Sara & Cariad's Weirdos Book Club - Muckle Flugga by Michael Pederson with Michael Pederson

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

This week's book guest is Muckle Flugga by Michael Pederson.Sara and Cariad are joined by prize-winning Scottish poet and author, Michael Pederson. Michael is the current Edinburgh Makar and Writer in Residence at The University of Edinburgh, he also co-founded the prize-winning literary collective Neu! Reekie!In this episode they discuss Stephen Fry, rivers, vocabulary, Robert Louis Stevenson, writing retreats, Jack Lowden and Salman Rushdie. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you!Muckle Flugga by Michael Pederson is available here.Follow Sara & Cariad’s Weirdos Book Club on Instagram @saraandcariadsweirdosbookclub and Twitter @weirdosbookclubTickets for Sara's tour show I Am A Strange Gloop are available to buy from sarapascoe.co.ukCariad's children's book Lydia Marmalade and the Christmas Wish is out in paperback here now. Recorded and edited by Naomi Parnell for Plosive.Artwork by Welcome Studio.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello, I'm Sarah Pasco. And I'm Carriead Lloyd. And we're weird about books. We love to read. We read too much. We talk too much. About the too much that we've read. Which is why we created the weirdos book club.

A space for the lonely outsider to feel accepted and appreciated. Each week we're joined by amazing comedian guests and writer guests to discuss some wonderfully and crucially weird books, writing, reading and just generally being a weirdo. You don't even need to have read the books to join in. It will be a really interesting, wide-ranging. conversation and maybe you'll want to read the book afterwards. We will share all the upcoming books we're going to be discussing on our Instagram, Sarah and Carriads, Weirdo's Book Club. Thank you for reading with us. We like reading with you. This week's book guest is Muckleflugger by Michael Pedersen. What's it about? A lighthouse keeper and his son have their lives upturned

by a depressed writer. What qualifies it for the Weirdo's Book Club? Well, it's on a lonely, craggy island where it feels like anything is possible. In this episode, we discuss, Steve Stephen Fry. Rivers. Vocabulary. Robert Louis Stevenson. Writing retreats. Jack Loudon and Salmon Rushdie. And joining us this week is Michael himself. Michael is a Scottish poet author and spoken word performer. Alongside his writing, he co-founded the Edinburgh Arts Collective, New Riki. He's also the current Edinburgh Macar and writer-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh. He's written several books, including boyfriends and a collection of poems, the cat prints and other poems. This is his first work of fiction, and it is Marklefell.

Trigger warning. In this episode, we do discuss suicide. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you for coming on to the podcast. Thank you. Michael Fulgerson. Got a little drum on the book there as well. It felt pretty, you know, carnivalesque. Yeah. We're talking about Michael Flagger. Your amazing, amazing book. First novel. First novel. I was a poet. They do. And you've written nonfiction as well. Yeah. Little hood of all the genres.

as my granny says. Worship are at the altar of them all, though. Equally loyal and disloyal at the same time. Don't know where you stand. Well, sometimes the thing that you want to write dictates the form that you write it in. Yeah. Well, you're a non-fiction fiction person.

Actually, so am I. Yeah. We've both, we've all dabbled. We're in the same nefarious club. Also, some of my favourite forms of literature are those that exist in those cookie realms in between. Some of my favorite poetry is prose poetry. where there's prose poetry and poetic prose divide.

Where does it meet in the middle? There's such a like beautiful blur, obfuscation crossover. Some of my favourite fiction is autophiction. You know, you're getting sort of 80% of the person's real life, but they've got all these masks and obfuscations to allow them to explore different territories or to protect people their love or themselves. And I like that sort of ski-wift nature of the genre.

And I guess in a mildly pretentious sense, genres managerial. You know, it's where we put. books in bookshops. It's how we enter them into prize categorisations. I don't think it should too acutely affect the way you write. I think you should follow

story, voice, passion, you know, literary interest and then you can work out what it is and where it sits afterwards. I would love that, because you know that sometimes men will go up to a woman reading at a bus stop and say, what's it about? I'd love it if those were her categories.

First of all, let's talk about style. Oh, look, you're asking me, yeah, yeah, what genre it is. And they'd just be backing off, like, all right, that's the bus coming. Yeah, I think I could hear my mum calling me for dinner. I'd be following them onto the bus. Yeah, continuing that conversation. I've got more to say, thank you.

I've been waiting for someone to ask. Yeah, they've let a fuse. Yeah. And we don't often have a book on where Sarah is wearing the match. I know. I should say, for anyone listening, close your eyes and imagine me in a blue t-shirt that says muckle flugger. In very neon colours, beautifully painted.

Because you're the first author that's brought her sort of little book-related gift. Yeah. Take note, authors. Up in the game. Salon Rushdie next month. Salman Rushdie is my, he's my joke author because he's probably the author that I can least believe

is an actual living person. Really? In terms of when you read the books that it's like, you know, the Ten Commandments, it just exists in stone because God puts it there. Yeah, or it's like reading Shakespeare.

It's like, well, or Nabokoff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like, okay. But Salam and Rushdie is still alive. I can't imagine him around releasing an album or giving people merch. We've got the same boot cover designer, a guy John Gray does all the salmon rusty covers in the UK.

Yeah, if you're watching this, you can see this. One of the most beautiful covers we've had in a long time. I felt like I liked having it on the desk. It's like so beautiful with the lighthouse on it. As soon as I started reading, and obviously I know I've read your non-fiction book, I know from real life, I've read your poetry. This was so real to me, but it was illustrated.

It's a cartoon. And I've never had that experience of reading before. as soon as I started, it was so colourful and magical readers. It was Fantasia. It was, and it wasn't in the same style as the book cover. But the book cover conveys it. Anything can happen here. And you have a map.

You have a map in your book, which is like, that is, you know, the dream of any book. Drawn by one of the UK's foremost book map drawers. You imagine telling your careers advisor, that's what you wanted to do when you left school. So he did all the like Bill Bryson Travel Brooks. He just did the new one for Shakespeare and Company. of the hunchback in Notre Dame of the big Paris map. I think he did the last map, Matt Hague novel.

