‘I want you to do the story,’ he said. It was sunny and surprisingly warm in the late summer of 1995 when he flew to London from Zurich. We met at King’s Cross Station, 11.30 am on a Friday, and took the express up to Edinburgh. I still had my doubts and felt displaced; I’d done the Scottish capital some years before and had no reason to hang about there. Neither fortunately did Luca who found our connection and chivvied me on to the Highland railway which transported us before sundown to Mallaig on Scotland’s west coast. We spent the night in a B&B with pink plastic curtains and the following morning boarded a ferry to the Hebrides. This was more like it. I remember as a young boy, three or four years old – this is one of my earliest memories from when my family lived in Harrow – being deeply affected by the song ‘The Skye Boat Song’. Not that I knew where Skye was, but the song was a popular radio request and some-thing sweetly strange and yearning touched me even at that age, not only in the beauty of the tune but also through the sound effects of waves and seagulls on the recording.
