I’ve been nominated as a Versatile Blogger! For this, I thank Ana Ela who writes a fabulous blog at The Habitual Runaway. We discovered each other recently because in a way we are opposites – she lives in Canada and has written about her trip through Europe, including Scotland. I live in Scotland and have written about my trips to North America, including Canada. It’s fascinating to see your own culture reflected back, and I always look forward to what Ana Ela writes. Her pictures are lovely too.

So what does the Versatile Blogger Award entail? Well, according to the rules, I’m supposed to pass it on to fifteen other blogs that I’ve recently discovered or follow regularly. Fifteen! Do I know that many? I’m also supposed to tell you seven interesting things about myself – that sounds easier. I’m going to start there.

1. I like to travel. Hmm, probably not a surprise. Why else would I be writing this blog?
2. I like books. My favourite author varies with time, but I keep coming back to Jane Austen. I love her sharply drawn characters and her wit: the way she says so much while saying so little. This task reminds me of a passage in Emma – the picnic at Box Hill at which participants are instructed to say one thing very clever, two things moderately clever or three things very dull indeed. Will that make my seven things excruciatingly dull? I do hope not.
3. When I was very young, I used to tell people I wanted to be an author when I grew up – until I was about 12, I wrote stories in notebooks and on scrap paper which I kept in a shoebox. Once I realised that this wasn’t a very secure career path I settled on librarian as the next best thing because I thought you could read all day (wrong!!) It took me decades to get back to writing for pleasure. Blogging is the equivalent of that shoebox.
4. I AM a librarian – I’m not in work at the moment, but once a librarian, always a librarian. When I worked in a Faculty of Education, I started Anabel’s Children’s Literature Blog which I still maintain. There’s even an element of cross-over with this blog; for example my posts about Anne of Green Gables.
5. I am an Englishwoman living in Scotland. I moved to Glasgow when I was 28; this year I shall be 56 and will have lived in Scotland for half my life, so I might start calling myself Scottish. In total I’ve lived in 10 towns or cities and had 17 addresses, so you can see that Glasgow is by far my longest place of residence. Not only that, we’ve just celebrated 20 years in our current house and can see no reason to move. Glasgow is a wonderful place – if you haven’t visited, you should!
6. I’m a little bit obsessed with Leonard Cohen. I’ve seen him in Glasgow, but have also travelled to both Dublin and Berlin for his concerts and written about the trips on this blog. He’s 78 – how much longer can he keep up this crazy schedule? Long enough for me to see him again I hope.
7. I’ve been married to John for nearly 32 years. None of the other six things matters as much as that.

So those are my seven things – I’ve even managed to link some of them to travel. Now to pass the award on. Ana Ela skimped on fifteen and chose five. I’m going to skimp even further and choose – two! Well, it does say recently discovered, and I have just come across these in the last few weeks. I would also be really interested to find out about their seven things.

1. Humph and grumble. This blog is very young – only three posts – but the author seems to be keen to get started. I used to know ultraviolet101 (not, I can exclusively reveal, her real name) when we worked in the same library. Maybe the Versatile Blogger Award will give her a stimulus for a new post?
2. Christina James, Crime Novelist. People are always tweeting and retweeting blog posts on Twitter. I’m fairly selective about which ones I read, but one of Christina’s really caught my eye. She didn’t say, but I knew as soon as I started to read it, that it was about living in Yorkshire at the time of the Ripper. It was a chilling piece of writing which conjured up exactly the right sort of atmosphere. I know, because I was there too. Since then, I have found other common experiences in Christina’s posts and I would love to read her seven things.

There is, of course, no obligation on the above bloggers to carry this on, but I’ve enjoyed the process and maybe they will too. Thanks again to Ana Ela for nominating me.