'It was the day my grandmother exploded…'

So begins one of my very favourite novels, 'The Crow Road', by Scottish author Iain Banks.  In 1995 I began a new relationship, and this book was from that time.  Soon after we had read it together, the BBC dramatised The Crow Road, 'our book', and we devoured every bittersweet episode as if it had been created just for us.

My memory of that book will forever be laced with the giddy joy of new love. 

The book remains, the lover does not. 

Our time together was marked by the Dunblane massacre at the beginning, and the Omagh bombing at its end.  What right had I to be so happy, when dreadful suffering was so close at hand? 

I must have grown up a lot in the intervening years, and I see things differently now.  I can share other peoples' sadness's and not be consumed by them - or my own.  But just yesterday, I heard Iain Banks will be 'away the Crow Road' himself, far sooner than he should be by rights; he has terminal cancer, and I grieve for him, his family, and all the further books he would have written were he granted longer. 

 

In today's Guardian, fellow Scottish author Val McDermid writes: ...we should take Iain Banks's work seriously because it enlightens us as well as lightening the load. I can't help raging against the dying of this light. The only good thing about knowing it's coming is that we can all make bloody sure the man knows how much he means to us all ...

This is my attempt to do just that.

 

I have never met Iain, but Google an image or two and you'll see a shrewd looking, personable face gazing back at you.  I shared a slice of my life with his work, and for that I am forever indebted. 

Thank you Iain.