Dougsbookblog

Falconry was hugely popular throughout the period, so I arranged to have a day out with Phoenix Falconry near Gleneagles. This was to be a proper hunt and I joined a party of five with four Harris Hawks on a chill Perthshire afternoon, and we headed out into the rough country behind the Orchil Lodge Fishery just down the road. The woods were full of pheasants, partridge and woodcock that were soon flushed out by the resident livewire black pointer. Just to be close to these birds is an absolute joy, but to see them in their natural element hunting in combinations of two three and four, sweeping through the trees at high speed after a swift and agile pheasant was truly exhilarating. The one thing which quickly became clear and which pleased me was that this was a genuine competition, and one in which the pheasants held all the aces. Time and again a bird would be flushed, the hawks would react, but the pheasant would be too quick for them. By the time we reached the open fields it was Prey 20, Hunters 0.

On we went to a rabbit warren in a nearby wood, and with the help of a ferret to get the rabbits out into the open, the hunt was on again. The rationale is that the animals the birds catch are the old, the slow and the injured; a kind of natural selection. A flurry of wings and three birds converged on the same rabbit in an incredible display of flying and teamwork. The handlers ensured the unfortunate rabbit was dispatched swiftly and the youngest of the hawks was allowed to eat his fill as a reward for his efforts and to strengthen the link between the hunt and the final reward.

Patience was essential - for everybody

Up close and personal with a true predator

Returning for her reward

Ready to hunt again

It was a fascinating day and a proper education. I felt no joy at the kill, but the hawks had done their job and there would at least be something for the castle pot, though I doubt my lord would have been pleased with a single coney! 

Tony Robinson, who had made an indelible name for himself as Baldrick in Blackadder, was the front man. His enthusiasm for history oozed from the screen (the first time I'd seen him on TV was reciting a monologue for children, Odysseus, the Greatest Hero of Them All). He cheerfully admitted he didn't know a thing about archaeology ... but he knew a couple of people who did. They came in the form of the wild-haired, rainbow-jumpered Professor Mick Aston, and granite-jawed, beer-swilling digging machine Phil Harding. If I remember rightly, relations between them at the start were a bit stiff, but over the years Time Team turned into a sort of cheery archaeology-loving family who visited your living room on a Sunday night.

In those early years, the search for archaeological evidence and historical truth was the be all and end all of Time Team. It was a niche programme for history lovers who salivated over the churned up remains of Roman mosaics and the slightly darker stain in the earth that might be a Saxon post hole. Nobody was all that bothered about building a big viewing audience.

But that audience came, and with it came changes. Time Team turned a bit tabloid. The three day format remained, Phil got a bit more to say, the geo-phys team got better equipment, Stewart got to go up in a helicopter, but now they were expected to have revelations and come to conclusions. I began to get a bit annoyed when Guy de-la-very-posh-Roman-expert would look at a bit of pottery and tell the world that it changed our whole outlook on Roman history, when it patently didn't, or Francis Pryor studied a hole in the ground and turned it into a neolithic temple, despite there being no real evidence for the claim.

You could tell things were getting strained when Mick would tetchily turn to Robinson and say 'no, it doesn't mean that at all. It might mean it, but it might not'. And in the latest season, the straw that broke the Samian ware dish: Mary-Anne Ochota, a very scenic archaeologist and former model, with a nice smile, brought in to co-present with Tony and bring a bit of glamour, as the producers, in Aston's words as he announced his decision to quit the show, decided to 'cut down the informative stuff about archaeology'.

I don't like the new format as much. I know TV shows have to move on and do things differently, but it's all a bit too forced and there's a desperation to find things that aren't there. Earnest and often po-faced, Mick Aston brought the gravitas and genuine learning to the show that kept me and history lovers like me watching for almost twenty series. There have been other changes over the years, but without him I'm not sure Time Team will be Time Team. I met Tony Robinson once, when he opened a dinosaur exhibition, (don't ask!) and he seemed a very likeable, easy going chap. I have a feeling he might be thinking the same.

