Back to the future
I should really be doing more about 1820 but I’m going to take a breather and think about the next project. I enjoy the village stories in Oakhaven and Cairndhu but need to do a rewrite to get them to flow more easily. I want to do them in short story form so that people can read them on the way to work or listen to them in the car. Something that a retired person can read for half an hour just before putting the light out. I’m drawn to the idea because I so enjoyed the Para Handy stories of Neil Munro. You get to know the characters and enjoy haf an hour in their company. I think I can do the same with Broon and Jinks and Miss Kirkhope, characters from Best in Show set in Cairndhu. I’ve written two but they need a bot of work.
What has caused this turn of thought is this latest set of riots and demonstrations which will end up like the 1820 insurrection with a clamp down by those entrusted with keeping the peace. For some reason people are reluctant to accept that the police are a mixture of ordinary people like the rest of us, some lazy and some over zealous but all human and likely to make mistakes. It’s the same with doctors, they’ve read more pages of the medical journal than the rest of us but the journal deals with a kind of average metabolism and none of us is ‘average’ and might not be in the journal at all. It’s this need to find a culprit that is frustrating – I am perfect so it must be someone else’s fault is the rule. One of the things I enjoy about being a story teller is that it’s always the bad guys fault and I can make sure the goodies win.
In case you don’t know, the picture is a recent on of a member of the Dalton Gang with his mask on.