A.L. Kennedy

Reality__here__ nothing but horror in that.

Read. As much as you can. As deeply and widely and nourishingly and ­irritatingly as you can. And the good things will make you remember them, so you won't need to take notes.

A good roast of sun, it slows you, lets you relax__nd out here if there's anything wrong, you can see it coming with bags of time to do what's next. This is the place and the weather for peace, for the cultivation of a friendly mind.

Have more humility. Remember you don't know the limits of your own abilities. Successful or not, if you keep pushing beyond yourself, you will enrich your own life _ and maybe even please a few strangers.

Being me is a job _ is labour so time-consuming and expensive that I have to have a second job just to support it. So that I can drink, I have to get drink and that isn__ something people give away and then there__ drink that I need because I have drunk and the other drink I have to keep around because, sooner or later, I will drink it. That__ a full-time occupation: that__ like being a miner, or a nurse.

As every languageless, stateless, selfless nation has one last, twisted image of its worst and best, we have the ceilidh. Here we pretend we are Highland, pretend we have mysteries in our work, pretend we have work. We forget our record of atrocities wherever we have been made masters and become comfortable servants again. Our present and our past creep in to change each other and we feel angry and sad and Scottish. Perhaps we feel free.