The one with the dodgy moustache is me, aged about 27, and the chap at the back is my friend and then journalistic jedi apprentice, Benjie. The picture was taken in the 80s, when we still had proper summers, and reminds me of the carefree days of local newspapers. Benjie was fascinated by the recurring sightings of 'big cats' and I'd promised that I'd find him one, so one day off we went into the blue, safe in the knowledge that nobody would mind as long as we came back with a story. Then, as now, I put such sightings on a par with alien kidnappings and Scotland World Cup qualification, events so unlikely as to be preposterous, but I knew I'd find a big cat at fascinating Monteith's Aisle, otherwise known as the Douglas Mausoleum (you can see some excellent pictures here), which stands on Lilliardsedge, north of Jedburgh. The Aisle houses the tomb of General Sir Thomas Monteath Douglas, 1787-1868, who now lies forever beneath a domed roof pierced with stars, with a tall angel at his head and feet. Sandstone lions, one asleep and the other awake, guard the entrance.

Benjie very sensibly left journalism to become a merchant banker in London, where he now doubles as the Makar or poet in residence to the City. I loved working for the local papers in Jedburgh, Kelso, Melrose and Gala, because you were in a unique position at the very heart of the community and if you knew what you were doing you could get a story out of just about anything. You never worked nine to five, you spent most Saturdays on a muddy touchline, and you never knew what you were doing from one day to the next.

Occasionally reporters from 'the nationals', hoary, grizzled creatures who smoked too much and spent most of their time in the pub working out how to maximise their expenses, would descend on your patch. They'd pick your brains, file their stories and if you were lucky buy you a pint. Their one universal piece of advice was 'stay where you are, son. Better off in the locals'. Of course, they were right, national papers are just one long grind of constant pressure, tight deadlines and demands for more and better stories, punctuated by the occasional bollocking when you get something wrong. But there's also a magic to them, an illusory glory that meant the advice just had to be ignored. I spent longer in nationals (Scottish variety) than in local papers, but my fondest memories are not of great scoops, or incredible news days like 9/11 or Dunblane, but of days like the one with Benjie, covering the unchanging rituals of the Jethart festival, or delivering competition prizes up in the Cheviots on a rutted one-way track that started in Scotland and ended somewhere in England.

It's true. When I finished the first draft of The Emperor's Elephant, the book that would become Caligula and Claudius, I had no idea where to go next. I knew it was good, but not quite good enough, but I didn't have the knowledge or experience to rewrite it. So what should I do? The obvious answer was write another book. I can't remember whether I decided it should be a crime novel, or whether he started creating himself in my head, but I remember getting up in the middle of the night to write everything down. The result was a book in the first person, told with a kind of Chandleresque commentary running through it. I read them again the other day when I finished the latest rewrite of Avenger of Rome, and they felt fresh and new. Who knows if, when or how they'll be published, but I think they will. The people who inhabit them are real to me and I think they deserve to be introduced to a wider audience.

The lead character is a Falklands War veteran with a special talent and a dirty secret, a wife with problems of her own, and nowhere to run when the members of his old platoon start getting knocked off one by one. 

I thought I'd give you a taste. Here's a flavour of Brothers in Arms.

CHAPTER 1

The legionary marching camp at Pennymuir in the Cheviots is where I made my first real connection with the Romans as a 16-year-old labourer on a Youth Opportunities Scheme. Every morning during the summer of 1972 I'd be packed off in a smelly old van driven by Taff, the Arnhem veteran, and put to work by Jock, the tall, wiry foreman of the labouring gang. The camp had been ploughed up by the Forestry Commission to plant trees and our job was to turn the peat back into its original position in the three foot furrows. The turf banks the Romans created at Pennymuir to protect their camp are still there and it's always struck me that using my mattock and shovel to cut the peat into manageable chunks, I was doing exactly what the legionaries would have done to create the place in 80AD or thereabouts.

Dere Street begins in York and continues as far north as Edinburgh, probably following the line of march of governor Julius Agricola's invading force. Most of it now lies under the A1 and A68 trunk roads, but there are sections between Pennymuir and Jedfoot which still exist more or less as they did when it was built, with the ditches and banks still visible and a carriageway as much as twelve paces wide. It's what we call 'clarty' underfoot, but wonderfully atmospheric and you can imagine yourself meeting a marching century round every corner. Look back north from any rise and the road heads arrow straight for the triple peak of the Eildon Hills which gave Trimontium its name. Agricola's cavalry would have scouted this route ahead of the main army and it doesn't take a lot of imagination to work out the reaction of the locals to the arrival of the armoured might of Rome.

