Uist Lady has given me permission to use extracts from her e-book, I Heard a Heron Bark. If you'd like to read her entire collection of blogs, please head to: www.uistlady.com

I HEARD A HERON BARK

PREFACE

Perhaps I should have named this book The Townie Has Landed. Before moving to North Uist, population 1400, the smallest place I had lived in was Salobrena, a Spanish town of some 10,000 souls. Although I was born in Kamapla and lived in a rural Uganda for a while, I grew up in Edinburgh and proceeded from there to study in Durham, and work in Dundee, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Inverness, and Marbella, Andalucia

Even though these places are of different sizes and characteristics, they are definitely towns. I hadn’t experienced truly rural life with all its joys and frustrations.
Once we landed in North Uist, my husband’s ancestral home, I felt compelled to write my observations of a life more different than I’d ever experienced before. New media offered the perfect solution to finding and creating my own audience, and I began to blog, posting in several different places and in return, finding a definite interest in these islands.

For blogging it seemed essential to have a nickname, so instantly and without much thought I plumped for Uist Lady. Fortunately I’ve remained happy with it, and it has even helped shape my writing. The Uist bit is a given, the Lady perhaps more debatable- but in writing about my present surroundings, a community which has been here for millennia more than I have and which has an unfathomably complex web of human history I decided to take a lady-like approach. So although there may be things and people I’d like to write about, discretion is the better part of valour.

I write plenty of reports about the islands for newspapers on a daily basis, so I wanted to try something that expressed more about myself, the being whom you must excise from press reporting. And I’m afraid if you’re looking for an island expert, I’m revealed as a rather inadequate, with no great knowledge of anything, and a horrible habit of anthropomorphising animals.

The blogs have many gaps due to excess busy-ness in other areas, and also periods of unexpected ill-health, so they are far from a complete account of a year in North Uist. I wasn’t really planning to e.publish them, seeing them simply as passing ephemera, but began to realise that I had a body of writing which might be of interest to others before getting lost in cyberspace for ever.

So thanks for choosing to read this. And if you can join me at www.uistlady.com from time to time, I shall be delighted.

Finally, thanks to the long-suffering Mr Mac for his enduring support in whatever I chose to do, even if it’s writing about him.

Uist Lady aka Susy Macaulay, December 2009