Background And Plot Synopsis

I was born in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in February 1956. I grew up there and when I went to Aberdeen University in 1974 I had only ever been off the island a handful of times.

The outsider's view of the Outer Hebrides is of a windswept rock in the middle of nowhere. It's a view only held by people that have never been there. Stornoway was a fabulous place to spend one's early years, on so many different levels.

Kids were given incredible freedom when I was young. There were no bogey men for parents to fear, 1960's traffic was relatively light, and there was no end of outdoor entertainment on offer. Mostly football, of course, but so much more besides. The Castle Grounds in Stornoway was and remains my favourite place in all the world. Very little can compare with the view from Gallows Hill on a clear sunny day at any time of the year, and the walk to the hill and back. We used to play all day in the best natural adventure playground I have ever seen.

The Castle Grounds is also where my spiritual home, Stornoway Golf Club, is to be found. I have always aspired to return there while I still have some decent golf left in my aging bones. My Uncle Billy (the late W P McKenzie, former head of the Western Isles Dental Service) bought me junior membership of the golf club as an eighth birthday present for the princely sum of one guinea. Every year, Uncle Billy paid my subs. Until, when I was eleven or twelve, the junior subs went up to TWO guineas. 100% inflation! What would I do? Uncle Billy could never afford that! But he did, and continued to do every year until I graduated into the ranks of the seniors. He started me down a golfing route that has given me immense pleasure over the years. I will always be grateful for that eighth birthday present. I've won world powerlifting titles and broken world records, but in sporting terms nothing I ever do will compare to July 1991, when I won the Western Isles Open title for the second time. When, for one week in my life, golf seemed an easy game.

The camaraderie in Stornoway Golf Club is still great, but my memories of the 60s and 70s are of fantastic, larger than life characters, a wonderful collection of people that I was privileged to be a part of. Several of the characters in the book will be loosely based on them. Maybe it was just looking at the world through youngster's eyes, but I think not. There was a generosity of spirit there and then that set my compass for later life.

Away from the Castle Grounds, Lewis boasts some of the best beaches in the world. I've lazed on the sand at South Beach, Miami; on the Adriatic coast in Pescara; on the edge of the South China Sea on Tioman Island; in St Tropez and in the Vendee; to mention but a few. But I can think of ten beaches in Lewis alone that put them all to shame. And if you drive for a couple of hours south from Stornoway to the west coast of Harris, you'll find beaches even better than Lewis can offer. No beach I have ever seen comes even close to the splendour of Horgabost in Harris. There you sit and look over to the island of Taransay, where the BBC filmed the early reality programme "Castaway" a few years ago. It's one of life's ironies that the best beaches in the world are to be found in a climate where they can be fully enjoyed for maybe 20 days a year. And then, only if you can pluck up the courage to immerse yourself in water far colder than it has any right to be on a sunny summer's day.

Add some of the best sea angling and trout and salmon fishing in the world, a tennis club that cost kids 7 shillings and 6 pence a year to belong to, parks every few hundred yards, and a youth centre par extraordinaire into the mix. Not forgetting a summer football league, a winter five-a-side league at the Gaydon Hanger at the airport (with free buses there and back). Stornoway in the 60s and 70s was just a fantastic place for a young lad to grow up.

And last but not least, The Nicolson Institute School. That "little rock in the middle of nowhere" happened to boast one of the best schools in Scotland, a hotbed of not just academic excellence but also of personal development in the widest possible sense. I tried my hand at just about every sport known to man. I flourished in the debating society under magnificent and inspirational teachers who freely gave up their own time. I was in the school orchestra, playing castinets for three nights in Carmina Burana. Everyone who wanted to be in it got in. No one was turned away, and a magnificent Head of Music called Bob Scott put in months of work to make us gel into something magical. I was the eponymous "Campbell of Kilmore" at the drama festival, and an extra in "The Cheviot, The Stag, And The Black, Black Oil". And the school's gyms and assembly hall were a fulcrum of local community activity, and a place to play five a side football years before municipal sports centre saw the light of day.