So he's this beautiful bookmap drawer. And the weird thing about that is you have to give him a geographical note of your book. So it's a summary of your book that doesn't take into account any of the characters, any of the plot, anything sort of dialogue

or human base and just focuses on place and landscape. So you then have to think about your book if it exists solely as a novel of place. What it would be like if there was no one there? And it was really helpful to me in trying to make the island come into life as a character into itself,

to have its own quiddity, was known that I have to describe this book geographically with everything else thrown out the window, which I think you wouldn't have to do under any other circumstances unless you were writing a characterless novel. Markleflugger is the name of a real island that actually exists in the world

which I didn't realise I'd finish the book I recently read Amy Liptrups the outrun and so I again we talked about sister books earlier it's a sister book to your book even though they're completely different but because of the landscape

I'd love to go to the Shetlands So Amy's Orkney so we're sort of going north of north of here so you're going off to let's see get the ferry from John O'Grots or Scrapster you'll come to Orkney after about two and a half hours. It's another 10 hours on to Shetland. So in terms of sort of being the northest of the north, it takes the biscuit in the UK. It used to be described as the full

stop of the United Kingdom. And to give you a sort of idea of the extremity of where you're at, if you're standing in the bulb room, the gallery room of the lighthouse on muckleflugger, you're closer to the North Pole than you are to London. So I figured if you were going to debate the sort of infinitesimal nature of your life compared to the gargantuanness of the world. If you wanted to dwarf your concerns against something bigger and bolder and more sort of numinous, then this would be the perfect place to do that. You know, you couldn't get any more extreme. You wouldn't hit the Nordics. If you went north, you wouldn't hit the pharaohs. You would keep going until you hit the Arctic. And the lighthouse that stands on this island of

muckle flugger, which used to be the most formerly inhabited island in the UK when lighthouse keepers were deemed by the census to live there full time, but then they automated the lighthouses and now it's Unst, which is just behind it. But we're going back to a point in time where it's very much a peopled place.

But if you stand on that island and look at the lighthouse, it looks like you're looking at the last giant at the end of this earth. There's just this huge edifice, this structure staring off into what can be a blanketing, dark, in the midwinter times.

I'm trying to shoot out this beam of courage and hope to offer people, I guess, a beacon or a sign or a sigil that there is someone there, there is warmth and energy, and it cares about them surviving this. Wow. So did you go there for a writing retreat? I've been there twice. So the first time I discovered, basically I was looking for a lighthouse to set this novel in. I wanted you to have this friendship love story set in a beautiful,

building and had written its predecessor, boyfriend, it's a non-fiction book all about male friendship and an old tower in Northern Ireland called the curfew tower. Oh, that's why I'm getting confused, because I was remembering boyfriends thinking, I'm sure, I'm sure he was in like a, is it pronounced a bossy, Boffi? A bossy, yeah. Oh, this must be where he was.

Yeah, no, it's sibling buildings. Basically, I was in this 250-year-old watchtower called the Curfew Tower, a veritable dungeon in his belly, owned by Arts and Provocator Bill Drummond, who now gives it away as writers' residencies, and I wrote boyfriends in there, in this Guardian watchtower, sort of looking back across to Scotland without being able to touch any of the pieces of my life, and I love the idea of this purview of looking out above everything else, and sort of feeling completely sort of master of the universe, yet entirely detached from any of the consequences of your actions. And I felt if I'm going to take this into the fiction world,

I need a sibling edifice. It needs to be back in Scotland, and Scotland has, this beautiful history of creating and designing and engineering delivering lighthouses, these huge candles, these street lamps of the whale road, these life-saving devices and I just need to find their right one. So almost went off on a

lighthouse treasure trail, which it sounds as romantic as it. Yeah, well you're talking about lighthouses is very romantic actually. Yeah, well I love them. It's like the internet hasn't happened. And we should say, I feel like we should just quit because if people haven't read it. So it's, Michael Flugger is an island.

There's a lighthouse on the island. And there is a lighthouse keeper called The Father. And then, yeah, I would say Ouse is the boy. Yeah, Ouse. I'm with you. The river. So, that's the boy. No, but there's a river. Oh, I see.

Sorry. So, I was like, he's the son. Is it not a river? I was like, whoa, Sarah has missed red. Yeah. So he lives there. The father and son lived there. They're sort of the only one to live on muck or muck or flugger at this point, although it used to be more people.

and Firth, which is also a river, yeah, arrives from Edinburgh and that's where sort of like the plot, the mysteries all begin, just in case people hadn't read it because we're talking about all these things that... Lighthouse keeper, known as the father, half in love with the world, half in hate with it, dangerous person to be close to... I've got a real crush on the father. Have you? Sarah!

So my... He's not nice. He's a bificated being, though. You know, he believes in the sanctity of saving. in life. He mans that lighthouse I could take ten keepers to do so. Do you know, my editor at favour

said there should be a helpline for those that accidentally fall in love with a father during the reading of this novel? Because in a sense, he is quite an incorrigible, terrible being. Yeah, we need to get this person away. This is a dangerous person. Awfully, it was just a description of his relationship with whiskey quite earlier in the book

and I was like, I love him. I love him. Take that to you, therapist. The dark, drinking because of the darkness. Yeah. And I realized maybe it has to be. just love alcoholics. Yeah.

That bit where they light up and they're happy and they're animated and it's the best person you've ever met. I think you really catch the depths. The depths of him. Sometimes the drink enters

the father's soft like snarling flames quashing the sun. There's a lot of, and the way he enters him is like a sonic boom like a love letter torn to shreds. He has, he is this ultimate biophicated being.

He's lovable and hateable in equal measures depending on how you look at it. I didn't hate him. I just definitely didn't think he was being a very reliable parent parental figure. Yeah. As a parent, I don't want him as a dad. Don't want him as a dad. That's not what I want him for. Oh, terror. I'm going to snog him. Oh, God.

He'd kiss well. I'm so surprised. Yeah. And again, let's just talk about the knitwear. He did to the mother. Like, we don't feel like, okay. It's rumors. It's all rumors. No, but you still don't get the sense of a happy woman. No, but we're meeting them deep in grief. First time. So never the happy one. That's where it gets fun. Perhaps later in his life.

