A Grand day out

Well, I survived the stag weekend more or less unscathed, though I can cheerfully say that the experience of a Saturday night out in Liverpool city centre will stand me in good stead the next time I write about Roman depravity and debauchery.

We started the day with an interesting trip from our waterfront hotel to the Grand National meeting at Aintree, courtesy of a Scouse taxi driver who had clearly decided that red lights and speed limits only applied to other people. Gambling and I tend to be mutually exclusive thanks to a salutary lesson during my misspent youth, and half a dozen losers only served to reinforce that. The fact that three of them were second by less than a head, and the one in the National by a literal whisker, made it all the more masochistic. But the pain of losing didn't detract from what was a fantastic experience. The Grand National is an epic event, and, the tragic equine losses notwithstanding, a truly magnificent sporting occasion, with genuine superstars in the saddle and under it.

Seventy thousand people packed the Aintree stands and bars and if there's a recession I can assure you it hasn't reached Merseyside. I've never been anywhere like it for conspicuous consumption by loud young men in never-before-worn suits, and girls in skirts so short they didn't actually qualify, wearing skyscraper heels and trying valiantly to negotiate four flights of stairs. The ladies of Liverpool certainly know how to glam up for the big day. Elegant ball gowns were all the rage, with upper works (as George McDonald Fraser's Flashman would say) proudly on show. I surveyed all this young fashion with a fatherly affection, thinking 'You may one day regret having your young man's name tatooed on your neck in letters an inch high, my dear' and that the man who persuaded women that spraying themselves with mottled orange paint and calling it a tan was a good idea is one of the business geniuses of our age.

The least said about the evening the better. Suffice to say that being bought a double is only a good thing if you're not drinking large glasses of red wine and that the aforesaid red wine and something called a Jaegerbomb don't mix all that well. Being of more mature years I didn't even bother trying to persuade the groom to dress in anything stupid, but much respect to the chap in the banana suit and the bearded young man disguised as Snow White, leading his reinforced squad of dwarves on the road to ruin.

Roll on the wedding!

Wha's like us!

We live, as they say, in interesting times. As we enter the two and a half year marathon debate on whether or not Scotland should be independent again, my thoughts turned to the good old days when Scotland was run by Scots - albeit French-speaking Scots whose relatives robbed and murdered their way to power

To put it bluntly, many of Scotland's rulers have been a dead loss, with the emphasis on dead.

Take the Stewarts.

James I - came to the throne after 18 years in English captivity. Murdered by rivals, including members of his own family. Didn't do his memory any favours by hiding in a sewer.

James the Second was blown up by his cannon

James II - crowned at the age of seven, spent most of his rule obsessed by destroying the rival Douglases. Blown up by his own cannon trying to get Roxburgh Castle back from the English.

James III - aged eight when he was crowned at Kelso Abbey. Annoyed just about everybody. Killed in a battle against his own son.

James IV - tried not to rile the English and ruled with a steady hand until he fell out with Henry VIII and nipped over the Tweed to Flodden to show him two fingers. Hacked to death with billhooks along with one bishop, two abbots, nine earls, fourteen lords and several thousand other people who didn't really matter much except to their relatives.

James V - seventeen months old when crowned. Kept himself busy fleecing the nation to build palaces and fathering nine illegitimate children. Died of fever after taking a bath in the Solway while his army was losing (there's a theme here) to the English.

Mary, Queen of Scots - dad passed away when she was six days old, husbands had a habit of dying on her. Bit of a schemer. Lost her head after annoying her rich English cousin, Liz.

So when people talk about the good old days, we shouldn't forget that in the couple of hundred years before the Union of the Crowns, everything in the garden was far from rosy. Scotland was riven by internal rivalries and run by vested interests who were happy to sell out to their bigger neighbours whenever it suited them. There's a lesson there somewhere, I'm just not sure what it is.

A walk near Bridge of Allan

It was a beautiful day in Bridge of Allan, the sun was shining and for once it was also warm. This, I reminded myself, is why you gave up being a wage slave. So I took a couple of hours off and headed for the hills.

I'd been walking for half an hour and seen a couple of buzzards and a veritable blizzard of Great Tits, but I was just thinking it was odd I hadn't seen a roe deer. Turned the next corner and there were six of them standing in the shadow of the old hill fort. Later I came across the skull of one that hadn't made it through the winter.

It also brought home the astonishing amount of damage last year's storms had done to the woods. Some parts looked like a World War One battlefield with trees down everywhere and the shattered splinters of some still upright.

Signed, sealed, but still to be delivered: my new book deal

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog about the joys of working in local newspapers that was based on a photograph I knew I had, but couldn't find. Well, I found it. As you can see I did not lie. We had joy, we had fun, we had seasons in the sun. The gent at the back is my friend Benjie, who went on to a career in the City. The guy at the front is me.

