To Camera: Writer Norman Maclean

The first day of October, 2009, Birlinn the publishers of “The Leper’s Bell” and myself, we proposed to launch the autobiography in the College of Piping in Otago Street, Glasgow. To this end, I fitted myself into my Hugo Boss suit.

As I started to, uh, talk – introduction to my, my, some excerpts from the speech – I noticed in front of me a Lewis woman with a, a very stern face, a face that had been chiselled out of stone. She looked, in fact, with her tight narrow mouth, and her hair in a queue, like one of the Callanish Standing Stones, and seemed to have the same thought in her head as they had too:

“Oh, Lord, won’t someone send me back to Carloway?”

Anyway, I stumbled my way through what I’d prepared to say, and, uh, it was another monotonous success. Uh, we sold an awful lot of books.

It was a miraculously short moment I had in the limelight. I think the book has, um, confined me to a permanent obscurity. But that’s not quite true, because in May Archie Mackay of Am Pàipear is coming back to sample my coffee, and perhaps something stronger, and he’s going to give a critique of my book in Am Pàipear, and he’s going to tell the people that Birlinn, realising the opportunity they’ve missed, are about to launch a softback copy of “The Leper’s Bell: Reflections of a Changeling”, by Norman Maclean.