You know, there's a softness. Sarah, head to muckle flugger and see what you can find. There's a tenderness there. Plus, you know, it's a lost art, the lighthouse keeping. You know, he is this almost victim of the past in that way. Yeah, his livelihood is dying in front of him. That's probably how we'll meet. I'll be in a rowboat.

He'll save you. He'll save me. There's a bonfire in his belly, regardless of how you look at it. I mean, he's an amazing character. And I think it's really interesting that we both have such different takes on him. Because he is an amazing character. And he, I think you really capture like dangerous dads. Like that's what I got, that vibe of a dad who is like, could go either way.

You're terrified. I'm scared of him. Yeah. But like, but you said there is moments of joy and happiness. But like, you never know where the dice is going to land. And that as being a child in that situation is always so exhausting. And Ouse is like the way his personality is molded by this parental figure. I found really heart like sad. And we know right from the beginning

a life expectation that he's going to continue his father's work and he's not suited for it. He should be doing something very dear. He's a knitwear designer. Should be heading to the clothes show. So again, so coming back to the knitwear, we didn't just talk about this, because this jumper that's described

with the sun and the wings. Oh, it sounds amazing. And Michael, I know that you in real life have an astonishingly great collection of... Big fan. Currently wearing. It's one of my most admirable characteristics is my lip knitwear collection.

So was it fun to write? write about someone who's this incredible knitter? Yeah, it felt like my own form of sort of kink writing in a way I was trawling Shetlandic knitware on the internet for a while until it was really sort of lusty with the passion, with the creativity and that

and then I would send Ouse into his workshop to create these things. He's obviously at this real crossroad, this juncture in his life where the father wants him to take over the lighthouse and says he'll render his whole life of failure if he doesn't do so. he believes in the sanctity of that profession and he's fought vehemently and hard

to pass it on to his progency and the fact that he would turn away from that is just abominable at this point in time yet oozes of these softer deportments he's a deeply creative being and he has such a proclivity for knitware he just wants to create these beautiful artefacts to not just pee items of beauty

but with the knowledge that they will also keep people warm during the coldest seasons which they have. They do the same thing they help people the same way but it just in very different like elemental ways like his is so harsh and rough seas and Ouse is soft and nurturing but they rest it's about rescuing

and he cooks he nurses making someone dinner making someone clothing yeah it's such generative careful caring skills you know talking into the grief world as well very briefly we did this sort of off beat literary chat show

called good grief it was me and Gem McKernie and we had like Ocean Vong on on it and Holly McNish and all these different people and it was tips for grieving but in a live environment with a reading and so you didn't necessarily have to give people something that could be part of their armory, their emotional toolkit. It could be a recipe to feed someone to put sustenance in their body during a time that they're not ready to talk and Ouse is doing this or it could be an item of clothing to give them or a way they can dress themselves in grief and Ouse is doing

this for the father all the time he's attending to his grief through these mediums from that perspective, you know, he believes in, I guess, the spiritual value of putting sustenance into the body at a point in time where they can't have an emotive conversation which can fulfill that charge. I guess that's why I found the father hard, because Ouse's whole being, destiny, personality is a reflection of the father. Yeah. Like, we don't know who Oos would be without this grieving father who's not facing anything.

So the nurturing, the knit where the food is because this man refuses to look after himself. Yeah. And I felt this frustration of just like, God, this person, it was can't breathe. He can't fucking breathe because your grief is so loud. And yet you won't say anything. On the Netware front, there was something that came to me. Actually got heckled after calling Shetland the Fair Isle and, you know,

Orkney world leaders when it comes to Netwear, which I was behind. But I was doing Hay Festival, Stephen Fry. We talked to a good bit about Netware. And then after words, quite a belligerent gentleman came up to me in the signing queue and said, no, no, we're number one. It was a Norwegian gentleman were a particularly fetching cardigan.

I've just come back from Norway. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The fishermen knitwear. Yeah. So now I say they're amongst the world leaders just in case this gentleman's following me around. I would also like to inherit his cardigan.

He was old and it was beautiful. They feel like the jacket of an off-duty night. Yes. I feel like a heretical one, not fighting for, you know, queen and country, but just one that enjoys. the nighterly ways you know

I've had to buy from a Norwegian knitware company a lot of spare clips because I wear them so much and I unclip them too enthusiastically sometimes so a few clips have went missing

but the netware never tears it's so strong stronger than the clip moths don't eat it it's too hard it's like it just it's like they need to put indentures

yeah to get into I've got a red one that like I keep I keep thinking maybe I should get rid of it like I'm not really wearing it there will never be a country

cold enough yeah the jumper I got in Norway I've never been cold enough to wear in Norway I had to keep taking it off but not today I mean it's bitter I would say it's not a jumper it's a coat and jumper combined you can wear like a vest top under me you can't because it's the itchiness

because it's itchy yeah but that's almost you need a light cashmere mixed top underneath doesn't have the same itchiness do they have no allergies in Norway you just get an ureate you develop a sort of skin armory to the network calluses that guitar players has but all over your skin all over your arms

Norwegians are so sexy It was interesting when you talked about Firfanoos and the names in the rivers. You know, every character that we know the name of and the book is named after a river or a body of water. Figgie is named after the, it's a bit more sort of esoteric. She's named after the figet burn in Edinburgh and Portobello, which gets colloquially called the figgy. Because whereas some writers think we all have spirit animals, I think we have spirit bodies of waters. You know, the pace of them, the depth of them, the temperament of them, the way they sort of, the way they swell and shrink, the way they change during the seasons,

whether that's a bog or a gully or a ditch. I have this theory about London because of London's lost rivers that it is fed underneath by like the river fleet. There's another one in North London that runs on over Tuftanel Park Station. Literally you see this metal tube come up from the ground and go on. And the fact that like there's these rivers like flowing and like that to me is like that says more about London than the top.

But we've contained all the water. We've contained it all. I've got two things. I'm so excited. I don't say sorry. We're just so excited. but now the man who reads your audiobook, Jack Loudon, plays river cartwright in slow horses. Hang on a minute.

