Pooh's a wee bitty glaikit ...

Peering over his coffee cup, James Robertson is talking in a strange, slow voice. He sounds something like Eeyore might sound, if only Eeyore was from the West of Scotland and not the Hundred Acre Wood. And not called Eeyore at all but Heehaw.

“Heehaw has a dour, preachy voice, like Private Fraser from Dad's Army,” Robertson chuckles. “He says: ‘Guid mornin', Pooh Bear ... If it is a guid mornin' ... And I hae ma doots.'”

This strange and wonderful Eeyore is being conjured up in an Edinburgh café because Robertson has made it his business to translate the works of A.A. Milne into Scots. If it seems an unlikely task for an author whose most recent work - the darkly comic The Testament of Gideon Mack - was longlisted for the Booker Prize, he believes that his output in Scots is just as important as his writing in English.

Robertson wants to make reading more appealing to children whose everyday language - or dialect if you will - is Scots rather than English and seven years ago, with Matthew Fitt, he founded Itchy Coo press to do just that. At first they commissioned original titles, but more recently they have turned to translations of popular authors as their means of reaching the widest audience.

Combining the original illustrations with warm, comical texts, books such as The Eejits - Fitt's version of Roald Dahl's The Twits - have been an instant hit in Scotland. “Doing it in Scots gave it a new dimension. People said, ‘This is funny; we feel this is closer to us than the original',” Robertson says.

When, two years ago, someone suggested translating Winnie-the-Pooh he sensed a challenge. Was it possible to take a book that he knew and admired as “quintessentially southern English”, transform it and give it more meaning to a child on a council estate in Aberdeen?

He found the answer to the question when he started on the first chapter: “Yon's Edward Bear, comin doon the stair noo, dunch, dunch, dunch on the back o his heid ...”

The work developed as a kind of homage to Milne, but inevitably Robertson produced a different book. “Scots slants the story in a different direction. As soon as you make a movement in the language, you also shift the tone and register of the narrative,” he says.

Sometimes the translator has to take liberties. Pooh's song Cottleston Pie becomes “Bannocks and Bridies and Buttery Bree”. Completely different, Robertson admits, but “it is a translation of the mood, of the sense of the book, not to be literally correct but to my mind it is an accurate, creative translation.”

Inspiration comes from the characters' voices, which Robertson delights in saying out loud. Pooh sounds slow and “a wee bitty glaikit”, a bear of very little brain in any language. Robertson calls Piglet Wee Grumphie (“grumphie” is pig in Scots) and he remains squeaky and excitable; Owl - Hoolet - sounds like “a professor of some esoteric subject” who would lecture his students in English but subside into a kind of posh Scots in his Morningside flat.

Kanga and Roo were difficult. Robertson thought of writing in a weird Australian-Scots, but decided “that was pushing the boundaries a bit too far” and stuck to plain Scots for Kanga. For the most part Roo just squeaks, which “works just fine”.

Even the unseen characters have an identity in Scots. Woozles remain woozles because “they seemed Scottish enough” but Heffalumps transform into huffalamps, because “lamp” in Scots means “to stride”, and the new word made a kind of sense.

Subtle changes such as this work brilliantly on the page. In the English edition Piglet wonders why a Heffalump would fall into Pooh's trap. In Scots, Pooh tells him: “... the Huffalamp micht be lampin alang, bummin awa at a wee sang tae himsel, and keekin up at the sky, wunnerin if it wis gonnae rain, and sae he widna see the Awfie Deep Pit, tae he wis haufwey doon it ...”

The sequel is published next year, The Hoose at Pooh's Neuk. It will introduce Tigger, who, in Milne's words, does bounce, however much you like him. “Teeger?” Robertson says. “He's a breengin bampot.” Which sounds about right.

Winnie-the-Pooh in Scots by A. A. Milne, translated by James Robertson, Itchy Coo, £6.99

Read the story online in Saturday's paper: Pooh in Scots. And buy the book - it's fantastic - at Itchy Coo.

Proof of ghosts or dust on the lens?

A courtly figure dressed in a ruff and staring from a castle window would not be particularly unusual if he appeared in a period painting. But this image was captured on a digital camera some 500 years after the Elizabethan era and has for thousands of people around the world become the ultimate proof that ghosts exist.

