As we approach the winter solstice it’s worth mentioning again the webcam pictures from Maes Howe on Orkney - which Dorothy used to great effect in King Hereafter. The site is www.maeshowe.co.uk and if the weather is kind then you can see the sun’s rays streaming down the access tunnel into the main chamber at sunset.
I also notice that Sigurd Towries’s excellent Orkneyjar site has a new feature about Thorfinn which I’ll be keeping an eye on.
A couple of weeks ago we had a DDRA council meeting here in Edinburgh. The day before it Ann McMillan and I visited Dorothy’s old school - Gillespie’s High School - to visit the head teacher Alex Wallace, and to present the school library with a set of Dorothy’s books. We were warmly received and had some very fruitful discussions on ways in which the school and the DDRA can cooperate, a fuller report on which will appear in Whispering Gallery magazine.
Many readers will be aware that as well as Dorothy the school also nurtured the novelist Muriel Spark, who based her most famous book - The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie - on the school and one of its teachers. Mr Wallace is keen to encourage a love of literature in his students and is hoping to follow up the declaration of Edinburgh as the first International City of Literature by making Gillespie’s the first School of Literature. Hopefully we can collaborate to generate more interest in the subject and more awareness of both the school and Dorothy’s work.
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