Literary overlaps here. I have never even made that connection. I've been so focused on I'm being the first ginger Mr. Darcy that I've went straight past the riverness of his cartwright. Yes, and also I had a very magical experience and I keep thinking about because I went swimming in Loch Ness about a month ago and it really did change me and it felt like on a cellular level. Being in the Lochness, the magic of Ness, he definitely did, and the mystery and the darkness and the fact that it's so deep and so big, just like me, it's my body of water, I found it. Oh, you've got the next.

Lockness, yes. And more water in Loch Ness than every other lake and reservoir in the UK combined. It's so big. There's so much of it. I like that you chose that for your body. And the best and biggest one. And the mystery, a mystery, mysterious. People don't understand it, but yet they're drawn to it.

It can't. And it's always five degrees. It doesn't get colder than that. So you can swim in it all year round. Wow. That's amazing. Yeah. I do feel, and again, it might be bullshit.

And it's so beautiful. I feel particularly good when I've been in Welsh River. Well, I do feel Welsh body. If I've got in it, I feel like, this is where I'm meant to be. Yeah. Which is denying my Essex heritage. You wouldn't do that. You wouldn't just like go to the reservoir in North London.

He wouldn't feel the same. Well, look, I get in the ponds. I like it. It's nice. But when you get in a Welsh river, oh, it's got so fucking clear. So clear. So wonderful. I'm with you on that. You know, we're topping up our energy levels from these natural world soces. And the only people that aren't named after water sources that we don't know about are the father and the mother, but they are.

You know, the father's born of storm. We get into that. And all storms have names now. And the father ones just sort of clandestine and unknown to you this point in time. Doesn't like naming them. Do you have a name in your head for him? Yes. Oh, interesting. We won't ask. No, we won't ask. And do you have a name for the mother? Yeah. They're all bodies of water, all rivers.

But because the mother's absent in the sense that she's physically no longer in the story because she's died. And these two characters of Father and Usa trying to work out who they are in her absence, how they perjure without the person that was the sort of magnet and the conversational carousel that connected them. Both of them feel that she ameliorated them as a human being, that she was the best parts of them. So they have to work out who they are in her absence.

in each other's company. So there's this fierce stillness with barbs that go sort of halos around them every time they're together because she's not there. So the father for all these sort of incorrigible

curmudgeonliness is in this deep bog of grief. So it's perhaps, I'm just trying to get you to fancy him now basically. I feel like I'm now doing an elongated poetic essay low guardian. Look, I recognize a man deep, deep breathing. One of the things you've brought us is a candle that smells like the dad

And so, look, this will do it. So it's smoke and honey. Smoking honey. That is the father's recipe. Oh, sexy. Take your pants off. Smoking honey. Fags and honey.

Fags and honey. B and H. It does smell lovely, but it smells like a rich man. I don't think he's rich in nature. You whiff it. He's rich in lore. Also felt the same and felt I needed to come to Ussie's aid because you know you get fur coming to the island

this rightly dandy from Edinburgh. Not sure where I got the idea for such a character. a rise full of flamboyance, obsessed with talent, and becomes obsessed with Ouse in a sense and wants to use him, manipulate him to better his own life. And the father wants us to take over the lighthouse. Yeah, no one's thinking about Ouse, really. Everyone wants to control the compass of his narrative.

So I couldn't leave him alone. He's the younger, he's the most whimsical. He's the most vulnerable of the characters. So I thought this boy needs a life coach and a confid on. But who would he want? Well, it would be a favorite writer, Robert Lewis Stevenson. Yes, I wanted to talk about. So RLS, Robert Louis, Steve.

So he turns up as a ghost. Yeah, the problem was he was dead. So I thought maybe that's not a problem and we can exhume him from the dead and gift him to Ouse in his spectral form. So I read a little bit beforehand that you were already a big fan of Robert Louis and you'd already like gone to his archive

and like, yeah, do you want to talk about what he means to you? I guess he's one of the most heralded figures in Scottish literary history. So if I was going to exhume him from the dead and create dialogue on his behalf, I probably had to invest some time into that. There's a lot of Stevenson academics who are very protective of a moment. You know, they want to see you wearing the white gloves.

I've got a couple of strings to my RLS bow. My earliest sort of incarnation of poetry, you know, it wasn't a big literary family, no writers, no doctors, no artists, no anything like that in the family. But my mum was a maternity nurse and a nursery nurse. And when she was a nursery nurse in Leif, she used to put some RLS's poems from a child's garden of verses to music to deal with, kids with behavioral difficulties or social problems that they were bringing into the place. And she would do what I would call music therapy, yet she would clip me around the ear for calling

it something so pretentious. But essentially, I felt she used to do music therapy with these poems. So I got really into RLS's poetry. Then years later, I won the RLS Fellowship. So I got to go to a place called Gris-Sern-Leon, which is near the Fontainebleau forest, southwest of Paris, where he met his wife to be, Fanny Osborne, and all these amazing. like painters and artists, Carl Larson,

the Glasgow boys were all going. It's now sort of like a Carl Larson Heritage Centre run by the Swedish Academy and loads of artists get sent out there

to go and be inspired by it but it was like the bohemian fronging place to be, you know, pre Scots Fitzgerald and Hemingway and everyone going to Glasgow,

going to Paris. I was like, oh, I missed that bit where they went Fitzgerald to Glasgow. Lots of people were assuing the bourgeoisie of Paris to be in this little sort of artist commune out there.

So I got to go there and it was the fanciest accolade I'd ever got. It was a nice sort of prize. And so I felt indebted to Aralist because he was so good at doing what he was doing. I got to be there with my bank account topped up with all this time and space and this laurel to my name. So I thought I'd better start reading his stuff again. And when he started talking to you. I see him in the room right now. We were already chatting, you know.