The photograph, taken at Tantallon Castle near Edinburgh last May, was released yesterday by Professor Richard Wiseman, a psychologist, who “just for fun” embarked three weeks ago on an online research project, inviting websurfers to send him their photos of ghosts.

The response, he said, was “beyond all expectation”. Hundreds of images were sent his way, from as far afield as Mexico and Japan. Then, after 50 of the best images were placed online, some 250,000 people voted for the most convincing.

The array of smudged photographs and crazy fakes that caught the interest of this huge audience may do little to prove the existence of ghosts, but it indisputably proves a human need to believe in them, said Professor Wiseman, of the University of Hertfordshire. “That belief is everywhere, across countries and cultures. It plays on much bigger ideas about life and death, and there's no doubt that, for many of the people who contacted me, there is comfort in the notion that people who have been harmed in life might be able to come back and wreak their revenge.”

In Britain around a third of people say that they believe in ghosts and one in ten claims to have seen one. Proof, however, remains elusive.

One explanation put forward by ghost hunters and some physicists is that in some environments low frequency sound waves - infrasound — vibrate the body, and lead to strange sensations. While Professor Wiseman does not rule that out, he believes that psychology may have a better answer, particularly in oppressive and frightening surroundings such as a ruined castle.

“In the hypervigilance model, as you become scared, you become more on edge. You begin to monitor you own environment and your own physiology,” he said. “In those circumstances, if you hear a sound like a creaking door, it only heightens your own sense of vigilance. The spiral goes on and you might easily have a panic attack.

“From an evolutionary perspective, all this is sensible, because it is comparable to a situation in the "normal world" where you might come under attack. But in these oppressive surroundings, the seemingly inexplicable becomes very worrying and you begin to look for other explanations.”

Read the full story here at the ghost link

The Tantallon ghost ran in the national edition of the Times and for 24 hours it was the most popular stoy in the online edition, followed-up all over the world.

Brave bomb disposal expert deserves VC

The Times, 5 March 2008

Friends of an army bomb disposal expert whose extraordinary courage saved dozens of lives in Afghanistan and Iraq are campaigning for him to be awarded a posthumous Victoria Cross.

Warrant Officer Class 2 Gary O'Donnell, 40, was killed in Helmand province last September while attempting to disarm an improvised explosive device (IED). Yesterday he was awarded a second George Medal, or Bar, the first presentation of its type for 26 years, in recognition of two incidents in May and July, when “he placed himself in immense personal danger in order to protect his comrades”.

James Boyle, a former controller of BBC Radio 4 and a family friend of Warrant Officer O'Donnell, said that everyone who had known the soldier felt a deep pride in his life and achievements. But, Mr Boyle added, many of these same friends “knew Gary deserved the highest military honour - the VC”.

The Ministry of Defence said that the VC was presented “for valour and self sacrifice ... in the presence of the enemy”. Mr Boyle said that no soldier who had worked in bomb disposal had won the medal, because they were not seen as combat troops. “Bomb disposal personnel simply cannot get the highest award because for all their humbling bravery, their work isn't seen to fit the description. Gary was constantly putting his life on the line and on one occasion, when he was defusing a bomb, he detected a guy trying to detonate the thing by using his mobile phone. That is how close he was to the presence of the enemy,” Mr Boyle said.

In that incident Warrant Officer O'Donnell had gone in to inspect and defuse a bomb, after a robotic reconnaissance device had failed in the searing heat, Mr Boyle said. He became aware that an attempt was being made to trigger the device by a terrorist, who was in a nearby crowd, being held back by troops. Lead screens around the device are thought to have deflected the signal.

On another occasion, Warrant Officer O'Donnell prevented an explosion that would have killed him, by jamming his fingers into a closing clothes peg, designed to detonate a landmine.

Warrant Officer O'Donnell's Bar follows the medal he won for disposing of a highly complex, innovative IED in Iraq while working with the Joint Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal Group in 2006.

A senior army officer said: “What he used to do was ridiculously brave. He went far beyond the call of duty.”

Although field commanders make recommendations for awards, they do not have the final say. An MoD spokesman said: “These are then screened at various levels in the military chain of command and passed to a committee comprised of the most senior military chiefs with operational experience, who decide the appropriate awards.”

Campaigners may face a long fight. The VC is the highest military award in the armed services for gallantry under fire, and an equivalent medal, the George Cross, is made to both military personnel and civilians who have shown great courage in highly dangerous situations.

