My Other Half's Art 4: More Painting

One of the good things about having a husband who is an artist, is that you can sometimes use the images he paints as book covers. Village in Winter made a lovely cover picture for my novel Ice Dancing, which was as much about the joys and peculiarities of village life, as it was about the very grown up love story of the two main characters. 

Village in Winter

Village Gala Day

I think some of Alan's most engaging images are those that involve 'busy' scenes with lots of figures, pictures that tell a story without being just an illustration of something static. They're full of life, colour and movement and I love them. Certainly these are the ones that almost always find a buyer. Lots of people seem to like Outsider Art except the galleries who turn their exclusive noses up at it. 

I think my favourite of all, though, is the one called Ae Spring, in which Tam o' Shanter, is only just managing to escape from the clutches of Cutty Sark, showing her bum in her short shift, with Meg the Mare as well as Tam himself, looking around in horror. And the eyes under the bridge.And the small devil sitting in the tree. It's a wonderful picture and although the original has long been sold, we still have prints. 

Ae Spring

                                 

Bonspiel

 Do have a look at our Etsy Store, the 200 Year Old House, and at Alan's website. 

Meanwhile, remember this post from September?  Artwork Free to a Good Home? Well, time is marching on. It takes up so much space. And he means it. If somebody doesn't come along and take it away very soon, he really will chop it up and put it in the chimenea. But if you do want it, you're going to have to come and pick it up. Preferably for a church or some other religious foundation. 

Ice Dancing - My Scottish Village Novel (with a bit of Ice Hockey thrown in for good measure!)

 

Cover image by Alan Lees

This week, my slightly quirky love story, Ice Dancing, is being serialised in the Dundee Courier. It seems appropriate for that newspaper, since not only is Ice Dancing set in and around a small rural Scottish village - and Dundee has a rural hinterland - but a theme of Ice Hockey, players and fans, runs through the novel and Dundee is a good hockey town. 

All the same, you don't have to know anything about the sport to enjoy it, because the novel's narrator, farmer's wife, Helen, knows nothing at all about it either, till she meets Joe, a visiting Canadian Ice Hockey player. Then she finds out all about it.

The book was a labour of love for me. I never expected it to be particularly successful. I just wanted to write it (probably the best of all reasons for writing anything) but to my surprise, I find that people who find it and read it seem to love it too. I suspect it doesn't have much to do with the hockey. It has more to do with what turned out to be a fairly sharp-eyed but loving observation of the realities of village life. After all, and with occasional spells elsewhere, I've lived in a rural Scottish village for some 40 years. And, as one lovely reviewer pointed out, it's about the realities of love and desire at first sight as well. 

The reason for the title, which gives me no end of trouble when people think it's a how-to manual, will become very clear if you read the novel! 

You can download it as an eBook here and as a paperback here. If you're reading this in the USA you should be able to find it on Amazon there as well.

Xenophobia, Bad Behaviour and the Blame Game

I don't normally blog about politics, even though I have strong opinions (don't we all?) but sometimes politics and events in your home country overlap with the kind of character analysis you find yourself doing all the time as a writer and sometimes you just have to say something.

Way back in 1983, the Russians were accused of shooting down a passenger airliner, with great loss of life. It was one of those terrible incidents that could be attributed to a horrific set of coincidences - always much more likely to occur at times of international tension. The aircraft had strayed off course, and the Russian fighter planes claimed that they couldn't identify it as a civilian aircraft. Disaster ensued.

Our tabloids, of course, had a field day. I had only moved to this village some three years previously. And I had an Eastern European surname. It's my dad's name and I'm proud of it, so I always tended to use it professionally, even after I got married. But of course all Eastern European names sound the same to many people, and - going about my business on the quiet street where I live - I found myself the target for name calling and jeering from a group of young lads.

My husband happened to know and like the father of the chief culprits. He had a quiet word and it all stopped, as if by magic. And that was that.

The interesting thing though, is that those 'culprits' were not the chief culprits at all. They were invariably the fall guys. They are all grown up now, and they never really got up to any more than minor mischief. This is still a rural area, where farmers don't stand for any nonsense and everyone knows their neighbours. But the more I kept an eye on the dynamics of that group of lads, back then, the more obvious it became that the real villain, in a small way, was the neat, clever, good-looking, middle class boy whom everyone praised as being 'such a nice boy'. He would set up situations but when retribution struck, he was nowhere to be seen.

One example will suffice. From a distance, I saw him kick a football at a martin's nest, on the eaves of one of the old cottages, deliberately dislodging it and bringing it down into the street. A moment or two later, an irate householder emerged, to find the usual suspects, still hanging about looking guilty, while the real culprit had - as if by magic - melted into the scenery. He always contrived to do it, and for all I know, he may be doing it still.

He may have gone into politics, where he is still destroying lives, and then melting into the scenery, leaving those less cunning to take the blame.