I walked out about five miles to Cappuck, where there was a permanent Roman cavalry station as well as at least four marching camps. The signal station was built by the Twentieth, the legion which was home to my character Valerius, and we know at least two of the men who were stationed there. Aulus Julius Severus, a tribune of the Gaestetae auxiliary cavalry, and Gaius Quintius Severus, who commanded the First Cohort of the Faithful Vardulli, left altar stones which are now built into the fabric of Jedburgh Abbey, and have incredibly survived two thousand years and the ravages of half a dozen more invading armies.

From Cappuck, I walked back over the hill to Jedburgh, for a pint at the Tavern with my mate Iain and brother in law Jimmy, and a perfect end to the day.

I found myself asking the What if? question the other night when I watched a TV programme called The Hudson's Bay Boys. In it, the BBC had brought together five Scots who had worked for the Hudson's Bay Company in the 60s,70s and 80s. The HBC actively sought out young Scots men to run their remote Arctic Circle stores from the 1800s to the 1980s, and thousands made their way across the Atlantic. It was a fascinating story of young men - teenagers - journeying from their homes in Selkirk, St Andrews, Dumfries and the Shetlands to seek out adventure and a new life in one of the harshest localities on earth. 

I think this is a remarkably tidy and well kept store at the  height of summer. It would be very different in the winter

While their contemporaries worked 9-5 in mills and offices, they ran the isolated company stores, traded for furs with their Inuit customers and hunted seals and caribou in temperatures that sometimes fell to minus 50. Before they reached their twenties they had become key members of the almost completely isolated communities they served. In one clip, Jim, the Shetlander, told how he'd pulled teeth, delivered babies and wept as he remembered the only person he couldn't save using his self-taught medical skills. They integrated in a remarkable way with the Inuit people; four out of the five had married local girls and now had children and grandchildren. The biggest upheaval in all their lives had been the celebrity sponsored anti-fur protests of the 70s and 80s. When Brigitte Bardot posed with a doe-eyed, fluffy white seal pup nobody worried about the native Inuit as the trade price of a sealskin crashed from 34 dollars a pelt to eight dollars and their economy collapsed, threatening the whole Inuit way of life.

The reason I asked myself What if? is that in 1972 I answered an advert in The Scotsman asking for young adventurous men to apply to join the Hudsons Bay Company, and, about the time I was turning turf in a Roman camp in the Cheviot Hills, went up to Edinburgh for an interview. I shudder to think what kind of weedy specimen I looked to the interviewers at 16 years old, but what if I'd got the job? My life would have turned out entirely differently and I'd be a different person now. Would I have written books? Maybe I would have written them a lot earlier, because there wasn't a lot to do during the eternal winter nights apart from read, write and listen to the radio. I like to think that I would have miraculously acquired the DIY skills that elude me today, not fainted during a difficult birth and yanked out a molar without a qualm. I suspect the reality would have been very different

I don't envy them, much, though four out of the five live remarkably fulfilled lives. The welcome they received from people they hadn't seen for twenty years was a testament to their achievements, but their youth was a desperately hard existence and for every success there would have been many failures. 

Still, you can't help thinking: What if?

This is a great time of the year for seeing things that are a little different. A flock of bullfinches feasting on the seeds among the dead nettles; long-tailed tits hanging upside down from the branches of a silver birch; woodcock and snipe exploding out of the flattened bracken and whipping away low and fast like mini-Meschersmitts. And of course, there are the old favourites; the pheasants hiding away from the guns on the estate over the other side of the river; an enormous buzzard that flapped majestically away accompanied by an escort of shrieking crows; the big roe deer that I caught sight of bounding down the hill through the trees that naturally didn't linger long enough to get a decent picture of.

That, in a cooking pot, was 360 Narratives, the two day get together I attended at the Barcelo Hotel in Stirling, hosted by the super-efficient Claire and Fiona from Playwrights' Studio Scotland, with a little help from Creative Scotland, and brilliantly marshalled by film maker Grant Keir. The idea was to bring people together from across the arts spectrum and get them to think about working together to create new and innovative projects. This is just the first step, with a residency to follow next March when the writers, screenwriters, playwrights, graphic novel designers and games developers whose projects have the most potential will be given the time and support to work together to begin making them a reality. The brilliant Phil Parker got the ball rolling with a clarion call to find a place in the new creative universe that's opening up all around, and urging people to collaborate with whoever was needed to make it work. Short films that can make a fortune on the internet, simple games that hit the right spot, interactive e-books that cross the divide between film, game and novel, films that can be created using a mobile phone. There's a market for them all. I'd never thought of any of them, but when he told his audience 'Story is the heart of everything' I realised that new doors are opening for writers everywhere.