He's got a lovely jumper Oh, I've won the Fellowship He just appears to you at that point in time Congratulations, here's the prize Then you can't turn him off Imagine that you're like Oh Here's the tickets, let's go

That's a great That's a great short story Yeah Or children's version Yeah Yeah Of your life story But he was such a good letter writer as well

He wrote like five volumes Of these monsters To JN Barry as well There's this You talk about in the book And at the back of the book That like yeah There's this collection of works

Between the two Which I didn't know I didn't know that they were pals So they were and they weren't They were deeply, emotionally connected through letter writing. Even though they both went to Edinburgh University, they just missed each other. So they wrote to each other for like over a decade, really impassioned letters. They actually declared their love to each other.

There's lots of, you know, lascivious, lustiness hanging in the balance there. If you were but a woman, dot, dot, dot. So a lot of that exists between them. So they're these really impassioned love letters, but they never met in person. Barry was supposed to come out and see Stevenson in Samoa at one point, but then literally life started getting more complicated and then he was going to come again

and then he got more married and that, you know, it takes up time and then for the third time he was going to come for a belated honeymoon I think it was, Stevenson dies, really young at 44 so they never met in person despite being in sort of friendship

love with each other. They sort of catfished each other. Yeah. They both have to sort of I was just thinking, did he send one? Did he send a little packet of B&H in a pot of honey?

That's where it comes from. And also, Stevenson's family for three generations before him all designed, engineered and delivered lighthouses. I was wondering if that was when you, because you obviously RLS talks about lighthouses in the book. And he's such a great character. So, you know, I felt like he was there. Like I kept him to be like, is he a ghost? And then he's talking about his family as being like. And I was like, oh, has Michael done that to be, you know, like just made that. But it's true. He really came from a family of lighthouse. His dad and his uncle engineered designed and

delivered Michael Flugger Lighthouse, you know, which was called the impossible lighthouse to build something at that extremity with, you know, no helicopters. Yeah, back in the day. No electric equipment. I think collectively, all of these lighthouses, they were such a feat of man against nature that they're almost Scotland's contemporary version of the pyramids combined. You know, it's unfathomable that they put some of these up. You know, the initial rendition of Markleflug a lighthouse got torn down by the elements and then they had to come back and build it, you know, bigger and bulk here.

And this was in the 1850s. So it was built to light those. waterways during the Crimean Wars to offer people's safe passage so it was built out of war and it's not stopped battling since so it was the perfect ship for the father to captain from that perspective

there are such levels to this so much thought consideration to talk about your writing process how long has this been in your heart and mind so it was pretty cookie you know after finishing writing boyfriends. I was looking for this lighthouse, this friendship love story,

carried it around inside my head for about, you know, six months to a year while I was touring that book, and I built it up, and then I plotted it over lockdown. And I was actually doing a bit of a screenwriting pupillage, I'd call it that, that makes it sounds more official, with a TV director I know who'd just done Gill, then Ludwig, and is actually now doing the new series of Slow Horsesies. Oh, the river keeps getting new. All roads lead back to the river. Yeah, to Jack Lowden. And we basically started doing some drafting

and I developed this blueprint of how to write a novel based on writing a script. So then I wrote the script for Muckle Flugger. I wrote as the initial plan for it as a script synopsis. So it built that up over a few months and then over a month intensely wrote the first draft. So I always say that Muckle Flugger is a book based on a script synopsis for a script

that never got written for a film that never got made which is quite a cock in many way to write a book but for me for vivid descriptions and poetic narrations to write something which was quite laconically character's location happening and hold myself back from doing any of the dialogue or any of the description

until actually the sort of more robust drafting phase of writing it was such a like difficult but canny way to do it because then I would hit the ground running because I've been looking forward so much to being able to dress it up that way but know I've got this driving story engine

so I wrote the first draft intensely within a month and then knocked it back and forth with my editor for like 18 months after that until we were really done with it I mean I love working with editors you know I'm a writer that I think the flamboyancy's

need tamed and this sort of effervescent version of it for me is the paired back It could have been quite a crowded plate, quite an uncomfortable reading. Because your language is incredible. Like your language, I have a friend who's an ostentatist, Joseph from Opergo, who's vocabulary is famous amongst because most, even all of us, he'll use a word that everyone has to go. I genuinely don't know that word.

And some of the vocabulary in this, I was like, what is that? I've got a look at up. Yeah, that's what it reminded me of. But it's not pretentious. It's a comfortable use of a brain that collects language to be more. expressive and you're like that in real life and you're like that in... Yeah, it's genuine. Each one of these words that sort of unfurl in the book, I have discovered them at some

point and I think I've always been insourcing by language. I didn't have that language around me. Insorcelled, lovely, lovely, lovely use there. It was a risky thing to use sometimes, you know, male working class communities if you use a word that someone doesn't, else, doesn't know, it's alienating, there's a gulf between them, it can be seen as a risk under those circumstances. So I think it's sort of rudimentarily, there's two different ways of using language. there's language which has a white picket fence around it as someone that is studied law.

No, you've got your A-level. There is a whole legal lexicon, a legal jargon that is built to keep you out, to make you sort of discompopulated and befuddled by the language, so you will always need to enlist someone to execute it and wield it for you. And also so you don't even know what the judge is saying. Like, obter dictum is literally the judge making the law, and the person standing there doesn't know what's happening. Yeah.

It's supposed to keep you at bay. Yet there's language which is used invitationally with the drawbridge down and I think if you come across a writer, a stand-up, an SES who uses language excitedly, generously, invitationly, you can tell that they've been sort of zesty to use it and it makes you feel welcomed in. But also, like with Lewis Carroll, I did my dissertation at university on Lewis Carroll and Samuel Beckett. And Lewis Carroll was always natural pairing. The sound is sense is what he said. And sometimes, like, the reason that people can read Beckett or Joyce, and they don't need to understand what each individual word means because they're reading a sentence that makes sense to them. Yeah. And that's what language is doing.

Like, yes, if you stopped it and went, definitely define that for me, Pasco. I think it's a kind of firework. But used in context is it's correct. Yeah. I love, like, verbizing a noun as well. Like the rain is porridge the soil. or this thought comes cali into mind but you know it's so easy to turn a noun into a verb

and you've just evolved language in a sort of playful way I love an invented word as well that maybe gives you an idea of what it means or just taking liberties with a word you know just extending their purview like gloriosity something like that you know there is such an easy way to just build upon language in a fruitful and excited manner that

and you know I in most circumstances says me or any writer you come across or even you when you use the words. You didn't invent this language. It was there. You discovered it. It was like a treasure hunt. And now you want to share what you've found.

