Blogmas Day 2
Christmastime is a time for stories. We tell each other stories, we enjoy the stories of our favourite Christmas movies, and we make new stories together. These stories keep up smiling through the long nights and warm us on cold winter days. But the stories most important to us are the ones that are most personal. On our first day of Blogmas, we’re celebrating those personal stories.
James Maley, Geordie Watters, Donald Renton and Archibald ‘AC’ Williams met in Spain. They were members of the XV International Brigade. They had gone to Spain to fight Franco’s fascists, and fought together at the Battle of Jarama, one of the bloodiest battles of the Spanish Civil War.
Our Fathers Fought Franco is written by the children of those men. It’s the story of how they met, why they went, and the memories, good and ill, that they brought back with them. It’s a story of resistance, of working-class solidarity, and ultimate commitment to the long fight for social progress.
A story about stories, Minstrel Heart tells the life and journeys of David Campbell. Spanning eight decades, from a childhood in wartime Fraserburgh to the working at the BBC and travelling all corners of the world.
Minstrel Heart is peppered with lyrics, poems and intimate diary entries that Campbell has kept over the years. He weaves his story of love, loss, travel and expression as only a storyteller of his own experience and calibre can achieve.
Barbara Henderson left Germany to come to Scotland when she was 19. Over the next three decades, she became a teacher, a children’s writer, and a Scot.
Like many EU nationals living in the UK, Brexit threw her through a loop, and compelled her to consider what her Scottishness meant to her, and the many others who had made the nation their home. So she asked herself, and then she asked others.
Scottish by Inclination is a book full of voices. 30 Europeans, 30 voices, 30 stories of those who chose to become Scottish. It’s a book about the beauty is choosing where to make our home, and choosing who we want to be.
Diary, Thursday 31 July 1986: I’ve got a job as a journalist!
John MacKay was the face of STV’s News at Six and one of the most recognisable broadcasters in Scotland. Throughout his career, he saw the seismic shifts in Scottish, British and global society. Devolution and elections, tragedies and triumphs. Whenever Scotland earned the spotlight, every news story, MacKay took note. Scotland Today & Yesterday includes diary entries spanning just short of 40 years – a living record of a nation that refuses to stand still.
Diary, Friday 12 September 1997: An historic day and a good one to be a journalist. Scotland has voted overwhelmingly for a Scottish Parliament … I wouldn’t have missed it – a real sense of occasion, of being a witness to history in the making.
