Over the years, since I took early retirement when my beloved daughter Jay was very ill and in a life-threatening condition, I’ve spent much time writing…

Teaching in early primary years, age 5 – 7, in a rural area, I often used to read stories to fit in with various class projects e.g. Farming, Fishing, Winter, The Seaside, Animals – and when I couldn’t find appropriate stories to fit an individual theme in class, I often wrote stories for those themes…

When Jay was really ill I had very little information or support – I started keeping a journal, writing down observations about daily situations and Jay’s behaviour which I often found really difficult to cope with; she seemed to have changed dramatically from the girl I’d known. And that was the beginning of my non-fiction writing – books about eating disorders and, whatever the illness or situation, the importance of building good all-round communication and cooperation to build that 24/7 collaborative care; the first ones published by John Wiley and Sons, e.g. Families, Carers and Professionals: Building Constructive Conversations; the last two by Routledge…

And now, a change of direction! Brought up in a small town in NE Scotland surrounded by farms, talking to school friends, visiting my grand-parents at weekends on their farm near Kintore, I learned quite a bit about life on the farm….and over the years learned to love, and sometimes write in the local Scots dialect Doric, as well as in ‘proper English’ learned at school.

Reading, language and building good all-round constructive communication and how to build it – has always been one of my main interests, not only at home but as a primary teacher. Boharm Primary, near Keith in NE Scotland, was a 3-teacher school where I worked for several years with ‘early stages’ (age 5 – 7). As always, clear explanation in a very wide range of subjects and topics was essential to everyone understanding what was happening … important in everyday life whatever the situation, most especially to avoid misunderstandings.

And recently a new project – putting together a collection of my stories about life in rural Scotland, fishing, farming and school, all based on incidents which happened when I lived in Keith, later in Macduff, a fishing town; others about incidents when I was visiting my grandparents’ farm near Kintore, Aberdeenshire; and when I worked at Boharm – now sadly closed – where almost all the pupils lived on fairly remote farms.