At Hawthorn Denne: Hawthornden International Writers Retreat

Still can’t quite believe this but I was invited on an international writers retreat, in Scotland. What an unreal start to the year, ensconced in a Scottish castle with another fiction writer, two poets, and the ghost of a parrot.

I posted this later as I was offline most of the time up there, even phone reception was tricky, especially when there was a gale blowing. I was glad of the poor weather because I just wanted to work work work. Odd to attempt this without the internet. Good and bad. Some day-job type work needed to be brought with me, although I felt guilty about this. Poor form.

What do I remember most? The porridge, the Silence, Doris the weekend cook and her stories from the outside world, the snow, Edinburgh all empty and quiet after the new year and full of thrift shops, the battle for sufficient caffeine, the battle to finish my book, the envy I felt when the other fiction writer wrote half a book in the first fortnight… Envy also of the poets who could start and finish a piece in a morning, and take the afternoon to walk and dream. (Almost made me get the point of poetry!) But I got some stuff done all the same, if I was not the front runner on wordcount. 

Oh yes, and I remember the night we briefly escaped the castle in M’s car… This was a visit to the shops purely for supplies (I tried to get him to drive to the sea but he wasn’t having it), and I remember how stoned we all felt, after not having left the castle for two weeks, as we piled out of the car and into some huge overlit supermarket. Stoned at the sheer quantity of stuff on sale, all that packaging. Eventually I bought crisps and whisky as both were in short supply at the castle. There were plenty good books, though – if I ever had a castle I’d want one with several libaries, too.