Parade of Sail! Aberdeen Bay.

Hello again,

BAP Union -Peru

As planned, I went to the beachfront at Aberdeen to view some of the Parade of Sail which was the final spectacular event organised by the Tall Ships Race 2025. The few hours spent watching and waiting were definitely worth it.

One by one, the vessels entered into the Tall Ships Race left Aberdeen Harbour and awaited the others out in the bay. The day was cloudy but it was still easy to view the ships emerging. At this point to negotiate the narrow harbour exit, the vessels are under engine control though some of the vessels had some sails unfurled. 

Alexander von Humboldt II

I'd stupidly forgotten to charge my big camera battery (I hardly ever use it now) so I had to rely on my phone camera. And since I loaned my binoculars to my daughter ages ago, I didn't have them either. That made it difficult to identify the vessels (apart from the green hull and sails of the Alexander von Humboldt II) but I viewed a good few of the Class A and some of the Classes B,C & D. 

I think the organisers all did a fantastic job over the four day event- The Tall Ships committees; Aberdeen City Council; Aberdeenshire Council; and those other involved bodies like the transport systems and food and entertainment venues. Those involved in policing the event - security staff etc did a very good job too. Well done to ALL! 

Gulden Leeuw (?) 

I thank the ships and crews who took part, large vessels and small, it's such a great event all round.

I took the photo above on purpose to show the contrast of the old and the new! Sailing vessels of yesteryear sailing around the more recent Offshore Wind Farm vanes out in Aberdeen Bay. 

I hope I speak for all attendees though I realise that it's a difficult event for people who are disabled or find a long walk difficult. I can't see how the organisers can make attending for these people any easier but I'm sure any suggestions that can be enacted on will be considered in future.

Bon Voyage to all ships and good luck with the next leg of the race to Kristiansand. 

Slainte!

Welcoming Tim Walker today!

Hello!

Today I'm welcoming my author friend Tim Walker to share his recently published novella The Trials of Arthur Whitty (15th July 2025). It's a really exciting project and has the most fabulous cover, but I'll let Tim do the explaining for you regarding the intent and purpose of the novella. 

 

This novella is the story of plain old Arthur Whitty, a man whose dreams are never dull and whose vivid imagination and sense of humour carries him through a series of sometimes challenging situations. Arthur has retired to a pair of slippers and jigsaw table in a quiet cul-de-sac in Berkshire, England. He walks his dog, Max, and lets his mind wander to a series of dreams in which he is more daring, skilful and adventurous that his real-life humdrum self. He is an irritant to his orderly wife, Emilia, and has succumbed to irksome cancer treatment following a run-in with skin cancer.

Once a date has been set for corrective surgery, Arthur sets his mind on organising a real-life adventure – a bucket list trip to Machu Picchu in Peru where he finds peace and a calming of the spirit. Arthur’s bullish nature carries him through a series of situations but there is little the retired couple can do about the onset of dementia. But Arthur is well supported by Emilia and their daughter, Holly, as the family rally round to make his declining years as comfortable as possible. And there’s always escape to his secret world of risk, responsibility and danger. In his dreams, Arthur always wins.

The author has drawn on personal experience and observations of elderly men in a support group he helps run for Men’s Matters charity in Windsor, Berkshire. Half of all royalties from the sales of this book will be donated to Men’s Matters, who support older men by encouraging social interaction and connecting them to health and wellbeing support services.

Here's a bit about Tim: 

Tim Walker is an independent author living near Windsor in the UK. Born in Hong Kong in the Sixties, he grew up in Liverpool where he began his working life as a trainee reporter on a local newspaper. He went on to attain an honours degree in Communication Studies in South Wales before moving to London where he worked in the newspaper publishing industry for ten years.

In the mid-90s he opted to spend a couple of years doing voluntary work in Zambia through VSO, running an educational book publishing development programme. After this, he set up his own marketing and publishing business in Lusaka, Zambia’s capital, then managed a mineral exploration company before returning to the UK in 2009.

His creative writing journey began in earnest in 2014, as a therapeutic activity whilst recovering from cancer treatment. In addition to short stories, he researched and wrote a five-book historical fiction series, A Light in the Dark Ages. The series connects the end of Roman Britain to the story of Arthur in an imaginative narrative. It starts with Abandoned, then Ambrosius: Last of the Romans; Uther’s Destiny; Arthur Dux Bellorum and Arthur Rex Brittonum, the last two books charting the life of an imagined historical King Arthur.

More recently, he has written a dual timeline historical novel set at Hadrian’s Wall, Guardians at the Wall. His two books of short stories, Thames Valley Tales and London Tales combine contemporary and historical themes and are now available as audiobooks. Somewhere along the way, he co-authored a three-book children’s series with his daughter, Cathy, The Adventures of Charly Holmes.

