Quoyloo Quill

                                                                                             This month I am grateful to Dr Linda Gask, a retired professor of primary care psychiatry now living in Orkney, who has kindly provided a fascinating and inspiring piece on her personal journey to find true north. Finding True North- a journey to Orkney by Dr Linda Gask   For most of my adult life I sought out the Western Isles to escape, rest and find peace and quiet to write. My fascination with all things ‘North’ began in childhood when travelling to Central Scotland, my mother’s home. It was a 12-hour drive then from the East of England going up the A1, forking West at Scotch Corner, turning North up the A6 and A74 then finally dropping down into Hamilton where my maternal grandfather was a miner in the coalfields of Lanarkshire until his early death. On a couple of these family holidays, we ventured as far North as Ben Nevis, Loch Ness and Glen Affric - but never into those parts of th

Today I welcome a good friend, Gaby Barnby to the Quoyloo Quill. Gabrielle Barnby lives in Orkney and writes short stories, poetry and full length fiction. She has run creative writing workshops for may years, encouraging new writers and supporting creative discovery. She is the author of three books and her work has been included in numerous anthologies and magazines. Here she describes her first impressions of moving to Orkney. First Impressions - Orkney We came from the airport to the town directly, although neither airport nor town accurately described either place by my southern standards. An airport was a vast sprawling, moving-floored shopping mall with shuttle buses and crowds of people from all nations, a city unto itself with flocks of aeroplanes gathering people up like a bird gathers worms. Not a simple strip of tarmac seemingly laid at random in a field with a building that was as homely as a school foyer for a terminal and a free of charge car park. And the town? Well, th

  This month I am pleased to welcome Stromness Writing Group member Dr Sunil Angris to the Quoyloo Quill. For those who don't know Dr Angris, he is a semi-retired medical doctor living in Holm, having moved to Orkney in 2019 after many years of holidaying here. He wrote extensively for the medical press while a GP in England and had regular columns as car correspondent for the magazines 'GP' and 'Pulse'. Now that he is semi-retired, he has more time to give to his creative writing, mainly poetry and short stories. Other hobbies include walking, music and sport. This is a piece Dr Angris contributed to the successful 'Bright Horizons' online foy in 2020 . For me, “Bright Horizons” began a train of thought leading straight to these islands. The sequence goes thus - “ I fell in love with Orkney for many reasons but chief among them was that the light and the horizons here aren’t bright!  Words conventionally used to describe the opposite of bright include “dark