Celebrities help launch a Scottish Book Trust project to get us all writing stories. Claire Black reveals more, and two authors offer extracts from their contributions
GO ON, tell me a story. All I ask is that it's true and that it describes a single day in your life. Are you inspired? Ready this minute to put pen to paper, fingertip to keyboard?
Edinburgh writer Irvine Welsh was. For one of the city's best know
n and most controversial novelists, being asked to take part in Days Like This, a project launched this week by the Scottish Book Trust and BBC Radio Scotland, gave him the chance to write about the day he watched his beloved Hibs beat Kilmarnock in the League Cup Final.
Days Like This is not only for professional writers, though, it's an ambitious attempt to get as many Scots as possible to write the story of a day in their life, which will be used to create a huge online collection, followed by a series of radio programmes and then a book.
Welsh, the mountaineer Jamie Andrew, broadcaster Hardeep Singh Kohli, musician Roddy Woomble, percussionist Evelyn Glennie and actor Siobhan Redmond are all "champions" of the project and by writing their own stories they're hoping to inspire you to do the same. Irvine Welsh couldn't be happier to be involved.
"Writing offers people a sense of options and a way of making sense of their lives and the world they live in," says the author of Trainspotting, The Acid House and If You Liked School You'll Love Work. And he's convinced that every one of us can take part. "Not everybody is inclined to express themselves by writing," he says, "but many people who have either been discouraged or have not had the opportunity certainly are. We all have stories to tell."
Days Like This is based on a New York project that involved the acclaimed author Paul Auster and resulted in the book True Tales of American Life.
For Marc Lambert, chief executive of Scottish Book Trust, it's an opportunity to create a map of Scotland from stories written by Scots the length and breadth of the land.
Working with nearly a thousand community groups, as well as NHS Scotland and major businesses and encouraging individual submissions, it's a showcase of the vibrancy and diversity of Scotland.
"We don't care whether you can spell, whether you can punctuate – that's not important," Lambert says. "We are looking for the raw material of what is a fantastic story. It's rawness and vivacity that we want."
If you fear the tyranny of the blank page, relax: you're not alone. Actress Siobhan Redmond says that she will be writing her story over the next week, while also performing eight shows at London's Globe Theatre. And she's nervously excited about the prospect.
"This is about content rather than style," she says. "I have no pretensions to literary style. I have on one occasion spelled my own name wrongly.
"I'm from a family of storytellers, though. I'm not very good with anecdotes, or even jokes, but a lot of people in my family were so I wanted somehow to pay some kind of tribute to that tradition.
"In doing this I'm remembering things – images, daft phrases – which is a real pleasure. It's nice to get little presents from my own archive."
For Irvine Welsh, the joy of Days Like This is its simplicity and the fact that it's open to everyone. "Anything that gets people expressing themselves and believing in their own creativity is inherently a good thing," he says. "For some it'll be a bit of fun, for others it might start them on a lifelong journey."
• To read the celebrity curators' stories and find out more about Days Like This, log on to
www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/radioscotland/dayslikethis/Irvine Welsh's winning feelingIT WAS a frozen day in March at Hampden Park, where I was heading to see Hibs play in the League Cup final. But I was coming from Miami, with a pair of sunglasses and a light T-shirt and jeans, but with a plastic bag containing a thick fleece and jacket. I flew in Saturday night and arrived at Heathrow at just after nine o'clock Sunday morning. I got a connecting flight to Glasgow and when I disembarked I was glad of the plastic bag and its contents. I took a taxi into town. I found my UK mobile wasn't charged, so I had no way of contacting the boys on the bus coming through from Edinburgh.
It was a typical cold and driech winter Glasgow Sunday morning, and everything was shut. I had time to kill and decided that the best way to get re-orientated was to walk towards Hampden. I crossed the Clyde and headed south, stopping at a McDonald's for the first time in years, drinking a coffee. It had started to snow heavily. I had just come from 90-degree heat and I was feeling the absence of every one of them. That sicky jetlagged feeling hit me hard; like being on drugs but without the buzz.