The George Cross was inaugurated by George VI, who was moved by the courage of civilians during the Blitz of 1940. Subsequently, 105 of 156 George Crosses have been awarded to military personnel.

Mr Boyle said that it was time for this military tradition to be overturned. Shortly after Warrant Officer O'Donnell's death last September, he wrote to Des Browne, then Secretary of State for Defence, and to the military authorities to make the case.

Mr Boyle wrote: “May I ask directly if you will consider awarding a posthumous VC to Warrant Officer O'Donnell? This highest of medals is for valour. I cannot think of any case I have ever read about where such sustained valour has been surpassed.”

Warrant Officer O'Donnell was from Edinburgh and lived in Leamington Spa with his wife, Toni, and four children. The MoD said that he had been recommended for the Bar in “recognition of his remarkable actions in two separate incidents. On both occasions Warrant Officer O'Donnell, who during his last tour in Afghanistan disposed of more than 50 IEDs, placed himself in immense personal danger in order to protect his comrades.”

Gates funds intelligent aid to farmers

A donation of £17 million from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will enable an Edinburgh-based charity to set out this year to halt the spread of some of the most virulent livestock diseases in the developing world, armed with a war chest of vaccines and medicines.

In Galvmed's sights are 13 feared killers, including avian influenza, swine fever and Rift Valley fever, which in 2007 claimed 325 human lives in Kenya, Tanzania and Somalia, along with the deaths of tens of thousand of animals.

The charity's first campaign, which is already underway, is aimed at East Coast Fever a disease endemic in 11 African countries, and responsible for the deaths of 1.1 million cattle every year. The combined value of this devastation is estimated at $168 million, a loss carried by many inhabitants of some of the poorest nations on Earth.

Conditions could be undeniably difficult, said Hameed Nuru, a Botswanan vet who is the charity's director of policy and external affairs. Even in war-zones it was important that livestock was protected to ensure that many farmers were not thrown even deeper into poverty.

“We have to include livestock issues in the aid package, and look at how to give people a start, to rebuild. This is a difference between what we are doing and the aid which is given because people have to eat, because it is emergency. We see it in holistic terms: give a man a fish, he eats for one meal, teach him how to fish and he eats for his lifetime.” said Dr Nuru.

The full story is here: Galvmed

I haven't posted here for a couple of weeks but over that time, one or two vaguely amusing stories have made into the paper. The argument over parking charges in Tobermory, for example.

If you're only on this site because you're a spaced-out PR executive from Seattle, you possibly won't know that Tobermory is the principal 'town' (population 700) on a Scottish island called Mull, beautiful, calm, peaceful, the kind of place where traffic policemen and parking attendants are unknown and unnecessary. Until some bureaucrat in a faraway office decides: "What they need is a parking attendant..."

More here: Tobermory.

In the next story I get to sit in a very fast car while it is driven very fast around a test track. It's a very fuel efficent vehicle and could yet save the planet, but I can exclusively reveal that it doesn't provide a cure for motion sickness. Here it is: Hybrid.

Oscar-winning interview?

"I have nothing to do with people who jump out of a plane with a suitcase and a key, and they open the case and they put their parachute on, and then exclaim ‘I did it!’ It is a completely different world. I don’t understand why people do silly things like this. I walk on the high wire.

"Of course there is something extreme when people point at me, a dot in the sky, but it is not what I am after. I don’t want to be thought of as a unique phenomenon, I want to do something I believe in, and doing it as beautifully as possible. Afterwards people come to me and say, it was inspiring, it was beautiful. That to me is a very different discourse, from forcing your name to arrive in the book of records."

That is Philippe Petit talking, the the man who walked a high wire between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre. The film of his achievement, Man on Wire, is hot favourite to win Oscar for best documentary. Petit was in Edinburgh for the film's European premiere last summer and months in advance I'd booked at interview with him, only to be mildly stunned to find I had no takers from the Scotttish Sunday papers, who apparently hadn't heard of him. So I never wrote the feature I wanted to write, and eventually sold a tiny news piece to the Times, which you can read here: Petit in Edinburgh

But it was a much better interview than that piece. Perhaps because English is not his first language, Petit's English is very precise. I've stuck the whole thing below, and it makes a decent read.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Did you often go back to the Twin Towers?