Of course, I needed an excuse to link it to this blog. Well, last week I finally signed a contract to write another five books for Transworld. Signing a books contract is always a great occasion. Not only does it vindicate what you've achieved in the past, it puts money in the bank. It doesn't make me a millionaire, far from it, but it does give me at least a couple of years of security to do what I enjoy doing most: writing books. This contract is to write another three historical novels featuring my hero, Valerius, which is a huge shot in the arm, because not only do I know him like a brother, the world he inhabits is fully formed in my head. There'll also be another two Jamie Saintclair thrillers, which is genuinely exciting and gets me out of sandals for a while.

I can remember every contract signing I've done. The first was in the summer of 2007 in a coffee shop near the Jenny Brown Associates office, which was then in Newington, just off the Meadows in Edinburgh. I sat with Stan in a coffee shop full of interesting people, and it was only when I put pen to paper that I realised I was probably the most interesting person there. The second time, we were in the Tun, a pub across the road from The Scotsman, and the contract changed my life, because the day I signed it sealed my decision to give up journalism and become a full time writer. The third was for my first two thrillers, and Stan produced it at the agency's summer party in a tent at the Edinburgh Book Festival. The latest, I signed at my dining room table. Not the most romantic of locations, but hugely significant, because it will take me up to my twelfth novel and by then royalties might not be something that only happen to other people.

It's odd that when I look at this picture now, I see a cheery chap on the cusp of a long and successful career in newspapers, on the brink of creating a happy family. Yet at the time I know he was angst-ridden and confused and feared he'd be trapped in his present job forever. He also worried he was fat. The one thing I guarantee, though, is that if you'd told him that in thirty years time he'd be where I am now, he'd have been a very happy young man.

Parallel lines

I think I've said before that I learned more history from historical novels than I ever did at school. One of the things I do remember is the history teacher telling us about the Black Hole of Calcutta, when over a hundred prisoners were locked away in an Indian prison cell four metres square and only twenty-odd of them survived the night. The only problem is that I always linked it to the wrong war. It happened in 1756, just before the Battle of Plassey, but for years I thought it was part of the Indian Mutiny.

In a way that's understandable, because the Mutiny is one of those conflicts that gives war a bad name, stuffed full of wanton savagery, military incompetence, corruption and double-dealing. It also, of course, spawned heroism, stoicism and sacrifice from civilian and soldier alike, and on both sides.

Two of the best novels on the Mutiny are JG Farrell's Siege of Krishnapur and George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman in the Great Game. Farrell's is a tightly corralled tale homing in on a single fictional event, while Fraser somehow manages to get his anti-hero to most of the major battles of that sprawling conflict that enveloped the cities of the north central plain. This week I finally got round to reading a third novel of the period.

I've always been a big fan of Julian Rathbone. He writes superbly crafted, often very funny books normally with a single main character involved in one of the world's great events. His hero is unscrupulous, and never dull, and the stories are prone to eccentric changes of direction that keep the reader guessing. What struck me about The Mutiny were the parallels with the Flashman book, in fact, the devious, philandering villain of Tom Brown's Schooldays even gets a mention. Rathbone skilfully pulls together the roots of the conflict, showing how religion, corruption and exploitation combined in an explosive mix whose potential for damage eluded the complacent rulers of the Raj. He solves the problem of the Mutiny's scale by telling the story from multiple points of view. Expectant mothers Sophie Hardcastle and Catherine Dixon show us Meerut, where the violence began, their children vanish, rescued from certain death by Lavanyah, Stephen Hardcastle's wetnurse. The children somehow reach Cawnpore, where the Indian girl is immediately ostracised, and endure the terrible siege and betrayal. For most of the book, Rathbone deliberately underplays the horrors inflicted on white and Asian alike, but in the massacre that follows Cawnpore the bloodshed is graphic and minutely described, an odd contrast to an event that Fraser conveyed in a single line. There are echoes of Flashman in Lieutenant Farquhar, the shadowy figure who slips with ease between enemy lines, and who along with William Raikes Hodson - assumed by some to be the original inspiration for Thomas Hughes's bullying schoolboy - takes the story to the sieges of Lucknow, Delhi and Jhansi. Like Fraser, Rathbone is probably kinder than she deserves to Lakshmi-bai, the Rani of Jhansi, one of the exotic female leaders of the revolt, but he perfectly captures the claustrophobic atmosphere of the British in India, imprisoned by a caste system almost as rigorous as those of the natives they despised, and the oddly muddled descent into horror of the Indian princes.

A walk on the wild side

Codeine, the Harris hawk: a born hunter

One of the things I enjoy about being a writer is getting the chance to research the odd things that your character might have to master. I have a plan for a series set in Medieval Scotland and one of the things my knightly hero will almost certainly be involved in is a hunt.

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! 

Time up?

I've been watching Time Team since the first episode in January 1994 when they went in search of  what might have been King Alfred's base in what would then have been the Somerset marshes around Athelney. Physically, I'm not sure what they found, probably not very much, but that didn't matter because the producers had stumbled on TV gold dust. That came in the format '... and we have just three days to find out' and the chemistry between the team, which took a little longer  to gel.

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.