Dec 12 2024 44 mins 1
This week, I’m revisiting the very first place I ever worked, with one of my very favourite writers…
Malachy Tallack was raised in Shetland, so you might think that we’d meet up there - and I’ll hopefully get there soon enough - but we actually caught up in Cupar Library, what with Malachy living in Fife these days.
I had a Saturday job there when I was at primary school, so it was a lovely, if slightly unsettling, experience going back after more than 35 years, but it hasn’t changed that much at all, and I was just so thrilled about that. We need our libraries more than ever…
Malachy’s latest book, That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz, is a gentle, lilting meditation on landscape, love, home - and loss - that centres on a man called Jack, whose quiet life is upturned by a small and quite surprising thing - and then another - and maybe one more…
It’s also an unhurried love letter to the power of a song, and to country music, and there’s a gorgeous accompanying album from Malachy, via Jack - and both are absolutely worth your time…
But seeing as That Beautiful Atlantic Waltz is also a reflection on memory, and the myths that tend to wind around it, I started by taking Malachy back to my bygone days in Cupar Library - as far as I remember them…
