My brief for this blog was to make it spooky - it being nearly Halloween. I then trawled the internet for the best historical spooky tv series and found one - The Living and the Dead - which really piqued my interest. The main character, played by Colin Morgan of Merlin fame, is a farmer who is driven to explore what happens after death. It was made for the BBC in 2016. Unfortunately, for some reason I have not been able to fathom, it is not available on iPlayer. So, there went that idea. That left me back at square one, with the Historical and Spooky guidelines not really helping. None of the others caught my interest quite enough. Perhaps, after I'd found The Living and the Dead , I didn't really feel like anything else was going to be as good. So Virginia suggested Ghosts . Ghosts ? Spooky - of course. Historical - not really! But she pointed out that there is a multi-timeline which happens in the series, as we continue to discover more and more about the individual ghosts...
What a weekend it has been! The 1st John o' Groats Book Festival has been in the pipeline for a long time, and it certainly lived up to expectations. It started with a bang on Friday. A cartographer was launching her new set of Northern Scotland maps. Sadly, I was at work during this event but I've heard great things about it from people who were there. The cartographer's name is Val Fry and the publisher is Nicolson. The first event I could attend was on the Friday evening when the authors were introduced, including 8 fabulous local authors who each had a 10 minute slot. It was great to see one of the organisers, Ian Leith , start the evening by showing his books. The next author was Virginia Crow, published by Crowvus, who started her talk by showing the Day's Dying Glory book trailer which had people sitting on the edge of their seats. Virginia Crow, author of Day's Dying Glory It was super to hear so many local authors talk about their books, an...