Booked

Hooray! After years of my stuff wrapping fish and chips the next day, I've got between hard covers. Well, soft - it's a paperback, to be launched on Wednesday - but it's a proper book, and I'm in it. Twice, in fact, although it's not immediately apparent. This is a selection of winning writing from the first 20 years of the Travcom Awards, all good stuff, and two of my stories were chosen although, as they're both about Scotland, they've been lumped together with a row of Scotch thistles in between the first, about Edinburgh, and the second, about Glasgow.

The title has unfortunate echoes of a turgid Australian soap opera, but it fits the contents perfectly, as there are stories about New Zealand as well as the rest of the world; and the cover image is a nod to how Kiwis go everywhere. It also reminds me of a photo I took on my exciting first trip to New York:

The Glasgow story in here is the one that won me Travel Writer of the Year in 2009; in a pleasing synchronicity, the only other time I've appeared in an anthology - Crest to Crest - several years ago, was with my first proper travel story which appeared in North & South magazine and launched me on my current career - which I insist is now a proper job despite the fact that most of the time I do it sitting on the sofa book-ended by cats. That story was about horse-trekking in the Canterbury high country when I was a kid. Canterbury, Glasgow - home, and away. Neat, huh?