I went back often, I had a VIP pass forever. There is no such thing as forever, but I went there just before the disappearance of the towers, for yet another interview. It was my home away from home.

Of course, I autographed the building – it was preserved, even when the building was redecorated.

The unsaid thing in the film is the towers aren’t there anymore ...

It was a very personal thing. I had toiled so hard to get to know those towers, they grew on me almost as a living entity and therefore when the towers died I felt something was pulled out of me. That is a very personal feeling. We know the death that day …. It’s hard for me to talk about my personal feeling with all this loss of life.

But like Edinburgh Castle [he can see it from his seventh floor hotel window] you imagine it will always be there…

Yes, yes. Whenever I put a wire somewhere, Notre Dame or the Eiffel tower people say, you know when I look at this place, it seems different because of what you did. I do that too when I look at Notre Dame. It’s not a normal cathedral, it’s my cathedral. I remember the wire. There is a certain conquest of the place where I walk.

People described what you did as beautiful – is that why you did it, for the beauty?

It's strange because those towers were maybe not seen by people as beautiful. For me they were not beautiful in an aesthetic way, they were just so grand. … an intimate theatre on which to set my wire …. After my walk, people said “Philippe gave humanity to those towers”

But what drew you to wire walking

A whole childhood of art and sport of climbing and solitude. Trying to achieve things. What drew me to the Twin Towers was at the time they were the most fantastic stage to put a wire, to create some kind of mystical theatre in the sky. It was a very weird performance. I was a dot in the sky the people were ants on the ground. Could they see me? Could I hear them? It was really an out of this world performance.

It is a performance. But it seems a very personal thing.

That is very well observed. It is a very intimate almost day-dreamy dialogue with those two giants who at the time of the walk for me were my friends. They were the enemy at the beginning – but as I approached they became my friends and accomplices, they let me walk between them. That was … it was a very intimate feeling. It was a strange performance. The first crossing was not even performing, it was more making sure the wire was safe, feeling it, because I had not even inspected the other anchor point which I always do before I walk. It was a very strange first walk.

But when I got to the other side for whatever reason, I went back on the wire and started walking and walking my eight crossings. That was unplanned, totally improvised. Then I could call it a performance. But it was made out of the personal joy of being there – it was a strange kind of performance. Unique.

The police officer encapsulated a lot of the feeling on that day …

Yes he was pulled out of his condition of being a policeman …. At some point I decided to give myself up. By then they were very frustrated. They were violent and angry – that dissipated after a while, but it is not a good memory.

[The film says that his violent arrest was the most dangerous thing that happened that day]

What do you think of other extreme sports and the absurd lengths people go to break endurance records?

Climbing six peaks in six hours? I have no interest in that – there is no beautiful human achievement – there is a mechanical muscle achievement. But that doesn’t interest me – what interest me is the theatre of life, the mystery of life, and artistic achievement.

I have nothing to do with people who jump out of a plane with a suitcase and a key, and they open the case and they put their parachute on, and then exclaim ‘I did it!’ It is a completely different world. I don’t understand why people do silly things like this.

Of course there is something extreme when people point at me, a dot in the sky, but it is not what I am after. I don’t want to be thought of as a unique phenomenon, I want to do something I believe in, and doing it as beautifully as possible. Afterwards people come to me and say, it was inspiring, it was beautiful. That to me is a very different discourse, from forcing your name to arrive in the book of records.

The ironic thing is I have broken records – but it is not my goal. There are more noble activities in life than creating and beating records.

Fortunately I was not born in the circus. I reinvented in my own childlike and poetic way what it is to walk on a wire. It is the theatre and poetry which drove me to the wire.

I loved the line about taking your foot from the building, and [your friend and accomplice] Jean-Louis’s description of tension ebbing out of your face. That sensation of moving away from the safety of the building – can you still feel that?

Absolutely. I feel that sensation each time I grab the balancing pole and start a high wire walk. It is not exactly the same feeling each time, but it is a feeling of intimate decision. Not for nothing is it called the first step. The first step is a beautiful title for stepping into a new continent ….

Not many people dare to take that first step – to land on the moon, to dive into a great abyss in the sea.

Is it fear or expectation, or letting go?
Neither fear nor expectation. It is more of starting a voyage of exploration. In a word that has not been touched by man. Look out of the window. How many people are walking in the sky? None. In the past 100 years, how many giant walks can history record. One or two and most of them by me. It’s a mythic voyage, something out of this world. What I feel out there - and I love it so probably much for that reason – is something that you do not get on earth.

