We return from twenty-eight days alone in our Scottish retreat - to self-isolation in town

View of Ben Resipol, Scottish Highlands

We are back from our month-long creative retreat in the Highlands. Twenty-seven rainy days, and one snowy one. No excuse for not writing. 

I’ve been quiet for some time. I had to be. Uppermost in my mind these past six months has been the continuing ugliness surrounding Sherlock The Musical. I am still not at liberty to go into detail. Suffice it to say that the lawyers are on the case. One day I will tell my version – although who will be around to hear it remains a matter for conjecture.

Okay, self-isolation. We are among the fortunate ones. One, we have each other. Two, our house is large enough for us to avoid each other when we need to. Three, I have work on my desk – one or two paying propositions, a new novel (on which more later), and news that the book I co-wrote with Robert Stone (Chasing Black Gold) is being looked at yet more closely by movie producers.

We only set this garden out last March; it is slowly bedding in.

How else are we lucky? Well, we have a garden (above). We live in an area with few recorded cases of coronavirus so far. And we can still walk, through mature woodland and over rough pasture, to our allotment (below), where we plan the year’s fruit and vegetables.

Another young garden. All rubbish and half bricks when  we took it over, but the fruit bushes (protected by cardboard) are getting established and the lower half is thoroughly manured.

Shopping isn’t as easy as it was. Bread flour – I have been baking my own since 1971 with hardly a break – is hard to find. However, A. came home the other day with a bag of pasta flour and reminded me that we had a hand-cranked machine in the cupboard. Indeed we had. It had been there for several years, unused. So out it came.

Linguine - in case it's not immediately apparent!

I won’t say that the result filled me with a desire to make all our own spaghetti and lasagne henceforth, but it was encouraging. We’ll try again.

In a few days’ I shall talk about the new novel, which announced itself to me while we were in our Scottish retreat. I came home with 20,000 words, very wet boots and a lot of questions.

A Creative Retreat in Scotland

We arrived in the Highlands in the most glorious weather. When you’re driving towards a remote cottage with no electricity in the middle of winter, it helps. 

If you wait long enough - or you're lucky - you will get moments like this

The first job, after we’ve checked that the water (it comes direct from the stream) hasn’t frozen up, is always to get the coal fire going. It’s so cheering to look up and see a smoking chimney.
 

An uplifting sight

 

This year there were no mice in residence, so we were very soon settled. Only one problem for me: when I opened my laptop (it runs from a small solar panel, via a car battery) I discovered that I hadn’t got the files I thought I had and was therefore unable to do the writing I had planned.

Well, it turned out to be a blessing. Over the last fifty years I have entertained (or bored) any number of people with stories about my time as a kid from a council estate (public housing, if you’re American) on a scholarship at a public (i.e., private and posh) school. I have written many and many an opening passage to a book on the subject, but all of them degenerated into a rant about privilege, disaffection and social displacement. Once I’d got over the shock of seeing a blank space where the transferred files ought to have been it seemed as if a door had opened up. So much so that I had to talk a walk up a mountain and think about it.

 

It's hard not to be contemplative when you are confronted with a view like this

Over the next weeks I wrote a thousand words a day about my experiences at boarding school. I didn’t rant, I didn’t beat my breast and threaten to bring down a plague of boils on the teachers and prefects who made life so unpleasant back then. Instead I created a fictional lead character, wrote about him in the third person, and tried to see things through his eyes. I developed a supporting cast of characters - good guys and bad - and considered all the many things – good and bad – that I might do to them over the course of 300 pages. Such fun, even to think about it! I wove in as many references as I could to the times they lived in, because I think they were momentous. Thinking about the period 1961-3, I was able to reference: the assassination of Kennedy; the coldest winter in 300 years; the beginning of the British satire boom and the disintegration of the Conservative government; the explosion of media activity that heralded the arrival of the Beatles; the Great Train Robbery, the Cuban Missile Crisis; the shock of Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering space flight; the thrilling exposures of the Profumo scandal (who had ever imagined that posh people were so lascivious?) and the startling impact of the first Doctor Who episode on BBC TV.

I don’t know what it’ll come to, but I am enjoying it. More than that, I feel relieved of a burden. I feel liberated. I have rarely written fiction – just two novels, a few stories and that’s about it – but I am warming to the idea.

There was a winter flowering cherry outside, struggling to bloom. We did a little pruning... and brought a few stems inside