Le Grand Meaulnes: by Alain-Fournier It was thinking about Le Grand Meaulnes that first led me to the idea of Common Ground. I’d read it in my early 20s, about the same age at which Alain-Fournier had written it just before the First World War. A feeling for the book had then lingered in my […]
Stories
Cromarty and the Black Isle
Hugh Miller’s voices
It is 1969. I’m about seven years old. I am sitting in my parents’ bedroom on the ottoman at the end of their bed, upstairs in our house in St Valery Avenue in Inverness. We live in the capital of the Highlands, I know, because my mother told me. My mother says we are descended […]
Cromarty
Cromarty
Kidnapped:
Stevenson, the Highlands and a story under every stone
The first edition of Kidnapped sits on my desk. It’s slightly shabby now, but when it was published in 1886, its dark green cloth cover and gold lettering would have glowed with the promise of what lay inside. The first surprise would have been its folding map, titled: SKETCH of the CRUISE of the BRIG […]
Edinburgh
Edinburgh
Wet Sand and Gasoline
Beachcombing in Fife with John Burnside
On a bright midwinter morning, the Fife coast gleams. Calling this corner of the ancient kingdom “a fringe of gold on a beggar’s mantle”,1 James II of Scotland clearly knew his real estate. The “East Neuk” is a beautiful sleeve of farmland – hemmed to the south by the Firth of Forth – with fishing […]
Fife
Fife
The Rules of Modernity
Glasgow, Stuart Murdoch and me
Books were never my friends. Records were. Are. Not actual records, you understand; not big vinyl things. I’ve never had that nostalgia for the physical – I’m a child of Thatcher, I can’t remember an industry that made things, so I don’t need to have them in my hands. Much better, in the case of […]
Glasgow
Glasgow
I’m Grim Up North
Lying reminiscences with Keith Waterhouse’s Billy Liar
You know when people say it’s grim up north? They’re right. My advice to anxious urbanites thinking of relocation is think carefully. What do you value? Where will you find it? My problem is the people – tattooed, moustachioed nosebiters choking the Saturday streets and drinking themselves rabid on two for the price of one […]
Mansfield
Mansfield
How to Find Your Voice in Burnley
Raising a glass to Paul Abbott
[Ext. Burnley Town Centre. Day] A rusty white Cortina moves slowly out of town, steering through police horses and football fans heading to Turf Moor for the match. Inside the car, the DRIVER, a tired-looking middle-aged Asian man, and his passenger, an inebriated younger man – a STRANGER to the area – are thrown around […]
Burnley
Burnley
Your Time Starts Now:
Questioning what’s real in David Lodge’s Birmingham
QUESTION 3.b): “Rummidge is not Birmingham, though it owes something to popular prejudices about that city”,1 David Lodge. Discuss. Seven years ago, almost to the day. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the sun was just poking its head out over the green campus quadrangle. Inside Avanti, the half-empty campus diner, two people […]
Birmingham
Birmingham
Ecstatic Boredom
Will Self and the Great British Motorway (with special reference to the M40)
“Once you’ve acquired the habit of motorway driving, it’s damned hard to kick it. You may set out on com-pletely innocuous excursions, fully intending to take the scenic route, but yet again the slip-road will suck you in, a lobster-pot ingress to the virtual reality of motorway driving.”1 Slip road In 1996, Will Self described […]
Thame
Thame
The Essex Factor
Rocking in Colchester with Giles Smith
“Once upon a time, I don’t remember when. Caught in the vacuum between now and then. Out on the road, phantom light lights to the East. The forgotten land where no roads lead. This is the Land That Time Forgot. This is the Land That Time Forgot. Call it Nowhere.” (Keith Godman, “The Land That […]
Colchester
Colchester