Joyeux Noël à tous !!! Santa Claus will very soon be at our doorstep or should I say up on the roof, ready to drop precious little presents into our chimney, ‘wee surprises’ as Iain and Margaret would say ;-). Why not read or re-read some good Scottish Christmas stories while waiting for him? 😉 Storytelling has always … Continue reading →
Bonjour! Hello again from Scotland, Janice, Marie-Agnès and Jean-Claude! Margaret and I would like to begin this first ‘Letter’ of 2011 by sending you all our very best wishes for the New Year. Janice, we send particular greetings and our kindest thoughts to your dear Papa, Jean-Paul, who’s been quite unwell recently. It’s pleasing to hear, Janice, that our Oscar … Continue reading →
Mairiuna, I have a great Sherlock Holmes detective story to share with you today! To commemorate the 150th Anniversary of Sir Conan Doyle’s birth, (1859-1930), the small island of Alderney, a bailiwick of Guernsey, issued a mystery set of 6 postage stamps beautifully illustrated by Keith Robinson. The mystery case, written by Keith Robinson, starts with the theft of an Alderney bull, a breed … Continue reading →
Mairiuna, before the New Year ramps up, why not investigate about our most popular posts to see what are our readers’ favourite subjects? Let’s see what the stats reveal. Suspense…. And the winners are : 1. Rannoch Moor: First Steps Into The Scottish Wilderness People seemed to be energized in the clear and fresh atmosphere of the place and everybody looked happy … Continue reading →
Bonjour Marie-Agnes, Janice et Jean-Claude! Hello again from Scotland! Please let me begin today, Marie-Agnes et Jean-Claude, by recalling that joyful, sunny day in late summer when Margaret and I met you for the first time, at Biarritz on the Atlantic coast. 🙂 From the deserted street on a quiet Sunday morning, you appeared as if by magic at the … Continue reading →
. Since we are speaking of Robert the Bruce I would like to introduce today Nigel Tranter, a very popular Scottish author who has written, among many other books of historical fiction, a trilogy about the great Scottish king. He died in 2000, at the age of 90. He was a great admirer of Sir Walter Scott and indeed, we … Continue reading →
I am thrilled to let you know Mairiuna that indeed , I do have stamps commemorating The Lost World . They are from Liberia and were issued in 1999. It came in the format of a sheet of 6 stamps and a souvenir sheet. Dinosaurs on stamps is a very popular collection amongst topical stamp collectors. The first dinosaur postage … Continue reading →
“A city built on books, brimming with writers and readers and home to the world’s largest Book Festival” Hi everybody ! Do you remember how an old dying sycamore growing in Conan Doyle’s childhood garden, on the playground of what is now known as Dunedin School, in Edinburgh, had been given a second life ? What a good idea to … Continue reading →
Quite touching the idea of portraying Sherlock Holmes brooding over the death of his author… all the more since we know how, at one time, Conan Doyle got so tired of his character that he decided to ‘kill’ him. “I must save my mind for better things,” he wrote to his mother. In The Final Problem, published in 1893, Conan … Continue reading →