I met some wonderful people, had my mind opened up to other ways of looking at the writing world, and was enthused, invigorated and finally left completely exhausted after two days of brainstorming that left most of us looking like wet dishrags, but feeling as if we'd really achieved something. When I started, I had no idea I was going to end up standing in front of about fifty people singing a folk song about a mad-eyed Manga warrior dying in a hospital to the tune of Hotel California (I can still hear it, make it go away). The fact that it took the place by storm and won the Genre, Location, Platform pitching competition was all down to my talented scratch team of Tracey, Alton, Fiona and Jessie, who entered wholeheartedly into creating something from nothing in twenty minutes and then had what it took to make it work (Having just seen the video, please excuse the poetic licence). Every one a trooper!

My wife almost had a fit when she saw Speed Dating on the agenda, but by the time I'd spoken to forty people for two minutes at a time over an hour and a half, trust me I wasn't fit for anything.

I won't be one of the collaborators who get together next year, because I have other plans and Valerius is about to march into his most dangerous fight yet, with enemies on every side, but it opened my eyes to a whole new world, and showed that a writer with imagination, talent and commitment need never be idle.

Remembrance Day fell on Sunday the 13th this year, which, by coincidence, is also the anniversary of the Battle of Sheriffmuir, one of the pivotal battles of the 1715 Jacobite Rising. Every year on November 13, members of the Clan MacRae gather to commemorate the occasion and remember the fifty clansmen who fell, holding the Jacobite left wing and dying to the last man.

Sheriffmuir is on the hill behind Bridge of Allan and Dunblane and it's become something of an annual event for me, a chance to catch up with my friend Jimi the Piper, a proud MacRae who provides the music at the event every year and former colleague from my weekly newspaper days.

Sheriffmuir can be a bleak, forbidding place, all heather and peat bog, and dark evergreens, but as a piece of land where men fought and died for their principles, a perfect spot to remember the dead of conflicts before and since. The MacRae historian gave an overview of the battle. How the Jacobites, led by the Earl of Mar, a man who would have been out of his depth commanding a Sunday school picnic, were on their way south to link up with a second Jacobite force, but had been met by Hanoverian troops commanded by the experienced and battle-hardened Duke of Argyle. The Hanoverians were outnumbered, but were a cohesive fighting force, those fighting for the Stuart cause were clansmen; warriors who knew how to fight, but next to nothing about the art of war. When they met, it was a tale of two flanks. The Hanoverian right overlapped the Jacobite left and the MacRaes died where they stood. On the Hanoverian left, the exact opposite happened and the Government troops were forced back towards Dunblane. The next day, Argyle, thinking he was beaten, but determined to fight again, took the field only to find that Mar, with victory his for the taking, had withdrawn back towards Perth.

Two hundred men, Hanoverians and Jacobites, still hold the ground at Sheriffmuir, beneath three great mounds of peat.

During the two minutes silence, I thought about those men lying forever on this windswept hill, and my grandfather, Johnny Gordon, who left part of his nose and most of his friends on another bleak hillside, on 12 July 1915, when three hundred men of the Kings Own Scottish Borderers from Hawick, Jedburgh, Kelso, Galashiels, Selkirk and Melrose were killed on a single day at Achi Baba in Gallipoli. And I thought of the young men, courageous and professional, now fighting and dying among the poppy fields of Afghanistan, for, it seems to me, even less purpose.

We were hugely impressed with the whole set up. I'd recommend it to anyone and definitely go back, maybe next time to go for the Walk on the Wild Side, when you fly the birds to catch their own dinner!

Kara with Measles the eagle owl

One man and his owl

Edith the Caracara (that's the one with wings) and Steph

She was noisy and fearsomely intelligent (the one with wings)

Kara and the gloriously marked buzzard

It was incredibly elegant in flight

They hit it off really well

The snake-eating eagle packed a punch

But the bald eagle was the pick of the bunch

Wow!

