Per Ardua Ad Astra

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Jack goes to great lengths to get his Wednesday post up this week – –

Wendy and I just arrived in Knoxville so completing the first stage of our journey to Scotland. Tomorrow we fly from here to Atlanta and then overnight direct to Edinburgh.

Apart from during the Covid 19 pandemic I’ve organized small group tours of Scotland every year since 2009. Two years ago I decided to stop, but requests kept coming so here we are again; the second final tour! There are already requests for the date of next year’s Third Final Tour.

They take a lot of liaising with an agency over there to organize bookings for hotels, ferries and visits. I also have to coordinate with my driver for the minibus. My longtime driver was an old friend, Colin, who sadly died a few years ago. Colin was much more than just a driver – a great singer and historian. However I had become good friends with another great singer and historian in the form of Alan Reid. He was one of the founding members of the well known ’Battlefield Band’, traveled the world with them and often drove their band bus. So a perfect fit!

Once I’m confident I have all the ducks in something resembling a row, I then start sending regular emails to the paying customers with travel tips and information about the tour.

Finally I have to start thinking about travel arrangements to Scotland for Wendy and me. Checking flight times and prices and deciding where to stay for a couple of nights before the tour starts,

Then I start to worry about whether I’ve thought of everything and what might go wrong, because there’s always something. We’ve had everything from an overnight hospital stay, an emergency dental visit, a ferry strike and bags that didn’t make it with their owner. We even had a family who missed a flight connection and arrived into Edinburgh on the second day of the tour!

But heck – once you’re three hours away from home there’s little point in worrying!

Whit’s fir ye will no gang by ye – que sera, sera – what will be, will be. Hi Ho Scotland here we come!

THE MONDAY BOOK: A Good Neighborhood by Therese Anne Fowler

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Normally I only put books I like in the Monday book. But after battling through this plot, I need to talk.

Character driven books are my favorite. This one set up a premise and then populated it. A black family live in a neighborhood where a white family move in and make some major changes to the property, resulting in damage to a historic tree on the black family’s property.

The black family would be bi-racial, except the white dad died because his family wouldn’t accept his black wife. It’s that simple. And it was kinda…. just too simple. This whole book feels like someone said “I need to write about the plight of American suburbs trying to not be racist” and then kept thinking up more convoluted ways to explore that. There are myriad ways of exploring racism in American suburbs without complications. Try skittles and iced tea walking home from 7-11. You don’t need to kill a historic tree through ostentatious display of wealth.

The narration of the story is told by “the neighborhood.” You never know or meet who is talking. They explore the character of the fall guy in this novel – the creepy stepfather who sets up his stepdaughter’s lover on a rape charge using his connections, and then finds his connections won’t actually turn it off again when he wants.

There’s also a totally unbelievable phone call from the teen girl who keeps saying she wasn’t raped, to the district attorney who is determined not to back down, and a conversation with a counselor who tells her 2/3 of women don’t believe they were raped at first, and pretty much have to come around to not accepting blame.

This is when I threw the book across the room. How many women have said they were raped and told they weren’t?

The plot is convoluted, the people are cardboard, the narration is weird, and frankly the handling of both racism and race culture feel like “what can I write about that will make people read me” rather than real. Those are terrible topics. They’re not entertainment fodder and if you can’t handle them with honesty and authenticity, write something else.