When I say the Nicolson was one of the best schools in Scotland, that's not just rose-tinted memories. The school sent a higher percentage of sixth year pupils to university and college than any other school in Scotland. Ah, yes, you say, but that's easily achieved in a small school. Well maybe it is, but the Nicolson had a school roll of over 1200 when I was there.

We all went off to university in September 1974. Most of us planned to get a good degree and then come back home. But almost none of us did. And that, in a nutshell, is what has prompted the book. Successive governments for as long as I remember promised to do much for the islands, but none ever did. There were no votes in it.

Looking back, I can appreciate now that when parents stood at the quayside waving us off, they were actually saying goodbye to their children for ever. For the next three or four years, we'd go away for ten weeks and come back for four (twelve in the summer), but when we graduated as engineers, lawyers, doctors, architects, accountants, scientists, mathematicians, computer designers, specialist managers and the like, there were very few jobs for graduates on the island apart from a few teaching posts and and the occasional job with the local council.

I got my first job in 1980 with a view to getting a couple of years experience under my belt before coming home. 28 years later and I still ain't made it back. My father died on 2nd January 2002. I probably saw him for an average of two weeks a year over the last twenty years of his life. And most of these two week chunks were spent taking the kids out for the day or on the golf course as he tended his beloved potatoes and pottered around the croft. So call it a couple of hours a day for two weeks once a year... That's what the parents saw as they waved us off on the boat, but what we bright young things just couldn't see.

And that's what started me off on this flight of fancy. What if there was something for islanders to come back to? Graduates and older ones like me. What could stop the progressive population decline and reinvigorate the islands? Not apply a sticking plaster to a bullet wound and create five jobs here and ten jobs there, all on the minimum wage, but something meaningful, far-reaching and radical.

And the answer was to declare independence! The Hebrides are further from the Scottish mainland than Dover is from Calais. London is nearer to Paris, Brussels and Berlin than it is to Stornoway. Hebrideans have as little in common with the new mandarins in Edinburgh as they have with the ones in London. There are independent states with smaller land masses than the Hebrides; others with smaller populations. The Hebrides has its own language, culture and traditions. In the 1960s, Lewis was a self sufficient island. You bought local meat from a local butcher. Your milk was delivered each day by one of the local dairies. You bought locally grown vegetables if you didn't grow your own. Now its food comes over on the ferry and you buy meat wrapped in sellaphane from the Co-op fridge rather than from the local butcher. And if bad weather prevents the ferry from sailing, panic sets in. Even the local paper is now printed on the mainland and comes over on the ferry. Petrol is inordinately expensive.

But if the Hebrides was independent, self-sufficient, with a low basic tax rate and the benefit of oil revenues from its west coast, everything would be different...

I want the book (and the film) to be simultaneously whimsical - perhaps a 21st Century take on the Ealing Comedies "Whisky Galore" and "Passport To Pimlico" - and a serious exploration of depopulation and of the political processes involved in going through the independence process. I'll be looking for parallels from the Balkans, Rhodesia, and various Carribean states.

I don't want to reveal the final chapter twist until I write it, but will of course happily discuss it with any publisher or producer interested in my work. I won't be writing the final chapter on the blog. That's a Word document!

These are among the themes that the book will explore.

I also intend the book (and hopefully the film) to be a travelogue, a showcase for the beauty of the islands, to dispel the "rock in the middle of nowhere" myth once and for all.

So if anyone has stumbled across this, I hope you enjoy it. Just bear in mind you're looking at a work in progress - as much a hotch potch of ideas that the finished article. And if you want to leave any comments or suggest ideas for the book, I'll be delighted to receive them.

I'll be disappointed not to write at least 1500 words a week - and hopefully quite a bit more, so why not drop in once a week and keep tabs on my progress?