Happy landings

How could you not love it?

Adrian was a font of knowledge with a host of wonderful tales

Call it hubris. Call it comeuppance. Call it the little man on the back of the Emperor's chariot saying 'You are only human'. Whatever you call it, it happened.

After crowing about last week's word output, I'd been working for about three hours today when my Mac ate my entire 51,000 word book. Hit save, it hangs up, then it crashes. Pages has had a failure and been forced to close. Mostly, you lose a couple of pars. This time Pfffft and the file disappears from the desktop. Search all you like, but it is no more. This is the second time, but I'd learned my lesson and I'd backed up my backups and most of my work was saved.

Suffice to say, I didn't do quite as much today as I expected.

We have a saying in the Borders: What's for ee, u'll no miss ee. Next time I'll keep quiet!

I'm now on my ninth: five published, one on the way to production, one being written and two crime novels currently looking for a good home. The one I'm working on is The Isis Covenant, a follow up to The Doomsday Testament. A couple of weeks ago I was struggling with it, not certain whether I was in the right place or going in the right direction. The advice I always give other writers is that if you have a problem, just keep writing and you'll eventually write your way through it. So that's what I did, but I had a difficult couple of weeks.

The way I explained it to David was that writing a book is like going on one of those long distance walks in the hills where you plan to tackle two or three Munros. You make a start and you're full of beans, then you come to the long climb to the first summit and all you can see is what's directly in front of you. You're groping your way forward one step at at time and progress is slow. Eventually, though, you reach the top and the view ahead is clear, a glorious panorama that stretches for miles ahead. Suddenly everything is worthwhile and you're racing, you know exactly where you're going and how you're going to get there.

I realise now that all I was doing two weeks ago was learning exactly what the book is about, working out the strengths and the weaknesses. Two weeks ago I was probably averaging two thousand words a day - way short of my usual daily target of three thousand - and struggling to do that. This week I wrote an entirely new opening chapter so the book now starts with a bang that increases the pace of the whole first quarter. In five days I wrote twenty thousand words, which is probably my best weekly output ever. No doubt there'll be another Munro to climb before I'm done, but the view from the top makes it all worthwhile.

*The paperback of Hero of Rome came out two weeks ago after quite a big gap, but it looks as if the wait was worthwhile. It sold 1300 copies in the first week in Asda alone and this week it popped up in the Top 10 historical novels at Waterstones. Transworld have ordered the first reprint. A great start and thanks to everyone who went out and bought it!

Of course, these things are entirely arbitrary. Even if you write a brilliant book or create a brilliant character, there's no guarantee that it'll be an instant success. There's also the undeniable fact that if you create something different, unique and innovative, you'll have a harder job selling it to a publisher than a more commercial, mainstream book with a guaranteed audience. Publishers are much more risk averse than in the past, and with good reason.

Cast your eye across genre fiction lists and you'll find that it's actually very difficult to come up with something that's unique. When I started writing Caligula sometime around 2004 (it was a project then, I didn't dare call it a book) I had no idea how crowded the historical fiction market was. Deep down I wanted to be the next Bernard Cornwell and I knew the name Conn Iggulden. I'd never heard of a guy called Simon Scarrow or read any CJ Sansom. I had no idea that at about the time I sat down and wrote the first sentence another half dozen excellent writers were doing the same with books that would become The Forgotten Legion, Warrior of Rome, Ship of Rome, Gladiatrix and the Empire series. Or that my old mate Bob Low, from Daily Record days, had already had his first Viking novels published and that Giles Kristian was about to follow in his wake. Caligula in its original form actually covers the same timescale as the early Macro and Cato books and Manda Scott's Boudicca series. If I'd known that at the time I probably wouldn't have dared write it.

At the beginning of 2010 I decided I could write two books a year and I put together some ideas for the next big historical thing. One of them was a five or six book series on the English Civil War with a character I thought could well be the new Sharpe and with each culminating in one of the major battles. It really was a great idea, and unique, or so I thought. My editor loved it, but about two weeks earlier the publishers had been presented with an idea for a civil war series with a character who could well be the new Sharpe, etc. etc. So in 2012, it'll be Giles Kristian who begins the journey to Marston Moor and Naseby, not me, and he'll make a brilliant job of it.

