• I’ve been in Scotland the last few days, at the Wigtown Book Festival in Galloway. Where’s Galloway? That’s what I wondered. It’s in the last remaining corner of Scotland that I’ve never been to before – bottom left, with views across to Ireland from Stranraer, whose Primary School I visited on Monday afternoon.

    I arrived on Saturday, flying to Glasgow and driving down in a hire car. I realised that I didn’t have a map and had put my faith entirely in the SatNav. I stopped in Girvan to check I was doing okay and bought an ice cream from Bob Bordone, a third generation italian ice cream maker.

    He told me that the great big rock out there in the sea was Ailsa Craig, part inspiration for my Craig M’nure stories! I almost felt at home eating my 99 on the beach staring out at the misty monolith.

    Wigtown is quite grand, as it used to be the county town of Wigtownshire. It is now a booktown like Hay-on-Wye. It was a wonderfully friendly set up and I met up with John Fardell and made new friends at a late night supper in the pub.

    Monday Morning I visited St Ninian’s Primary and spoke to about 15 children who make up KS1. We spent sometime coming up with an hilarious story about the tooth monsters who torture you with toothbrushes and drills if your teeth fall out with holes in them. This was one story, we decided, that it was not a cop out to have the hero wake up in the morning and find it was bad dream after all.

    In the afternoon, I visited Castle Kennedy, where I nearly tripped over a Red Squirrel. It waited while I got my camera and posed for me, then it let me take a profile shot before he skittered off into the woods again. They are totally enchanting creatures. The castle benefits from the warm air of the gulf stream, so the walled garden is an impossibly romantic tangle of herbaceous borders, still flowering away in late September.

    Tuesday morning I drove to Carsphairn in the middle of Galloway’s nowhere, and had a lovely time at the school that has only 13 pupils!

    I worked out that I just had time to visit Culzean castle on the way back to the airport. What a wonderfully romantic place, perched up on the rocks staring out at Arran.

  • We are so used to using computers and software now that incremental updates pass us by. I use a mac, so sorry if you are one of those windows users. I’ve just noticed a search box marked search history on the bottom right hand side of my Safari window. (Safari is my web browser)

    I typed in something I’d been looking up recently and it instantly brought up a coverflow selection of the websites I’ve visited recently that are related to the subject. Amazing!

    Not just a list, but good sized images of the sites. Not just saved images, but live connections to the sites so as I flick though them I can see if they’ve been updated. For a visual person like myself, this is so much better than drilling down through a history of URLs, generally broken down into days and weeks. I can never quite remember when I last visited a site.

    How many other brilliant innovations are there on my machine, that I will only find by accident? I suppose it was mentioned in a read me document or a welcome to the new look Safari video somewhere, but who has time to go through all those?

  • How does he do that?
    How does he do that?
    I’ve always wondered how puffins sort the fish they catch so that they stick out of the sides of their beaks in that nice, orderly way.

    I just heard a bit of kerfuffling on the roof of my studio. This is usually either cats, squirrels or blackbirds looking for grubs in the leaf litter. A minute later I was distracted by a movement outside my window. A squirrel clung to the trunk of the willow tree, that is about twenty five feet away. It was flicking it’s tail as if to get my attention. Then I saw it was carrying two apples in its mouth, arranged beautifully, like a puffin arranges its fish.

    I scrabbled around, looking for my camera, telling it to stay still for just one more moment. The camera does not zoom that far, but by cropping and enlarging in photoshop, you can see what he was up to. Once I’d got the shot, he shook his tail and disappeared.

    The birds have been acting strangely this morning too. Flitting around the pond in an agitated state – mostly tits and dunnocks that have been invisible all summer. It must be the equinox – a message has been triggered in their brains. “Get ready for winter!”