Fiona Cameron: Contemporary Fiction

Since someone posted Robert Frost’s poem on Facebook recently, I’ve been pondering the roads I chose not to take from school-days onwards. My first career ambition was to be a lawyer. But the harridan who was head of my school burst this bubble very quickly. ‘No opportunities for a woman in that career,’ she announced.… Continue reading The road less travelled…

I’ve decided that, on balance, I still love social media. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have: introduced me to people who have become genuine friends, several of whom I speak to daily; brought me back into contact with former colleagues, neighbours & school friends, and indeed one of my earliest childhood friends (hi, Nick! 🙂 );… Continue reading SM and silver linings

Some of my earliest memories are of sitting up with my equally insomniac mother in the middle of the night, drinking milky tea and eating Barmouth biscuits in the kitchen of our Glasgow flat. Because it was on the top storey, you could see the windows of all the flats in the next street along,… Continue reading Pity the poor rural nighthawk

Fellow Europhiles, I have a sinking feeling that we have learnt SFA from our failure to stop the Brexit juggernaut in its tracks. My take on the failure: the effort was fragmented from the start, and we never managed to fix that during the 2 – 3 years when we still had a realistic chance… Continue reading Learning from our mistakes

Almost all of my novels feature a male character who’s an ace cook, and doesn’t mind doing most of the cooking. Christmas always brings home to me why I dream up men who’re happy in the kitchen: it’s because I haven’t lived with one of that species since I was a child. My father was… Continue reading Another Christmas come & gone

We’ve never eaten so healthily as we have since we went into lockdown in mid-March (no, we didn’t wait for Bozo to announce it). We’re eating more fresh fruit and veg than ever before, even if the weekly fruit-and-veg box route means I’m cooking up some strange combinations. There’s been nothing that hasn’t worked so… Continue reading I love the ‘new normal’

Many factors make me proud to be Scottish. Some of them are geographical: our islands (in particular Arran, Tiree, Whalsay). Our capital (apologies to my native city, but really Glasgow with you it’s not the place, it’s the people; Edinburgh, on the other hand – I love you as if you were a person). Some… Continue reading Being Scottish in 2019

When I was at school (from age 5 onwards; the one I was at had kindergarten, primary and secondary departments all on the same site), I passed the Glasgow School of Art – the Mack – every school day. I also went to painting classes there on Saturday mornings for several years. The building was… Continue reading Don’t stay sad, get mad

It feels like it’s taken forever (mainly because I worked more slowly during 2017, distracted and depressed by the lunacy that’s Brexit), but PERMACULTURE is published at last. On Kindle meantime, but the paperback will be available shortly. Many thanks to those who have helped me get it to this stage: Lin White, Dawn Tomlinson,… Continue reading It’s here at last!

On 14th November, I saw a truck on the A75 loaded with Christmas trees. TV news this morning was full of stories of Christmas lights being switched on. It’s impossible to find what you’re looking for in most shops because they’ve moved everything around to make way for shelf after shelf of Christmas tatt. It’s… Continue reading The how many? days of Christmas