This is what I read about

Simon at stuck-in-a-book has a challenge – find a picture that sums up something about your reading. Given that a picture is meant to paint a thousand words I thought this would be reasonably easy but the moment I started looking through pictures it became a bit of a quest. There were no shortage of pictures which summed up no end of things about me, but it was when a not terribly proposing view of Port Ellen distillery (a whisky legend, the distillery is sadly mothballed now) which really chimed with what I read and why.

Finally though I settled on this picture (it was a coin toss between them). It’s from a night about 3 years ago when I was staying at my father’s. Like many a Shetland summer evening it only just managed to stay the right side of bloody cold, but the light was amazing and dramatic, we had been out fishing and finished off eating freshly caught mackerel on a beach below a 2000 year old broch. It was a perfect evening right at the end of my holiday, entirely like something out of a book and even at the time tinged with a sense of nostalgia. The picture and the occasion are very rooted in place for me, one of those transient moments that I keep looking back to; a mix of total satisfaction in the moment, and a sense of it being outside of my everyday life.

I think a lot of my reading is about finding occasions like that captured in print – people finding their place in time and place and company.

Thinking about it now a bottle of malt wouldn't have gone amis though, especially something as legendry as a Port Ellen, which is almost that evening in a bottle.