August 2011
7 posts
10 tags
The Piper of Loos by JF Derry
I was a typical prepubescent boy: Commando comics, stenn gun sticks, fir cone grenades. Incongruously violent games for kids; Bang! Bang! Neeeooow! Kabooosh! There was no honour or glory in our play, no honorable mentions in dispatches, no medal ceremonies, no weeping widows. Just brutal annihilation.
Lie down! You’re dead! I got you. No you didn’t!
At secondary school, this interest manifested...
6 tags
We Can Rebuild You: The Bionic Hand by Lucy...
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
(Douglas Adams)
Deadline-crashing habits from time served in the media die hard so here I am on the morning of 28 July with various false starts, sitting on the western-most edge of the Isle of Lewis trying to think about a bionic hand lying in a museum several hundred miles away.
Outside, long strips of crofting land and...
12 tags
A Tartan Tale by Kate Tough
Learning which object I’d been assigned (Ross Tartan Suit), I was delighted. I had no problem with it. Not at that point.
OK, who among us didn’t look down the list of 26 objects to see what everyone else had ‘got’? And who didn’t wonder what it would have been like to have been paired with something else, something more immediately glamorous or dangerous: the Lewis Chessmen, miniature coffins, a...
7 tags
Rat-a-tat-tat by Christine Finn
Mary Barbour’s rattle sounded out to me long before I ever saw it. I was delighted to be paired with such a fascinating object, especially one so much outside my ken; I knew nothing about Scotland during the First World War. But I should have done. Going to see it meant I could pursue another lead, possibly one to draw on, which had rattled away in the cupboard of family tree stories ...
8 tags
"Gneiss to meet you" by Janette Currie
My object is the Lewisian Gneiss [rhymes with ‘nice’]. It isn’t a personal object - didn’t belong to someone famous or infamous. What can be said about a lump of grey rock? What can you even think about a rock? I’m a researcher at heart, so, being paired with an object and subject-matter completely outside my field, I scurried in search of the undiscovered country: geology.
Both in the NMS...
12 tags
Saint Fillian's Magic by Linda Cracknell
I love the kind of writing commission which delivers a subject without any choice. Anxiety nags at me initially but then I discover there’s something about it I’ve always wanted to write about, even if I didn’t realise it.
When I got matched with the ‘Coigrich’ – the 16th century silver gilt case or ‘shrine’ which represents the handle of Saint Fillan’s Crozier, and became one of his...
11 tags
DIG OUT YOUR DANCING SHOES by Collette Davis
I was meant to go to Orkney today but a wise Neolithic archeologist persuaded me otherwise. I made the decision to venture North a couple of weeks ago after speaking to Ian Begg, who I came across in June when dipping my toe into the 26 Treasures research waters. Ian is a retired architect who just so happens to have a specific interest in the carved stone balls of Scotland. He suggested I write...