Lucky Boy

Theodore, my brother, drowned when he was a boy. Nobody saw him do it so nobody knew how long he’d been dead when I found him. I saw him floating, white skin in black water with his curly hair limp, a red matted halo barely moving in the lake like the rest of his body was barely moving, rocked only in the wake of a passing boat, people moving on to happy without seeing his pale body suspended, face down, forgetting life. But the doctors said he was a lucky boy because the water was so cold and because the woman in the campsite next to us knew CPR and even though some of the family said he was never quite right after that, other people, who didn’t know he’d been dead for a while, didn’t really notice that he was a little bit off.

When Theo was seventeen, he came home from his summer job, cleaning out grease pits at the steel mill, and said, “I’m getting married tomorrow.”

“To whom might I ask?” Mother still had a smile on her face at this point.

“Julie Best.”

“Julie Best? Martin and Lynnette’s daughter? That’s a fine catch Theodore,” she was still laughing.

Neither my mother nor my father were laughing the next afternoon when Theo and Julie arrived home, dressed in their Sunday clothes – Julie, wearing a thin golden wedding band and her belly just beginning to show through with a baby.

Theo came over and looked at me for a long time, the way we used to look at each other when we were kids, playing the Stare Game, who would break first – not me! Not me!

“You’re a lucky boy,” I said.

And he smiled and everything was ok.

Theo had one more year of high school left which he decided he would skip, the baby was more important. So he took a full-time job at the steel mill and that was that. He worked shifts and he worked over-time and he worked holidays and he had insurance and he had benefits and every single chance she got, Julie screamed into his face that he wasn’t quite right, that he was off – more than a little bit.

When the baby was born Julie wouldn’t hold him and refused to see him, Theo too wasn’t allowed to visit. The doctor moved her to another floor, a special ward for troubled new mothers and everyday, to ease her pain, the nurses would express milk from Julie’s full, aching breasts and would bring the milk to Theo who sat waiting in a tiny room, no bigger than a closet and there – he fed his son – breast milk from a bottle. On more than one occasion, when I was there to see my brother feeding his newborn son I heard him whisper, “I’m a lucky boy.”

If a book is worth reading, it is worth buying.

Wigtown, in a fairly inaccessible spot in Dumfries and Galloway, south-west Scotland, has 900 residents and over a quarter of a million books, housed in over 20 bookshops.

Being a bibliophile and erstwhile secondhand bookshop owner myself, I’ve intended to get there for the past several years, ever since one of those 900 residents came up with a Good Idea and the whole town was cajoled into remodelling itself as Scotland’s National Book Town. Well done that person!

Finally made the trip last Saturday and had a great time, despite the horizontal driving rain which accompanied us all the way from Glasgow and stayed with us throughout the day until ten minutes before we were leaving Wigtown, the bookshops having closed for the day. Then the sun came out.

It’s a very pretty little town, even in the rain. Most of the bookshops look from the outside like doll’s houses, and not much bigger – so it’s a surprise and a delight when you squeeze through a narrow door into what you expect to be a tiny one-room shop, only to find that once inside, room leads on to room after tiny room, through low doorways, up creaking old stairs, tucked under the eaves – and every one of them jam-packed with books.

Books of all shapes, sizes and conditions, some new but most secondhand: tall books, small books, some as big as yer ‘ead; from unassuming paperbacks to beautiful leather-bound gold-tooled tomes; books costing 50 pence or hundreds of pounds – and every price in between; children’s books; ‘adult’ books (even vintage Playboy magazines lovingly protected in their own plastic covers with a health warning prominently displayed over the shelf); science, sci fi, fantasy, literature, art, and on and on, not forgetting the inevitable ‘miscellaneous’…

My two favourite titles discovered on the day were:
When Men Wore Muffs
and
Sheep and their Skin (an ordinary-looking volume, which amazed me when I opened it and found it marked up at £100.)

I came away with three books from three different shops, but wishing for unlimitless funds and bookshelf space.

The good news is that we only managed to see about half a dozen shops – about a quarter of those currently there. I’m just going to have to go back another time!

For more, see www.wigtown-booktown.co.uk/

Down the Aisle and Back Again

The first draft of the weddings book - 'Fabulous Places to Get Married in Scotland' - is finally done. Woohoo!

Now it's just a question of going back to the beginning and filling in the bits I couldn't complete first time round for a variety of reasons; laughing hysterically at the stupid, and badly written bits which have crept in; making amendments to same which hopefully are more sensible (or at least better written); adding foreword, contents page, index and stuff like that. And checking very carefully that I haven't gone over the word limit this time - having to remove 14,000 of my lovingly crafted words from the last ms sure taught me a lesson there: COUNT!

So as a result, I'm feeling very pleased with myself and deserving of a break from the computer face.

My first venture out into the unknown, blinking in the unfamiliar lights of day, was my first trip to Wigtown, which proudly proclaims itself 'Scotland's Book Town'.

More of that soon.