This week, we finally managed to install our new (not new ) item of furniture - a mid-18th Century grandfather clock. It's not bright and shiny like more modern ones, but a dark oak with a warm patina which the beeswax polish is drawing out. In order to set it up, we had to do a certain amount of research - how to hang the pendulum, where the weight went on the endless chain - and it got me thinking... where and when did certain divisions of time come from? The time periods which I have written either had household clocks or didn't, I have not written novels from the time of their invention. Clocks have been around for a long time, and the obsession with measuring time in an ordered fashion dates back to at least the ancient Sumerians. It was they who established a circular reading of time and, I imagine, the sixty seconds/minutes came about as much because it was an easy way to divide a circle as anything else. But it wasn't until much later that the precision of seconds ...
There’s nothing like a global pandemic to make you appreciate the life you had before. Without the freedom to roam around Scotland, my debut book would never have happened. And I’m grateful to this day that it was done and dusted before Covid struck. The fact I’ve been unable to travel the country again to launch Craggy the Coo Wants a Place to Call Home is a trifling inconvenience in the great scheme of what we’ve all endured over the past 13 months or so. I’ve been asked how I picked the places that Craggy travels to in the course of his journey. If I’m honest, they really picked themselves, based on where I happened to be or personally chose to visit in the 18 months or so it took me to put the book together. So let’s start at the start. The first picture I ever took of Craggy on location was in the village of Rockcliffe, Dumfries and Galloway in January 2018. That stretch of the Solway coastline brings back magical memories from my childhood when, to quote one of my favourite autho...