mullet” are now confirmed and I’m excited to be able to tell you all about them.

Firstly, Sandstone Press, my publishers, have commenced a series of monthly events featuring their books, and I will be doing one on Thursday 5 May at 7.30pm at The Greenhouse, in Dingwall.  Yes, that’s the date of the Scottish Parliament elections, but with any luck you’ll have voted by then and will be able to make it along.  In fact, it’ll be finished in time for you to vote afterwards if you like (assuming your polling station isn’t miles away).

Anyway, enough mention of politics, because the event will of course be nothing to do with the elections.  I’ll be doing a few readings from Up The Creek Without a Mullet, answering questions (there’ll be an “in conversation” format) and there’ll be copies for sale and even some refreshments, you lucky people.  But just in case you’ve been to one of my past events, don’t worry – it won’t be a simple repetition of what you’ve seen before.  I’m delighted to say that among a couple of other extra fun things we’ll be doing, I’ll be reading some “hot off the press” extracts from the intended sequel, an exclusive preview if you like, which should hopefully give you a bit of a flavour of what will be coming next.

The second event will be in Edinburgh on Monday 13 June (time and venue to be confirmed), and is organised by the author and adventurer Alastair Humphreys.  Besides doing all sorts of interesting and exciting things, Alastair runs fundraising events for Hope and Homes for Children featuring other adventurers doing talks on their travels.

But they are talks with a difference: each speaker presents twenty slides, each automatically progressing after twenty seconds – a method apparently called Pecha Kucha and originating in Japan.  This is the first time that Alastair has brought the format to Scotland (though you can read about others here), and other speakers will include round-the-world cyclist Mark Beaumont, so I shall be in intimidatingly prestigious company.  While twenty slides for twenty seconds sounds on the face of it like a simple concept, it will be an incredibly difficult 400 seconds to deliver well.  It should be a real challenge but it will be a privilege to help raise money for such an excellent cause (and because it’s for charity, tickets will cost.  I’ll provide details on that once I know).

Please do come along if you’re able, or spread the word to those you think might be interested.  I’ve created an event for the Dingwall bash on Facebook here, will do one for the second event once I have the confirmed details, and of course have updated this website’s events page.

If you survived to the end of Up The Creek Without a Mullet, you might recall mention (on p206) of the Adelaide-based amateur touch rugby team The Mullets, whose member Natalie wrote to me when my 2005 trip to hunt Australian mullets made a few headlines.  She told me about some of the fun quirks of the team including their annual award of The Golden Mullet.

Natalie emailed the other day to report that, sadly, The Mullets are no more, but she was excited to read that the team had been enshrined in history (or at least, mentioned in my book).

Sadly I’ll never be able to fulfil my invitation to go and see them play.

I wonder if this was how people felt when Third Lanark hit the dust?

I reported the other day that the Google Checkout function through which you could buy signed copies of Up The Creek Without a Mullet was down.

Well, it’s working again!  Thanks to Matt, who built this website, a wee tinker under the bonnet has sorted it.

There shouldn’t be any problems now, so if any other gremlins appear then drop me a line.  Remember, you can order a copy from anywhere in the world, with simply either your credit/debit card or a Google Checkout account.  Just click here to buy.

Someone who tried to buy a signed copy of my book online via the link I posted some time ago has just got in touch to say there’s an error, to do with currencies. Nothing’s gone badly wrong and nobody’s lost any money, but there was a problem in the… well, I don’t really understand. I’ve emailed Google Checkout to try to get to the bottom of it, and hopefully there’ll be a solution soon. In the meantime I’ve removed the link from my front page.

If you really want a signed copy in the meantime, drop me an email and we’ll try to sort something out.

Anyone else faced this problem? Do please let me know if you have. Apologies all round.