My memory is that October is cold in Sutherland in the Highlands of Scotland. Come to think of it, my memory is that June can be cold too.
Nature might well abhor a vacuum, but whether anything can convincingly fill the one left by the Kirk’s role in Scottish life remains to be seen
As a child, I was taken there a few times in half-terms by my Grandmother, to go and look at faded headstones with my surname on them. I suppose she thought it important to show me my windswept origins. Pictures show a little boy and a formidable woman in closely wrapped raincoats standing by grey stone and mossy clad churches. It all felt like a very alien aesthetic to the Romney Marsh where I had grown up and so I often struggled to describe it all in the holiday diaries which school made us keep. As others wrote of trips to Disneyworld or the beaches of Europe, I struggled to find similes for ‘rain’.
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