Blazing Paddles

Alone in his tiny kayak, Brian Wilson sets off on an 1800-mile odyssey around Scotland’s grand cliffscapes, unspoiled shorelines, fearsome sea passages and Hebridean islands. He discovers a world of sea-level adventure, and in the process takes a good look at Scottish identity from a unique and fascinating perspective. Sometimes harrowing, frequently philosophical, often hilarious, this book will appeal to all lovers of the coast and its endlessly varied characters, wildlife and lore. Adventure is there aplenty as he battles with whirlpools, heavy seas and hypothermia, streaks naked in front of Lady Diana, and survives a close encounter with a killer whale. The narrative is brim-full of history and folklore, disasters at sea, haunted bothies and the exploits of Celtic Saints, Viking raiders and mermaids. It is inhabited by larger-than-life characters like Tex Geddes the shark hunter, Dr Stan the cave-dweller, and a whole camp of homosexual gold panners. It is also a perceptive commentary on submarines, supertankers, and other issues threatening the Scottish coastline and its unique and fragile wildlife.

Praise for Blazing Paddles:

'…as good a maritime sage as has ever come out of the Scottish seas.’ THE SCOTSMAN

‘…I don’t know whether the adventure itself or the story of it deserves the greater admiration; the combination strikes me as a triumph – which I hope will have many successors.’ BBC RADIO 4 – A Book at Bedtime

‘…one of the classic pieces of canoe writing. This is without doubt the best sea canoeing travel book I have ever read.’ CANOEIST Magazine

‘Beautifully illustrated, by a perceptive conservationist … is both topical and entertaining.’ CANOE FOCUS

About Brian Wilson

Brian Wilson is a highland-based writer and environmentalist, best known for his adventure travel writing. Educated in Aberdeenshire and at Edinburgh University, he graduated with an honours degree in Mental Philosophy in 1984. After working with many of the major Scottish conservation and environmental organisations, he is now a freelance environmental contractor and trainer specialising in traditional stonework and thatching. Currently thatcher to HRH Prince Charles at Birkhall, his company Wildland also won the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland conservation award in 1996 and 2000.

Brian lives near the north-west highland port of Ullapool with his French partner Marie-Pierre and their daughters Malin, Manon and Nellie, and dog Damson.

Brian writes STERN WORDS, a monthly column for OCEAN PADDLER magazine.

See also Brian's Dances with Waves: a coastal voyage around Ireland.

An Interview with Brian Wilson

When did you first begin writing, and what inspired you to do so? Have any specific books/authors served as inspiration for you?

Apart from academic work, and a couple of magazine pieces, BLAZING PADDLES was my first serious writing project - an unusual one in that it required spending 4 months in a small boat! I set out to write an adventure travel book of the kind I would have liked to read, but was far from certain that I could complete either the book or the journey itself!

Some of my earliest inspiration came from Tolkien, Hemingway, Herman Hesse and Robert Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance). RLStevenson's Travels with a Donkey has much to answer for too. Later, I sat up and paid attention to writers like Gavin Maxwell, Frank Fraser-Darling and George Mackay Brown who wrote about people I wanted to meet, and places I wanted to discover for myself. Rachel Carson and Farley Mowat demonstrated that it was possible to write eloquent prose about environmental issues, and Patrick O'Brien and Tim Robinson (Stones of Aran) reassured me that there was no end of stories to be told about the coast, and the sea itself. In a sense these authors, among others, travel with me at all times, as guides and mentors.

Can you tell us something about the inspiration behind your books? And about what you were trying to achieve, what ideas you were trying to convey?

I've been trying to write books with an appeal to a general readership. It is all too easy to become pigeon-holed into a niche for kayaking and adventure-sport readers. This can be avoided to some extent by careful marketing, cataloguing and reviewing, and by the 'image' of the book, but it can only really be successful if the writing itself is of genuine interest to a wider readership. I've tried to explore the interplay of adventure, environment and folklore, and to represent the drama, humour and philosophical connections between the people, places and events of a journey. These, of course, are the elements of any good yarn anyway! The most satisfying aspect of having BLAZING PADDLES serialised on Radio 4's Book at Bedtime was that it meant the BBC believed it had wide listener-appeal.

How do you go about creating your voice on the page?

Truth is indeed often stranger than fiction, but this rarely renders it as engaging to the reader, and first-person factual narratives are at great risk of seeming dryly egotistical. My aim is usually to hide the 'I' amongst the encounters and events which make up the narrative, or to reveal essential information through observation, key encounters and dialogue. There is, however, a limit to how much can be hidden, as readers do like to know with whom they are travelling, or indeed sharing a tent!

While travelling I keep a log of thoughts, conversations and expressions, which will later become the flesh of the book. Back home, I try to stick verbatim to the expressions and phrases as written in the log, which are inevitably fresher and more flavoursome than any chosen for literary polish at a later date.

How and when do you write?

Ideally I need long periods of peace and immersion in order to write well. It may be that several weeks will pass in thinking, reading, planning, arranging structures before material will begin to emerge in forms and phrases I am happy with. A (distant!) deadline of some sort is useful to me, as otherwise something else is always more urgent than the 'work in progress', however the monthly deadline for my Ocean Paddler Magazine column always seems to come around far too quickly! Outdoor work occupies most of my time these days, except in poor weather. So I write mainly during daylight hours, on foul days, between dog-walks and cooking!

What do you enjoy reading? What are you reading that you can recommend at the monent?

I enjoy Jonathan Raban, Bruce Chatwin and Bill Bryson - three very different travel-masters - and a particular hero of mine is Tim Severin, whose imaginative journeys and meticulous historical reconstructions have been inspirational.

Kenneth White amazes me with his ability to express geopoetical ideas so concisely, and his Waybooks were a lot of fun.

Among novels which I have returned to more than once are Barbara Kingsolver's amazing Poisonwood Bible, Keri Hulme's Bone People, Arundhati Roy's God of Small Things, Louis de Bernier's South American trilogy ... oh and almost anything by Annie Proulx!

I'm also looking forward to exploring several writers from the Two Ravens bookshelves, which are beginning to look very hard to resist.