You’ve kept doing it?
Yes, it is one of my many passions. It’s life lived at its fullest. You cannot do it all day long, all your life. I usually practice four hours a day. Ok that’s a good part of the day when I am happy and in my element but unfortunately life calls for me to put my feet back on earth. Have lunch. Sleep.

And you always stay in the seventh floor of hotels, like this one?
It’s a little low. [laughter]

This sense of the Robin Hood in these walks is strong, isn’t it? Picking the pockets of the bureaucrats who want to stop you.

Exactly I was never very good at obeying the rules.

[in the film there are glimpses of his first two well known ‘illegal’ walks – Notre Dams, 1971, at 20; then Sydney two years later and the following year the Twin Towers]

I never thought of asking permission. It never dawned on me to knock on a door, to ask ‘Would you let me ….?’ It’s so obvious the answer would have been ‘Get out of here?’ I did it by intuition, illegally, because that’s what an artist should do; he shouldn’t ask permission, in my opinion.

The last time you were hired “professionally” …

For the Letterman show, three years ago [for the launch of a book he wrote]. It’s not a walk I like to remember, it’s a walk I did to help my book. It’s not one of my beautiful walks [16 stories high over Broadway and 42nd Street]. It was straight from one building to another. It was almost raining, it was co-ordinated with a TV show, and I don’t like TV.

It seems to be harder and harder for me to hired as a wire walker. It seems the world has changed, that people are more afraid of everything – putting on a giant event, and um … I don’t know, in a few years from now the profession of wire walker will be plainly illegal.

There was a century when giant feats would be attempted, when we would build things and attempt things . It the opposite now, we won’t attempt anything and it is better to say no than yes. People say ‘You never know’ and ‘what if’. I live in a world of what if’. Talking about my last walk, I am also thinking about my next. It’s very strange – I am the most famous wire walker in the world, and I am the one works the least. All the others are in the circus. That is easy – you do the same thing everyday.

To conquer the world, to run a wire between that beautiful church and incline towards the castle – well I am ready to do it tomorrow. It will take probably a few months of research and organisation and a few weeks of rigging and it will cost a lot of money probably – but then it will have a few hundred thousand people, and the entire world through the press to witness another miracle.

Why is it not happening? If I want it to do it, it will be like the end of the world, a total nightmare. I have to find the money, to get the permission, it is almost impossible. But it the phone rings, if the mayor of Edinburgh rings and says, ‘Hey Philippe I saw your film I looked at the press and you would like to walk. My city says “Come here, lets do something”’. This is a dream. Secretly I know it will never happen.

When most people think of what I do, they must think, this man is mad. He’s risking his life. It’s insane. We should stop him and put him in jail. I exaggerate, but that is a little of the feeling, when you think the world has changed. The world has changed immensely. We are surrounded by cowards who are not …. Who are forgetting to be poets. We are all born with a part of us who is a poet. Why are we now dulling our senses and not wanting to do beautiful things? My profession is do beautiful things, but I need to be invited.

Did you make money from the Twin Towers walk?

I am inept at keeping money. I am not a rich man. My financial life is a mess.

For the Twin Towers – there was not much involved – but most of it came from street juggling, in New York for eight months. A few friends of mine chipped in.

It seemed to be the end of friendships?

That was what they say, but I was surprised when I saw that in the film. Most of my friends cry when they describe the first step and that’s beautiful, its noble to cry, but there is something else, like the doubt. I was surprised. I can't talk for them, and they have the right to say what they think in the film, but this is not my film.

So you’re still friendly with your helpers?

No, but that is not my choice. So, it is a strange human chemistry again and I don’t know where it came from. People change, they do U-turns. But I don’t change. Two weeks ago I was in Western Square Park in New York, passing my hat. Nothing has changed for me. But anyway, that is their story not my story.

The tensions in the film?

This is not invented.

Where did the American helpers come from?

I needed people to help me. It was dream. But is was very demanding. People would say ‘Yes, yes’ at first and then later think ‘ Omigod, he really is going to do it’. They were scared to death, or feeling like cowards. Some of my friends said ‘I will’, and then said, ‘I have to stop, I can’t help you’. Some even betrayed me. That is the human dance. That is part of doing something and needing accomplices, there are the good the bad and the half and half.