And the way to you do that is to use it in an excitable and generous manner and cause someone to go and look the word up in the exact same way that you'd done maybe even a couple of weeks before you used it. There might be a newness to your discovery of this language. And it's not a high-brow process in itself. So with the internet, I was co-hosting Pointless this week.

And I didn't know. That, you know, like to own, as in to be owned by someone, as in, you know, they win the little debate. They spell it P-W-N. Own, as in to, oh, she owned you because of the internet, because of the typo, because the O is next to a P. So in the slang dictionary, to be owned or to own is P-W-N. I thought it was like a misspelling of porn. We wouldn't know. Yeah, porn.

I was like, oh, they must be not tame porn. Playing chess. Well, I thought they were like not saying it because it's rude. Yeah. I was like, okay. Well, then it's like you're almost giving words or language a little curio. You know, if you collect tokens on a bracelet. It's like you've put this little token on the word to indicate where you're supposed to place it.

And also you're saying we're a group. We understand this. Because the joy with language is being understood, being comprehended, the connection, the community. And that's why having variations on language is so enticing because we understand a thing that other people don't understand. or I'm understanding a thing in a brand new way, or a writer is showing me something. I'm looking at rain in a new way

and how it hits the soil because of the word porridge. Yeah, and the language you've got for RLS, I'll call him RLS. Yeah. Like the way he, that particular character, you really grafts like how, well, I don't know how he speaks, but I really feel like I do now. Like you really embodied his soul, it felt. Like we were really getting RLS from the language the way it was,

that was different to Ouse, but not so different that they couldn't talk to each other. Yeah, I thought, was that like, again, something you've ever, like, to get his voice? So that was a pastiche, you know, a lot of maybe like 10 or 12 key sentences that RLS uses I've taken from the letters

and from his memoirs. Yeah, because you've got them at the end, and then I've referenced them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And then all of the others I've written in what I see is his brogue or his style from that perspective. So it's almost like me, I'm all like breeding his language together from that perspective.

And that's the riskiest part was creating new dialogue for a much lionised literary stage from the past but you know if I'm not going to upset a Stevenson academic or two I've done this wrong

And they are vicious I bet Stevenson are one of the ones that was particularly elated by and I shouldn't because I've got an advantage because it was a bit of almost Scots vernacular was using the word carnaptuous which I'd heard you know working class people

describe wasp ass when they deeply pursue you, like they've got a vendetta against you, like the carnaptuous wasp. And Stephen Fry asked me mid-show. I've never came across that word before. What does it mean? It was like, Stephen Frye just asked me what word means. Don't get me wrong. There was more that I needed to ask him for. The fact that I even got a point. You know, it's University Challenge. I'm chuffed to forget a point. Oh, that's brilliant. Pawon't him. Pooonan him. Oh, you get there. Yeah, they definitely get a rosettes. I mean, you'll be in a very small group of people.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I had to go local vernacular, but I'm taking it. Oh, it's gorgeous. I wanted to ask you about Firth because especially having... Yes, the character who arrives on my hubblogger, yeah. So having written this book after boyfriend, so we meet Firth as he's intending to end his life. And then, so this is no spoilers to anyone. Yes, he says right from the beginning.

He's going to end his life. and then he sees a northern Gannett and remembers that he promised his grandfather that he would paint one. So this is the reason for his trip. Tim McLaugh or Flugger, yeah. And it's paint and die. Yeah.

Do some painting and die. And that's his sort of headspace. And so I wanted to ask you about, I guess, putting yourself in the position of someone was that something that was sort of part of your grieving process, imagining what might be going through someone's mind? So I guess the backstory is that as I've written this in the follow-up to boyfriends in which I write a sort of Pee and a love letter to who would be my best friend, dearest friend in the world at this time, a guy called Scott Hutchison. He was the singer in a band, Frighton, Rabbit, an incredible artist, you know, loved the world over for his confessional, elegiac lyrics.

And he ended his life almost what felt like to me midway through a road trip we were on together by just. jumping off the Forth Road Bridge. So when I wrote the character of Firth, there's nothing biographical in Firth about Scott that I wanted the readership and quite frankly myself to meet a character in that situation who, even though you get an insight into the dramatics and the pain and the trauma that brought him up there very quickly, he comes back down off that bridge. So I wanted to write a character and walk hand in hand with a character that was taking their life back from the ashes, clawing their life back from the ashes, so that sort of

every gulp of air, every day they continued to live, was in defiance of death. And their whole life was an anthem of survival. And not necessarily infallible or puritan off the back of it. They would still be full of foibles and make plenty of mistakes. But the fact that they decided to go on living was enough. Yeah. And it's so odd that it's a distraction that works. It's not Actually, hang on, I've got something to live for it. I don't know if you've seen Riot Girls, the new Sally Wainwright show. In that show, Joanna Scanlon is about to end her life by hanging and her phone rings. And it's someone being annoying.

And then she joins a rock band. And I think it's so great to show that sometimes these things are a hair one way or another. It's so, I guess, hugely relatable to be in a state where you think I can't go on. That's a real part of the human experience. And for some people, I think it's a really clever thing to do and it feels really true. And I just reading it, I was really like, wow, that must have been very hard for you. While it's full of joy as well in the character,

but taking someone from a place, yeah, taking someone out of that. Yeah, doing what you weren't able to do. Getting into life. Yeah, it was exactly what you want you touch upon there so shrewdly was that I wanted it to be a flippancy. You know, it wasn't someone really, who deeply cared about him, running after him and telling them all the reasons he had to live.