Anyway, I have strayed from  the point, which was to celebrate a US publishing deal for a great writer who truly dared to be different. Guy Saville created an entire alternative Africa ruled by the victorious Nazis for his book The Afrika Reich, based on plans that were actually formulated under Hitler. It was an idea so innovative that at first he struggled to find a publisher, but once it was in print his perseverance paid off and it's been a huge success. Now major American publishers have thrown their considerable weight behind it, and that success is about to be deservedly replicated on the other side of the Atlantic.

And so to Liam Fox. The interesting thing for me in the last few days is the number of Tory backbench MPs - and there'll be those in the other parties - who appear to genuinely believe he's done nothing wrong. Yes, his chum who at one point lived rent free at the state's expense in the flat they shared, set up a health consultancy at the same time he was Health Secretary. Yes, the same chum miraculously changed his area of expertise to defence at the very moment that Dr Fox became Defence Secretary, but that's what chums do. Chums jet all over the world and sit in on sensitive business meetings with heads of state and high-ranking military officials (it's not yet clear who paid for the jets, but it'll all come out in the wash). Who hasn't got a chum who'd accompany him on 18 trips abroad, to Dubai, and Washington, and New Zealand and Sri Lanka? After all a chap needs someone interesting to talk to when he's stuck on a plane with all those boring civil servants and defence contractors.

Who cares that everyone outside the tranquil and economically independent village of Westminster thinks that, at best, Liam's chum Adam has been living off his back like an ever-expanding leech? And that Dr Fox has been a willing host to his blood-sucking best-man? All that matters is that Liam is one of us and has done a fine job making the armed forces more efficient, on the Greek model. Why, he even set up his own charity ( 'to establish, and develop ... a network of like-minded conservatives in politics, business, journalism and academe on both sides of the Atlantic' - Who knew the definition of charity was so broad?) with his chum, Adam in charge.

And of course, Adam didn't benefit directly from all this networking.

Liam:  I am absolutely confident that he was not dependent on any transactional behaviour to maintain his income.

I'll probably try to work on the way up and down: a nostalgic return to the days when I wrote The Emperor's Elephant on the train back and forward between Bridge of Allan and Edinburgh. I didn't find it quite so easy the last time I tried it, but six hours in front of the computer with no internet access is just what I need at the moment. If I get fed up, I'll read one of the dozens of books in my ever-growing TBR pile.

Truth be told, I've always found London a bit intimidating. Too big. Too impersonal. Too many people. Too many bricks and not enough grass and trees. As the song says: I'm just a small town boy ... I can't breathe properly unless I'm within walking distance of the countryside. Last time I was down, I got  bit lost and had to ask directions. Three people ignored me, two just said 'Sorry mite' and walked past and the guy who eventually set me straight had a Scottish accent. What do you expect, I hear you ask? Well it wouldn't happen in Bridge of Allan or Jedburgh, or Edinburgh or Glasgow for that matter. It makes me uncomfortable to see so many people living their lives in self-imposed, self-satisfied blinkered isolation. Something quite 1984ish about it. If you dropped down with a heart attack would they help you, or just step over you?

Anyway I'll let you know how I get on in the next blog. With fifty-odd of Britain's best historical writers in one place at the same time there has to be something worth talking about.

Sharpe opened my eyes to Wellington's Peninsular campaign in a way no teacher ever could. Here was the blood and guts of Talavera laid out before me through the eyes of a man destined to become an epic hero of literature. I loved, and still do, the meticulously researched history of the Sharpe books, but it is so much more than that. There are the wonderful, carefully woven fictional stories of love and death and betrayal, the heroines, heroes and especially the villains; who will ever forget the despicable Sergeant Hakeswill, the duplicitous Ducos or the odious Simmerson?

Yet Bernard Cornwell, surely the Godfather of historical fiction, is more than Sharpe. Take your pick from the Grail Quest, Redcoat, Starbuck or Uhtred, but for me the best of them all is the Arthur trilogy, an epic achievement by a remarkable writer.

And he's still going strong! On Monday Mr Cornwell begins a book tour to celebrate the publication of what is, by my count, his 49th solo novel, The Death of Kings. If you get the chance go along and say hello to a true legend.