And Annie? Was she your girlfriend afterwards?

Well, that’s what she says. At that moment something stopped, that’s not at all what I will say when I am 90 years old and write my memoir. I won’t tell it that way. Yes this relationship diffused and evaporated slowly, but it was not the guillotine of me having walked the twin towers. Everybody understands life the way they want - I respect the individual’s way of thinking, but don’t ask me to agree with it.

But you admitted bedding that American woman after you were released from jail …

I would never have allowed that to be part of the film, it is totally unnecessary. This is part of the differences I have with the movie maker, and it is healthy to have differences.

I suppose he saw it as a kind of adrenaline rush on your part ….

Yeah, yeah, probably. In my book, I mention it because I wanted to be very honest in explaining what happened after the walk, but it is mentioned in a poetic, very soft way in four lines. I never thought this would become a scene in a play – but it did when I allowed a play to be made from my book. The director decided to have a scene from that encounter. I thought it would never happen in a film. It disturbs some people, and disturbed me the first time. But that’s life.

Seeing Gaza from Scotland

Cluster bombs are preoccupying Peter Howson. “I'm obsessed with cluster bombs right now,” he growls. “And this picture - you even have the mosque in there, with the bombs going off all around it.” The artist stands by the window in his study. Behind him, the Ayrshire hills shimmer on a crisp winter's morning, a beautiful, tranquil prospect. But Howson's attention is entirely focussed on his work, scattered over the floor, images of desolation that he has pulled from the 20 or so sketchbooks piled on his desk.

Each one is more terrifying than the last. A line drawing of a figure in agonising pain. Children fleeing some unseen horror. A couple embracing - they seem lost in a moment of sexual ecstasy, until you look closer. “It's actually a dying pregnant woman,” Howson says in his slow, resonant voice.

This is Peter Howson, the Scottish artist, whose chaotic, difficult life, can't subdue his talent. Howson is famous for his often shocking figurative work - and for his extraordinary life, in which he has overcome his Asperger's Syndrome, his addictions to alcohol and cocaine, a failed marriage, and the attentions of all sorts of strange and occasionally vindictive people.

He is a tremendous interviewee, who just takes on direct questions, however impertinent they might seem to an outsider. Among other things, in the course of this interview, we moved into his personal life, where he almost unhesitatingly revealed the unusual domestic arrangements he shares with his partner of six years, Annie.

We don't have what you might call a normal relationship,” he says. “We stay in different parts of the house. She takes care of me a lot of the time, I take care of her in some ways. Sometimes we get a bit confused, but not really. I know we are a couple who love each other very much and care for each other. We're just not a proper couple in that we don't have a physical relationship.”

He meets Annie in the evenings, he says, for a hour or so, when they sit in front of the television. When their programmes are finished, they go their separate ways to bed.But how can such a passionate man resist a beautiful woman such as Annie? “I love women, I do,” he pleads. “Probably that's one of my big dangers. I'm a visual person, I love beauty. There's comes a point in life... Beauty can lead you to God, in the way that Dante was led through Beatrice. You have to sanctify it at some point.”

Read the full interview, which appeared in the UK edition of the Times, here: Howson on Gaza

Say it in Scots

"Without some kind of understanding of the Scots language, you can't really understand Scotland. It informs and infiltrates every area of social and cultural life, for virtually everyone, because everyone comes into contact with Scots at some level - that might be someone who just says “hame” or “didnae” occasionally, to someone who never speaks English at all, but Scots. But Scots has not been given official sanction for a long time."

So the novelist James Robertson told me, at a conference on the future of the Scots language at Stirling University. You can read the full piece here: Scots revival. Robertson wrote The Testament of Gideon Mack, a really dark, claustrophic but funny book which is more than dimly reminiscent of James Hogg's Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Should you need an instant fix of Robertson's writing, click on the link, and scroll down the Times article, where he has written a comment on my article. You will also come across the word "leitmotif".

If you didn't know, Gideon Mack enjoyed the twin distinction of being featured on Richard and Judy's Book Club, on ITV, and was nominated for the Booker Prize. In his spare time, Robertson translate children's book into Scots - like the Roald Dahl (in the pic above) and Winnie the Pooh. They are an amazing read in Scots.