It was something quite juvenile, quite small, a promise he's made to someone that's not even alive, nor holding it to them, nor probably even remembers the promise that they made. It was something pretty throwaway, and that was enough, because it shows the sort of mercurial nature of the mind, actually, if it wants to clasp onto something,

nuanced and tiny and totie as it is, it'll grasp it, and that's reason enough. So you can almost tell that he believes in it, but it's fooling himself a little bit as well. And it was knowing that in those situations there is such a high percentage of people that a tiny flippancy could have changed the outcome. In fact, because we're such, you know, temperamental, you know, emotionally laden beasts, the heart's going like a ferris wheel at that point in time. So small decisions could change the course of their life, at least for the time being. Or just start a brand new story. And actually that goes on all the time anyway.

Tiny little things are a new adventure, a new journey to go on. Male friendship, we don't talk about it enough, do we? We don't celebrate it enough. I don't feel like I know enough about how men fall in love with each other. Michael's doing the good work. You're doing all of it. He's doing the work in his nonfiction and his fiction. Yeah.

Do you know, I think as someone that's been so soppy about friendship, you know, I grew up with my mum being surrounded by friends, friends from high school days, nursing days. Her best friend from when she was like a toddler still comes around to the house twice a week and they chat each other's faces off so much, they've got jawache in the morning. And I always knew I wanted a piece of that friendship pie. My sister was having sleepovers from a young aide, hiding under the sheets, spilling secrets together. And when they left for school the next day, they were linking arms like salted pretzels.

You know, they had this beautiful physical vocabulary to their friendship. And I had a really hard time trying to replicate. that and emulate that and all the sort of all the male friendships I had around me you know I tried to do that to absolutely disastrous effect for many years so I thought you know if this balances itself out I'm going to write a little swan song

beacon of hope to the boys of the future and that's what I'm trying to manifest in these friendships I was so alarmed by hearing some of the statistics that one to three to one to five males say they don't have a close friend that doesn't mean they're not social or they don't have a friendship group around them but they don't have friends that they can speak to fast and intimately and with reassurance about deep emotional

truths. So you've got these men in very social environments, yet still feeling isolated and lonely from that perspective. Yeah. I think the stereotypes are that men bond over drinking and sport, which are not, that's not the souls. That's not, you know, intimate, intimate sharing. My husband, who moved here from Australia, I mean, he's lived here for six years now, but he's still so isolated in terms of all of his friends are women actually really I hope they're friends

I was like yeah I just see how isolated how difficult it is for men to become friends and I've talked about this before but there was this study about stagdos and how they took all the men out

individually to question them and not a single one was having a nice time and they all thought they were doing it for the group so entire clumps of men not getting what they need from other people

and providing something that they think the others want and we can break through that we can break through that Men shouldn't be lonely. Men, we're here for you. I had a staggedy of mine cancelled, not for like, you know, PR reasons,

but because it was too sort of boring and historical. I organised a friend Stagdew in Berlin and took us on one of the, like, history tours. And then on one of the... We would have loved that. Yeah. On one of the boats along the river, which was all about, like,

identifying the oldest parts of Berlin. Amazing. But they pulled... It's my dream holiday. There wasn't... No, there was a bar on the boat, but only did it. bottles of beer and not those two pint

Steiner so they actually pulled the boat over halfway through and got off so it was just me and one of a guy like brother-in-law that wasn't really even invited to the wedding that was on the boat by the end if it was tricky. Mutiny, you had a stag mutiny. I had a stag mutiny. I was a coup d'etat. One of the groom was dressed as a giant baby.

I got in trouble that I hadn't brought any costumes. Why didn't you organise it, Michael? I was going to say you don't seem the obvious choice if he wanted to be dressed as a giant baby. I sort of made a sort of cultural city break weekend. I thought that was feeling. Yeah. And I tell you what, I would, it sounds dreamy. I would have had a lovely time, bottle of beer on the river. We go for a nice inner. This is why this is why midday's women with book podcast and get invited on a lot of staff. Yeah, I was going to say, we're not. It sounds like you created a great city break for some book, book fans. But I wanted that absence to come into the novel. You know, I've always seen myself at war of the concept of man up, which suggests that actually we shouldn't speak about our fears, trepidations, or vulnerabilities, yet we swallow them in the pit of our belly. Like,

piece of grisly meat and dissolve them into silence. And that causes two things. It caused people to, like, numify their senses and their beautiful, soppy, gooey, emotional beings, or it causes people to sort of eventually collapse with the unspoken weight of it all. And Us and the Father, they're trying to find their dialogue. The Father's this conglomeration of every testosterone-driven, stoic, aggressive, Scottish da, that I've came across, be it be at my own or my friends or all of the emotional absentee. that I've seen buckle relationships exist in this human being while still having the will to be important to the person at the other end of it,

but not having the notion of how to tell them to that. And again, the friendship with Ouse and Furf, it's flamboyant, it's romantic, it is definitely in the face of what is the prescribed notion of a male friendship. So I wanted to address all of those stereotypes. After touring boyfriends, if someone had written a book about, friendship or male friendship be it fiction screenplay writers clinical psychologists i'd been on a panel with them so i felt like it was this human hard drive of people's friendship lore and these characters had to had to sort of absorb that and become the the sort of ferry go-round ride for it in every

manifestation that it came across not necessarily to offer the answers but to learn how to ask ask those questions yeah i think it's so interesting and their relationship is like when they discover each other the way you're talking about it makes me think yeah those are two female characters I would have instantly recognised oh they're just going to be best friends but because they're like

what's happening why is he interested in him what's the capitalism behind this there's a deep suspicion yeah it's like oh is he is he safe is Firt is who's okay around Firt like so suspicious where if that had been two female characters

I've been like great they're about to have the adventure of their life they're finally found each other Rachel found Monica yeah I love the scene when Ouse is showing first his library because I love books

and the characters both love books in different ways and the idea of two men one of them whose literature has been about proving to other people that you're interesting and intelligent and a status symbol and then someone who is entirely secret and there's no one to impress and it's genuine and then and first realizing

he might have read more books than me Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know, I love that bit because he hasn't been doing it to impress anybody. He's just being quiet reading. And it's genuine enjoyment. With no audience. So you've got no one to say, have you read? And with books, people who maybe don't read or don't enjoy reading,

one of the things they think is that it's about showing off an intelligence and thinking you're clever than other people. And you go, oh, no, no, this is our Netflix. This is our guilty pleasure. This is our, oh, God, I'm supposed to be doing something else. But I just want to finish this chapter. Yeah, and often when you're like, have you read, you're not doing it to show off.