Thank you for reading The Trials of Arthur Whitty. Please leave a star rating and review on Amazon and/or Goodreads so others can benefit from your experience.

Tim’s Amazon author page: www.author.to/TimWalkerWrites  

Goodreads: www.goodreads.com/author/show/678710.Tim_Walker

Tim’s website: www.timwalker1666.wixsite.com/website

Facebook Page: www.facebook.com/TimWalkerWrites

Instagram: www.instagram.com/timwalker1666

X (Twitter): www.twitter.com/timwalker1666

TikTok: www.tiktok.com/@timwalker804

BlueSky: www.bsky.app/profile/timwalker1666.bsky.social 

My thanks to you  for visiting today, Tim, and I wish you the best success with The Trials of Arthur Whitty. 

Slainte!

p.s. I still have your Light in the Dark Ages novels on my Kindle which may someday get a re-read, especially if I ever go back to writing set in earlier centuries though the late Roman Britain period would require a lot of new study on my part! 

Tall Ships Race 2025 in Aberdeen

Hello!

The green one- AlexanderVon Humboldt II
Bremerhaven

A long awaited weekend arrived and didn't disappoint in the least. The cloudy weather with a hint of Scottish smirr didn't dampen the enthusiasm when I had a fabulous day at Aberdeen Harbour (Scotland) to view the fifty or so tall ships berthed along the quaysides.

The city of Aberdeen was thronging with thousands of visitors to the massive event. In addition to the vessels berthed in the harbour, there were quayside concerts by famous and local bands, lots of food outlets, street entertainers wandering around and plentiful craft tents to browse their varied stock. There were paddleboarders and jet skis on the harbour waters doing stunts and entertainments. I didn't manage to video or photograph him but one of the paddleboarders was playing bagpipes! 

Dar Mlodziezy -Poland in the distance

Union Street, the main street in the city of Aberdeen, was the venue for a huge 'fleet' parade, though I didn't see that this time around. Other events were dotted around the city centre, for families and for all sorts of fun.

Bap Union- Peru

The last time I viewed the Tall Ships Race event was in 1997, an even more exciting time for me. My younger daughter won a berth on the 3-masted schooner Sir Winston Churchill (vessel now retired ). It was a UK Sail Training Association ship and she took part in one leg of the Tall Ships Race 1997. She boarded the vessel in Leith (Edinburgh) which then slowly meandered northwards and she was up on the rigging when her ship sailed into the docks at Aberdeen. It was so amazingly exciting to view the vessels, small and large, following one after another along the entry channel into Aberdeen Harbour, the channel between the quay and Torry Battery to the south of Aberdeen being narrow enough to seem like a canal. The next leg of her race that year was over to Norway.

Note: A new harbour quay in Aberdeen has slightly altered that above situation. 

In 1998, she was invited to do a return voyage, that time on the SS Malcolm Miller the sister ship to the Sir Winston Churchill and very similar. The image below is when the Tall Ships Race came to Aberdeen in 1991, an event  I also attended.

SS Malcolm Miller
Sail Training ship

The SS Malcolm Miller was replaced in 2000 and was sold to a private owner for use as a pleasure vessel. The vessel then had a turbulent time as the Helena C, was seriously damaged and then restored and her original name of Malcom Miller reinstated. It remains in private hands as a charter vessel but its importance on the Aberdeen Harbour quayside in 2025 is that the vessel was built in Aberdeen in 1967 by John Lewis & Sons. We were sad to be unable to board the Miller since those boarding were a private party of guests, though my daughter believed the schooner to be so changed in its current refit that it didn't seem anything like it was in 1998.  

Thallassa- Holland

This time around for 2025, the vessels arrived from Thursday 17th. There has to be a queuing system since once into harbour many are berthed two or three abreast since the harbour area isn't large enough for them all to be dockside.

Rigging of the Sorlandet - Norway
One of the older ships in the race

My plan is to go to Aberdeen Beach Boulevard tomorrow Tuesday 22nd July to view the 'Parade of Sail' as they leave port and muster out in Aberdeen Bay before they each get the go-ahead to begin the next part of the race- each ship given their official start time. To get the real feel of these cutters and clippers you really need to see them in full sail. It's especially impressive seeing the dark green sails of the Alexander Von Humboldt though the one in harbour today is a replacement vessel to the one I saw in 1997. 

So, till next time...

Slainte! 

See the confirmed ships who are in port for 2025 here https://www.tallshipsaberdeen.com/confirmed-ships/

Welcoming author Ali Bacon!

Hello!

I'm afraid it's been a lot longer than ' In the Blink of an Eye' since my last post here but today I'm totally delighted to welcome author Ali Bacon who has used exactly that phrase in one of her book titles. However, she's here to tell us the scenario which has also led to her latest publication 'The Absent Heart' which is exactly my kind of novel! 

