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Kate Muir - Author/Columnist
Kate Muir is a columnist for “The Times”, a travel writer and author. Her home town is Glasgow and she was a Brownie."Scottish women who are successful are not afraid to get their hands dirty, or fight against the odds"
I think our culture - even for those of us who are not at all religious - has a certain Presbyterianism
underlying it, and people attracted to Scotland come to work there because they appreciate those
no-nonsense, hard-working, pioneering values.
So Scottish women who are successful are not afraid
to get their hands dirty, or fight against the odds. Some of us have also - mistakenly - had
a chip on our shoulders about being Scottish abroad, and we need that Protestant work ethic
to wear it away.
I always talk up Scotland when I'm abroad - beautiful landscape, brilliant art, vibrant culture, and friendly, funny people. I try not to mention our unhealthy lifestyle, our lack of longevity and the fact - in the papers recently - that Scottish children have become the most obese in Europe.
Being abroad emphasises your Scottishness. I found the French much preferred me being "Ecossaise"
than from London. The Auld Alliance always goes down well. Abroad, we always celebrated Burns'
Night, but we don't bother now we're back in Britain.
One of my top Scottish moments was smuggling
lots of banned haggis through the Eurostar bag search machines during the BSE scare - we had
to have the real thing for Burns' night in Paris. The security guard turned a blind eye.
The best piece of advice I can give to anyone who wants to become a journalist, is to get reading and writing.
Your own diary or online biog is a brilliant idea, and you should read everything, from the tabloids, to magazines, to the serious newspapers - a succinct tabloid article, with a brilliant headline, can tell you everything in 100 words, and if you can write concisely, then the long stuff is easy.
I worked on local papers in my holidays, wrote for school and student magazines, and then did a postgraduate journalism diploma at Cardiff University. But if you can't spell embarrassment or accommodation or liaison, you're toast.
I'm proud of winning the Amnesty International Award for feature writing a few years ago. I
was in America at the time, and I wrote pieces on inmates who worked in a factory on death row
in Texas, and another about mysterious deaths in police cells in Mississippi and Alabama.
I'm
also very pleased to have my novel out, Left Bank, published in January 2006.
I would love to interview Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex and some fantastic semi-autobiographical novels. She died a few years ago, but I would like to know the truth about her life with Sartre - I don't think it was a perfect as she made out.
I'm also interested in the fact than Sartre's star is waning, but hers is growing after their deaths. I don't know much about her possessions, except that she lived in a hotel mostly, so had very few. I suppose it would be fantastic to have her old-fashioned portable typewriter.
I would give the money to the Saidia Education Fund in Kenya. My kids' school in London is twinned with Ngilai School in Kenya, and through this charity, we help to send money for the simplest things - books, shoes, lanterns for the teachers to do marking at night, and most importantly, footballs and games.
We also get letters and drawings back from the kids in Kenya, so there's an exchange of information. We have been raising money to build a girls' dormitory, since some of the kids walk up to 7kms to school each day, and we want to encourage more girls to attend school, rather than staying at home.
As more and more children become Aids orphans, the school becomes more important, and is growing vegetables and keeping chickens for food.
My best trip ever was to St Kilda and the Flannan Islands, the last pieces of Scotland way out
in the Atlantic.
We went in an Arctic rescue vessel and sailed 18 hours from Oban, and landed
on the uninhabited Flannans, where there is just an abandoned lighthouse and thousands of extremely-friendly
puffins.
On St Kilda, we saw the village abandoned in the thirties, the stack rocks where the
St Kildans climbed barefoot to catch the fulmars and gulls, and had a drink at the Puff Inn,
then Britain's westernmost pub. I want to go again - it's like the edge of the world.
I would like to see Paris, New York and Glasgow in the 1890s - the decadence in Paris, the wild Irish in New York, and the great, prosperous industrial age in Glasgow.
One of Kate's favourite website's is www.philobiblion.blogspot.com
