The Poetry Group

I well remember in the summer term of 1996 sitting down for a talk with Allan Bilby (left, at a charity event in 1995), the head of the comprehensive where I had been teaching very happily for a dozen years. The purpose of my asking for the meeting was to tell him that I was leaving the teaching profession at the end of the Christmas term as we were well advanced in the process of buying a shop in a remote village on the west coast of Highland Scotland. 

When he asked why I had decided to leave teaching I told him that my union had just completed a survey that showed that a typical male teacher completing forty years at the chalk face in order to qualify for a full pension would enjoy just two years of it - a statistic which had just been brought horribly home to both of us by the sudden death of one of our colleagues who had enjoyed even less than his two years of pension.

There was another reason: I wanted to dedicate more time to writing. I was already busy writing short stories which were winning minor competitions, and a novel which had been represented by a London literary agent, so I knew I could write. Later, in the early 2000s, I was to have two unsuccessful novels published by a London publisher, and submissions win two of the nation's top short story competitions.

In the years in the peaceful environment of Kilchoan I had plenty of time to write. I produced more novels - one of half a million words - and more short stories but they didn't repeat the earlier successes, so when I came to Golspie I was looking for a new writing challenge - and found it in a small group which meets every Tuesday evening in the village library to discuss poetry.

When I say 'small' I do mean small: a gathering of six is large by our standards. A few wanted, like me, to write poetry and have it criticised by the group which, over the last couple of years, we've been doing. We accumulated quite a body of work so we did what I swore I would never do with my novels: we decided to publish a selection ourselves, something which I had always frowned upon as 'vanity publishing'. We now have our first little book, containing ten poems by four authors, with a cover picture painted by another member of the group.

I'm not sure how good the poems are but.... hey!.... I'm thrilled.