I was down in Islay recently for the Islay Book Festival, and a splendid wee occasion it was, too.

It’s always good to meet fellow writers and readers, if only to encourage each other that reading and writing books is a good, and legitimate, activity.

I sometimes wonder, though, whether it’s too much of a middle-class activity. Or, maybe more precisely, where the working-class voices are. Almost invariably, the voices I hear around me at book festivals tend to be rather polished (mine included) – unless you go to a specifically targeted language festival. I miss hearing the broad Buchan fairmer loon accent or the accent of the Barra nurse or of the Invernessian scaffy at such literary festivals.

Literacy – the ability to read and write – is, of course, a wonderful thing. A cotter Gaelic lad like me is as entitled to it as the brightest Oxbridge don, but what literacy (almost inevitably?) does is smother, or silence, the oral voice. Primary and secondary school and college and university tend to “iron out” those beautiful, delicate native fluencies which are, almost subconsciously, edited as “errors” on the written page.

It’s a battle that us “regional” writers........

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