At 12:30 a pub close to the ground had opened its doors. I was in there for a just a few minutes when my pals Tam and Russell came in with their dad, uncle and some friends. The pub started to quickly fill up with Hibernian and Kilmarnock supporters. I got talking to some lads from Ayrshire, they were good guys and we had a drink and a sing-song together and wished each other all the best. My jetlag was starting to recede. Tam had his phone and I was able to rendevous with the rest of the boys outside the ground and pick up my precious match ticket.
The jetlag kicked in again with a vengeance when I got inside the stadium, where 30,000 Hibs fans and 20,000 Killie supporters were creating an electric atmosphere. I felt a bit disconnected from everything and I suppose the drinks in the pub didn't help. But the fatigue left me in the second half as the goals started to fly in. As that half progressed it was evident that it was going to be Hibs's day, but Kilmarnock fans continued to back their team. Personally, I never felt totally safe even at 3-1, you just don't when you follow Hibs, and I didn't relax till the other two goals hit the net.
But we were treated to some great striking from Benji and Fletch, and 5-1 in a cup final is always a great result.
Hardeep Singh Kohli's school daysA PAIR of socks. Grey knee socks. With a red and blue stripe around the top. That's how Pickle and I met. 1974. August. Hillhead. The West End of Glasgow. The first day of the local primary school and Pickle's mum and my mum found themselves at the back of the school hall, two immigrant wives with five-year-old sons and no knee socks (the ones with the red and blue stripes around the top). The only ones without knee socks. That wasn't the sole defining feature of the two families: we were the only brown faces in the room. Pickle Pathak and me, AJ Ghujral, and our mothers. Was there ever stronger grounds for bonding? A pair of grey knee socks. That was one thing about the immigrants; poor they may have been, but their kids were always going to look the part.
Registration over on the fateful day in Hillhead in the nearly mid-1970s, our mothers left the school hall with fresh plans to acquire knee socks. But not before one of them won the battle to invite the other round for a sweet hot cup of masala tea. In the ordinary run of play, in India, the Pathaks and the Ghujrals would never be friends. The Ghujrals would be the middle-class aspirant affluent aristos of Delhi society; the Pathaks would probably run a small radio repair shop. But here in the great melting pot of British Immigrant culture, finding themselves stuck between floors in the lift of life with each other, the Pathaks and the Ghujrals were forced to meet and bond.
Playing in the one room that the Pathak family lived in, I was painfully aware that Pickle and I had no great desire to be friends. I felt Pickle smelled. This was both harsh and fair. Pickle carried about with him the aroma of curried fish. It was both pungent and subtle. And what an aroma; it was unmistakably marked by a rare and exotic quality.
It was a smell that did not readily exist on the radar of West End of Glasgow smells; yet the nuance, the layers of the smell offered a certain complexity, a challenge that did not at first suggest fish. There was essence of bay, a suggestion of turmeric, the merest hint of cardamom. That smell was a conundrum wrapped in a mystery shrouded in enigma. Notwithstanding this esotericism, Pickle was smelly. And smelliness is next to Oh My Godliness. To be friends with such a child suggested more than just social liability.
MORE INFO"WE'RE not asking for a piece of writing, we're asking for a story," says Marc Lambert, the chief executive of Scottish Book Trust. If you want to take part in the project, here's what you need to do:
• Think of a day that was memorable for you. It might be a day that still haunts you, or makes you laugh, or cry.
• Write 1,000 words about what happened on that day (around two sides of A4, if that makes it a little less daunting).
• Submit your story online at
www.bbc.co.uk/scotland/radioscotland/dayslikethis/ or by post to Days Like This, BBC Scotland, The Tun, 111 Holyrood Road, Edinburgh, EH8 8PJ
• Stories submitted will be read by the celebrity panel and will feature on BBC Radio Scotland's website for everyone to read. The best stories will feature in a series of radio programmes and be included in a forthcoming book.
