– Samuel Johnson There used to be quite a lot going on in a highland village during the long, dark winter months. There was a ceilidh every week where the locals danced or performed, singing the old songs or reciting poetry. Often there was a sewing circle with its attendant gossip; the Mothers’ Union meetings; the Girl Guides and Boy Scouts classes; and the weekly film show in the village hall. But with the advent of television and videos, people often preferred to stay cosily indoors, being amused by often violent films with heroines with high cheekbones, collagen-enhanced lips, and heels so high it made ankles comfortably ending in slippered feet just ache to look at them. Therefore when Hamish Macbeth, police constable of Lochdubh, heard that a newcomer, John Heppel, was planning to hold a series of writers’ classes in the village hall, he set out to dissuade him. As he said to his fisherman friend, Archie Maclean, ‘I don’t want to see the poor wee man humiliated when nobody turns up.’ Hamish had seen a poster in Patel’s general store: DO YOU WANT TO BE A FAMOUS WRITER?