You're like, I need to talk to someone. It's a sonatory act that I needed to know. I think you would love this thing. And people are like, oh, you're giving me homework. Whereas with Firth, there's so much bravado. He's in the Edinburgh literary scene. He wants to be the prince of it from that perspective. So he needs to have either glorifying or acerbic opinions

on every new work coming out. And he just concentrates on that which is the conversational currency of these sort of Shubines and Salones. So, and then you've got Ouse on the other hand who's just devouring these libraries because it takes his imagination flying beyond the restrictions of this remote island and then there is this then power dynamic

of he's read more books from me but I'm the one that's supposed to be known for this so it re-addresses that balance a little. Have you listened to Jack Loudon reading it? Oh yes. Did you go there for the recordings? So I went to, so Jack Loudon did the audio book, right? let's have her Jack moment

I love him as an actor Did you already know each other? We're friends So he had read Boyfriends, we'd sent him a copy and he'd loved it and then That's cool A moment for that The fact that your sort of mind

Trophy Cabinet has got teaching Stephen Frye language And Jack Loudden loving your item That's so cool Anyway carry on So he loved that book He sent me a really nice message about it And then we had this Zoom about this writing project

we were maybe going to do together. Who knows, maybe we will one day. It involved me researching the character of Bonnie Prince Charlie by assidiously watching the season of Outlander that he's in. Anyway, and then so I went to make up a list of people that I would love to do the novel. There's so many voices and characters in it. It was never a question that I was going to do it. It's beyond my range.

They're sort of, you know, 18 to 80 in it. There's all sorts of accents. has to be this beautiful vespianic delivery. And Jack was high, the sort of top tier of my list and Faber straightaway wanted him to do it. So we asked him and he said, yeah. And it was his first ever audiobook. That's amazing. I'd seen

him contribute to audio book pieces but as a character in like a BBC radio drama, but it was the first time he'd done it and, you know, he approached it really interestingly, he would get a, he didn't read it until he went into record it. So he agreed to do it without having read the book because I've loved previous work.

And he's a really passionate ambassador of Scottish stories. So he got the gist of it and developed into it and thought I can do this. And basically the audio producer would give him a story summary, I think just before he went to record it. But he said, look, I want to experience this book in real time with the characters. He said, you know what? I didn't fluff a line of dialogue because that's what I know I love scripts. But some of them nissient narrator parts of it, he said were pretty tricky for me because you don't do that as an actor. And obviously I use quite cookie and esoteric language. He did say be shouting at me a few times in the vocal chamber.

But he delivered like an incredible job of it. And, you know, in some of my live readings of the book, I've sort of copied his way of speaking like Robert Lewis Stevenson and I read out those bits and they're sort of genteel upper Edinburgh accent. And I was like, oh, yeah, Jack's onto something. He's great at that. But I just loved his work. You know, I'd seen him obviously, Mary Queen of Scots back in the day.

but then one of the ones that really stuck in my mind was Benedictian big Hollywood biopic where he plays the war poet Sigridussoon and I thought he delivers sort of this poetic prose really well under those circumstances and then I'd just seen him in that play the fifth step, the David Ireland one

it was amazing in it as well that's the one Steen went to see and just like absolutely fell in love with him my husband he just he just with Martin Freeman yeah so how he plays so it was a different

he was opposite someone different when it did Edinburgh Dundee and Glasgow and then they recast for London and Martin Freeman so I've seen these two incarnations of it and Jack's been the constant for it it's just a two character play as well

so it's really paired back to the intensity, the ferocity of the acting and he plays an emotionally vulnerable character going into AA so I knew he could deliver it with you know bravura yeah Michael we could talk to you for absolutely hours

we can have one more question because it is about the just for your time I like the hand was up, you're ready to roll. An adaptation, because surely this has a future life on TV or as a film. And I wanted to ask, are you allowed to talk about it? Well, I hope so. We've got some early conversations going about the theatrical adaptation at the moment.

We've had sort of notes of interest from filmy people, but nothing official on the plate. So we're still very much courting. Well, I think it's going to be, I mean, it's such a visual book. and it will be such a brilliant and I sort of wrote it on a screenplay diagnostic so it's sort of made to be adapted and nearly every journalist or host I've spoken to has started casting it for me

so I like that people are invested about how they see this on screen Jack Loudoun first so Jack when we did some of the pre-press for the audio book said look if Michael wanted me to be in it I'm in it don't get me wrong he was backed into a corner at that point in time and he said but only to play Firf. Yes.

He'd be a great for. I did the Edinburgh Book Festival Russell Tovey there. And he said the same. He said, I love this book. I'd love to be in the movie of it, but only to play Firf. Everyone wants to play Firf.

And Stephen, when he introduced the book, described it as the emotional quest of a character called Firf, whereas I don't really see there being a main character. There's a conglomerant of them in a character drama, but all three of them,

they'd put their flag in the sand and it was on the Firf Bay. Hey, really exciting. we could talk to you for so long. Thank you so much for coming in. It's such a brilliant book. Well done on the book. Well done on your award nomination.

Thank you. Yes. Congratulations. It's a total pleasure. I'm such a huge fan of this podcast. As you know, so I've quoted elements of the podcast. Yeah, this is good.

We didn't realize we had running jokes. We do. Oh, there's more tropes than you know. This is beyond Graham Notting for me. Oh, my God. Thanks for you use a metaphor from Weirdo. Ah, yeah. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you for listening to The Weirdo's Book Club. My book, Lydia Marmalade and the Christmas Wish, is available in paperback now. And I'm on tour. Tickets for my show. I'm a strange gloop are on sale now from sarah pasco.com. Head to Instagram to find out about the books we're reading at Sarah and Carriad's Weirdo's Book Club. And please join us on Patreon. For God's sake, we've had it for months. What you've been? Come on. Lots of stuff on there. Loads of stuff. Little stuff. Sneaky stuff. Thank you for reading with us.

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