So you want John Wayne

I’ve been belabouring Bonnie Prince Charlie and it’s taking me away from my objective of sea stories, so I need to stop. Just one last comment. Someone asked me if I could do a John Wayne set in the highlands and, after a bit of thought, I said ‘Of course, we could do The Searchers with a Lowland girl abducted by the McDonalds and being searched for in Glen Coe. Or we could do the rustlers, the Dalton gang would do, coming down from Robber’s roost to steal cattle. It would have the advantage of a language problem as Wayne would be a Lowlander and not speak Gaelic. There’s also a story about the surveyor making the roads, he is under threat to take the road through one clan and not another, depending on whether the clan chief is enlightened. A kind of Wayne railroad Western where the town wants the railroad but the rancher won’t allow it. Of course, that could be set in the industrial revolution, just think what happened when the railroad was getting close to Balmoral. My own village lay in a valley but the railway ran along the rim, where the mines were but it would be easy to make the Laird refuse to let it come through the estate and create a drama, I’m sure there were instances where the Lord of the Manor did just that.

Come to that I could even do a pioneer type story with the outline I had for the people from the vanished warrior city in the Middle East travelling to Britain and finding the Leprechauns caught in the middle of the struggle between the farmers and the hunter-gatherers. Ranchers against sod-busting settlers with the Leprechaun in the background. Yup! Kimo sabe, Tonto.

Now let me get back to the sea.