Authors Electric

This week, I am on holiday in our extended family house on the Hebridean Isle of Iona. There are seven of us and we are having lots of laughter and big, jolly meals round the kitchen table, which has an incomparable view of the Sound (strip of water) between Iona and the much larger Isle of Mull. Portentous clouds, the wee fire station and our house peeping in on the left  This our 21st year here and, over those years, we have brought 57 individual friends/family members to share in the delights of this beautiful place with us. Often it is simply people that we love to spend time with; but often too, one or two people who we feel need Iona. Perhaps it has been a tough time for them of late - health, worries, relationship upsets, financial problems, recent bereavement, whatever - but we just know that a week on Iona will calm their souls and feed their spirits. It is not that we do anything special beyond ensuring there is plenty of food/wine, comfortable beds, hot showers...

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. So said the famous nineteenth century Scottish author,  Robert Louis Stevenson, who certainly knew a thing or two about travelling. Born in Edinburgh and suffering from ill health all his life, he was only too glad to forsake the 'draughty parallelograms' of that chilly city's New Town, with its grid of Georgian terraces.  He and his long-suffering wife braved many voyages to what was then called 'The New World'. In the last years of his life, he lived in the merciful climes of Western Samoa, where he was known and loved as 'The Tusitala'  (the storyteller). He is buried there, a quotation from his own poem on his tombstone:                                      Home is the sailor from the sea  ...

To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. So said the famous nineteenth century Scottish author,  Robert Louis Stevenson, who certainly knew a thing or two about travelling. Born in Edinburgh and suffering from ill health all his life, he was only too glad to forsake the 'draughty parallelograms' of that chilly city's New Town, with its grid of Georgian terraces.  He and his long-suffering wife braved many voyages to what was then called 'The New World'. In the last years of his life, he lived in the merciful climes of Western Samoa, where he was known and loved as 'The Tusitala'  (the storyteller). He is buried there, a quotation from his own poem on his tombstone:                                      Home is the sailor from the sea  ...