The Sir Duncan Rice Library appears as an intrusion in the landscape, or at least as an intrusion on my imagining of what the landscape of Old Aberdeen is meant to be: all ornate medieval monuments with parapets and belfries and buttresses carved from granite. Eight storeys high, the building sits on its own, on the western edge of King’s College, and appears to be constructed entirely of glass.
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‘The longest road out is the shortest road home.’ The message came to me in a fortune cookie last July, and though I did not really grasp its meaning, I pinned it to the wall next to my front door, …
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In early 2016 I went to Bali for a friend’s 40th birthday. I was to meet a group of friends from all over the world for a week of sun, sea, seafood and Bintang. I went over early, renting an …
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The Ghost at the Wedding, Shirley Walker’s 2010 memoir of her mother-in-law Jessie, explores the devastating impact the First and Second World Wars had on the soldiers themselves, as well as the women left at home. She does so with …
Read more →When I was seven or eight years old, sometime between reading Little Women and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I began writing little books, culminating in the seven-chapter opus Amabel …
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