Argyll Skies

FINDING Argyll was an accident... an accident which would change my life forever.
Although my family name is Scottish and my forebears herald from Edinburgh and the Lothians; prior to 1990 the furthest north I had ever ventured in the UK was Jedburgh in the Borders.
Born in Hull, I had spent most of my life living and working in Yorkshire and the Welsh borders.
Then one wet September afternoon in 1990 - some 27 months after my last cancer surgery - huddled in a claustrophobic newspaper office in Colwyn Bay, I was mulling over my future.
Would the cancer return? Was newspaper journalism really for me? Is there more to life than what has gone before? What am I doing in this dismal North Wales seaside town?
Questions from which I needed some answers.
I had recently split from my first wife, our divorce was pending, and at the age of 32 I had no direction home.
The planet of my life was beginning to rotate backwards. I needed something green and fresh to give me hope.
As an English newspaper and magazine journalist I was a true untravelled sassanach.
But all that was to change in October 1990, when I accepted the job as Editor of a small weekly paper in the wilds of Scotland.
Suddenly while skimming through the weekly trade press over a mug of black coffee, with the rain hammering on the rear window of our office, I noticed an advertisement.
It was random but maybe it was for me. The recruitment advert was for the job of a senior reporter "with the opportunity to edit" on a small newspaper in a town called Lochgilphead in Argyll.
I blinked, and re-read the advertisement, smiled, checked my curriculum vitae and applied immediately.
Only after I had posted my application did I find Lochgilphead on a British atlas - a small rural place at the head of Loch Fyne, some 90 miles north-west of Glasgow, and half-way between the picture postcard town of Inveraray and the larger fishing/ferry port of Oban.
It would be nestled in the area where one of my favourite movies Ring of Bright Water had once been filmed and where one of my favourite writers George Orwell penned Nineteen-Eighty-Four.
On paper at least it seemed the ideal move.
Almost seamlessly I was interviewed, offered the job and the adventure began.
This was my odyssey and my oracle.