Ali has been immersed in similar research to me in that our studies have included various important Scottish people of the Victorian Era like David Octavius Hill and his second wife Amelia (You'll find posts about her on this blog.) 

Every author comes to writing with their own story so here's Ali to tell us...

What the Victorians did for me 

Ali Bacon explains how she used family history to find her way into historical fiction

Until a few years ago I hadn’t thought much about the Victorian era except that my grandparents, born in the 1890s, lived on the very edge of it. I certainly didn’t consider writing historical fiction which, as a non-historian, I thought of as simply too much work!  

However all that changed about 10 years when I was writing a contemporary novel (A Kettle of Fish, 2012) and somehow the story of a Victorian artist and photographer got into the narrative.  I was googling art events in Edinburgh and at the time there was a major exhibition of the work of David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson. I decided to investigate and became quite obsessed by this body of very early photography. I got hold of a large scale study of Hill where I uncovered not just his artistic skill but also his entire life story which I found engaging, intriguing and extremely poignant.

As a result I ended up writing In the Blink of an Eye which was an imaginary account of Hill’s life seen through the women who surrounded him. At the beginning of the novel he had recently lost his wife and was caring for a 4 year old daughter.  She remained a crucial focus but I also wanted to explore the romantic implications. He was a widower; charismatic engaging and at the centre of Edinburgh society.  How come he didn’t immediately remarry as many widowers did in the Victorian era? And who in the end would become his second wife? So there is a romantic thread in the novel but it’s not a romance and many themes of love, loss and friendship are explored against the backdrop of the discovery of photography.  

I was still a very reluctant historical novelist! Researching my characters was one thing,  but then there was all the background research too and even the idea of it was overwhelming. However,  I had some family history to fall back on and the period didn’t seem too remote to be imagined. It also helped that I was writing about places I knew from my own upbringing,  Robert Adamson being a native of St Andrews where I went to university, and the Paton family with whom David Octavius Hill had a very strong friendship,  were from Dunfermline, the town where I was born. Although I haven’t lived in Scotland for quite some time it was fun to feel I was rediscovering my own Victorian roots. Another consideration was the ‘voice’ I would use to conjure up that era. I didn’t want to attempt fully authentic diction (whatever that may have been) so I kept to neutral (to me) language in terms of period but falling back on voices from my youth for a more Scottish flavour.

In the end I was pleased with In the Blink of an Eye and had found it to be a rewarding experience, so I considered where I might go next with historical fiction and again family came into it in the shape of writer Robert Louis Stevenson, a more famous figure than David Octavius Hill and one about whom a great deal more has been written.  I shied away from him at first as a topic but there was a small family connection, in that one of my ancestors had actually gone to university with him so there was that feeling of familiarity and a sense in which we thought of him as one of the family. Eventually, I focused not on R.L.S. himself but on one of the women in his life, a lady called Francis Sitwell,  around whom I uncovered a web of emotional intrigue.  I brought her to life in The Absent Heart published earlier this year. Frances was trapped in a bad marriage but was also in a relationship with a well-connected scholar and critic when they both met the young  R.L.S. The novel unravels this triangle and explores the landscape of friendship, love and desire in late Victorian England. It has quite a different feel to In the Blink of an Eye as it’s set mostly in London and in a later period, but I still felt  in touch with my characters through those generational links.  It has a more conventional novel structure than Blink and readers all seem to consider it a page- turner.

I’m delighted that following publication of The Absent Heart my publishers Linen Press have decided to reissue In the Blink of an Eye with a new cover and I hope this will attract more readers to both books. I’ve just unearthed some old linen napkins, recalling how Dunfermline in the 19^th century was a linen town par excellence, which makes a neat tie-in to my publisher!

More about Ali

Ali Bacon is a native Scot living in South Gloucestershire. Her writing ranges from flash fiction to full-length novels and she has recently dived into historical fiction, with her second historical novel The Absent Heart, inspired by the letters of R.L. Stevenson  published in March 2025. This follows an encounter with a Scottish artist and photographer which became In the Blink of an Eye, (Linen Press 2018), while her short story about a medieval nun, Within these Walls, was winner of the Bristol Short Story Prize, Local Writer Award in 2019. 

Find her on Facebook (AliBaconAuthor), Instagram @alibwriter and Bluesky alibacon.bsky.social

Her website is https://alibacon.com where you can also or sign up to her occasional newsletter Beyond the Book.

Buy Ali’s books:

From Linen Press

https://www.linen-press.com/shop/the-absent-heart/

https://www.linen-press.com/shop/in-the-blink-of-an-eye/

From Amazon

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Absent-Heart-Ali-Bacon/

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07B3HSZ6D/

My thanks to Ali for visiting today with such a fascinating post.

Slainte!