Alma Mater is on Kindle!

          The Imperial 66 my mother bought me to take to uni was still at home when I returned to lick my wounds after four years studying at Edinburgh University. I got a job as a labourer in the steelworks, working three shifts, and decided to teach myself to type, and maybe to write when I got in from backshifts. I was used to staying up late and there wasn't much else to do.

          That was in 1973. So I started writing about my time at university and probably used the diaries I'd kept. By the time I'd finished the first draft of Alma Mater about four years later, I had about half a million words. I was about twenty six when I gave up my job in Edinburgh Public Libraries and ended up living by myself on the dole in a flat near Meadowbank Stadium. I had an old portable then, but my pal Jared moved in with me and gave me a permanent loan of another Imperial 66. Fine machines. Built like tanks.

          So I halved the book by discarding the first two years of my university life and, I think, I got the book down to ... well, a lot less than half a million words! Then I stopped and tried to write other books. It was after I had my first radio play accepted that I started writing it again. By then I'd written, or half written, about three novels, and I didn't want to give up writing prose for dialogue, so I began to re-write Alma Mater when I wasn't writing radio plays.

          I think the draft that's ended up on Kindle was from about 1983. I'm not dead sure. When I finished it then it was two hundred and seventy five pages of double spaced A4. I had a lot on my plate at the time and didn't bother trying to get it published. I thought I'd wait and hold on to it and re-write it again when I was a bit older, but tempis fugit. I think the only publisher I sent it to was Polygon who were then the publisher attached to Edinburgh University and I think I only did that as a joke.

         When I was in sixth year at high school in Motherwell, 1968 happened. What a year! There was even trouble in Edinburgh. The resignation of the Rector made going there extremely appealing though the reality was extremely disappointing. A quote from Malcolm Muggeridge's resignation speech is at the front of the book along with one by Newman.

 NEWMAN: A university is an alma mater, knowing her children one by one, not a foundry, or a mint,  or a treadmill.

Yet how infinitely sad; how, in a macabre sort of way, funny that the form their insubordination takes should be a demand for Pot and Pills, for the most tenth rate sort of escapism and self-indulgence ever known. -MACOLM MUGGERIDGE, ON RESIGNING AS EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY RECTOR, JANUARY 1968.

Alma Mater  is now on Kindle!