I'm quite confident that, if I start this blog with "remember the scythe?", most people reading it are going to immediately know where I'm pointing you to! That's right: Poldark. Now, I know that the series with Aidan Turner and his famous scythe was actually a remake of an earlier programme, but let's just focus on this more recent iteration of Winston Graham's novels about the eponymous Cornish hero. One of the things which is so wonderful about Poldark as a series - not only onscreen but even more so in the novels - is that it covers such a vast period of time. Because of the time in which it is set, there are huge local and global changes taking place around the characters and, when you have been invested in them for so long, you can really experience the upheaval alongside them. This is something I attempted with (what I hope) was a reasonable degree of success in my Early Story of the Rite trilogy. If it ever actually appears on bookshelves, it won...
I was warned ahead of this week that the theme of one of my blog posts would be “Share Your Shelf”. And, if I’m honest, I’ve been putting this one off because it was always destined to out me as a nerd of the highest (or should that be lowest?) order. My bedroom shelf contains very little in the way of fiction. It is largely stocked with books that have gathered more dust than an Egyptian mummy, and might one day find their way into a Museum of Nerdery. Specifically, my shelf runneth over with titles relating to either Scottish history and geography, or to seabirds. In some cases, my books are dedicated specifically to Scottish seabirds. As a boy, I was obsessed with how many pairs of Manx shearwater bred on the Isle of Rum, or how many gannets occupied the Bass Rock as opposed to St Kilda or Ailsa Craig. I was consumed by a need to visit all of the major seabird colonies around our shores. Ailsa Craig regrettably remains on my bucket list, but if you haven’t set foot on Hirta or the B...