Author Archives: Ruby

Free writing practice⤴

from @ Ruby on Wheels

Once again, I’ve been encouraging students to write for pleasure (not just because they have to) and once again I promised that if they could manage to write for at least 5 minutes every day, then I would do that too. Of course, the first problem with deciding just to ‘write’ is that you don’t know what to write about. Perhaps starting with life today …
This evening we went to the photographic club again. We started just a few weeks ago, and it’s been really quite interesting. I’ve put some photos in for a competition, and have found out about rules about mounting and labelling. This evening’s meeting was mainly looking at the results of the Scottish Photographic Federation – seems there’s an annual competition with various categories. It was nice to see some members of the club had some winning photos in the collection.
It was also interesting to realise that some of the hoots were quite like some of my own photos! I wonder if I’ll be able to start winning prizes. Several of the overall winners fitted easily into specific sections and categories – birds were popular, and also sports. I don’t think I’ll be doing much of them, though, as I suspect you need to have quite a powerful zoom lens to be able to get the close-up shots with all the clarity and detail. There were also lots of landscapes, but they tended not to get the higher marks. For me, the most surprising categories were the collages and obviously-photoshopped prints. For some reason, I’d expected they would take a more “pure” attitude to photos – giving more credit for photos that were hardly manipulated at all. Not the case, though.
After getting home, I was inspired to go onto the computer and upload a photo to my Flickr account – before Christmas we went to Spain and I haven’t yet posted many of the photos. So I put up one of Steve standing in an archway in the Alhambra.
alhambra arch

The Trumpet Blasts …⤴

from @ Ruby on Wheels

Any Scot with a smattering of knowledge about our history will know something about the content of a book titled “The First Blast of the Trumpet“. It can be none other than John Knox. Indeed, the novel is about Knox’s early life. The idea of finding out a bit more about his background and the issues of the time intrigued me, and I welcomed the opportunity to read a wee bit of history with a wee bit of fiction intertwined. The novel didn’t disappoint.

The novel introduces various characters such as the Elizabeth Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, as well as John Knox, and the relationships between the characters gradually unfolds (although I must admit I was puzzled at first at the chapters devoted to life in St Mary’s Abbey). There are a few fictional characters, but most of the main action is based on historical figures. This gives the novel a good grounding in real events. There are some surprisingly “naughty” episodes; this gives an insight into not just the history of the times but also the morals and expectations of society. The hold of the Church on so many decisions about society is well-documented, but in a novel you get to see the ways this affects the ordinary people.

When giving dialogue from a time in history, the writer will always have to make some linguistic choices – keep true to the language of the time and risk giving conversation that is unintelligible to a modern audience, or give a more up-to-date conversation with some indication of what it would have been like. MacPherson has chosen the latter, and has done it successfully. Little smatterings of Scots give a flavour of the language and develop the characters: “haud your wheesht”, “Thon sleekit skite …”, “… you’re all gowks.”

The novel takes events up to the time when John Knox is about to embark on his own spiritual journey, but has to leave Scotland.

MacPherson, Marie (2012) The First Blast of the Trumpet

The book is available from Amazon and also from Knox Robinson Publishing