"How many freelance PRs can one country sustain?'

....so true.

http://www.pressgazette.co.uk/content/what-if-we-dinosaurs-are-smartest-people-room

It's the default leap for every former hack, and one that I've taken myself, to an extent, sort of.

Because for me freelance work is all about flexibility. It could mean providing strategic PR advice, writing website copy, editing, subbing, speaking, broadcasting, singing, teaching, fishing, whisky tasting, crisis management, social media ghostwriting, speechwriting, being nice to tourists, selling books and other stuff on Fleabay, and even some paid-for journalism.

But hey, it's better than working.

New Shetland Life Magazine: Islanders wanted!

This has been a difficult magazine to put together for lots of reasons, but I think in the end it's a really good read with some fantastic photographs - and the opportunity for you to take some that will perhaps be just as good!

Andy Holt from Papa Stour contacted me several weeks ago to suggest a piece about the problems being faced by the island - only eight permanent residents now - and his impassioned article makes for salutary reading. Fancy a move? It is one of the most beautiful places in Shetland. Funnily enough, since taking over as editor of Shetland Life I've been looking at something to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the arrival on Papa of the 'first hippies'; Andy was one such. As it turns out, it's a melancholy anniversary.

Meanwhile, The BBC2 show The Great British Bake Off has taken over the Morton family's lives, to an extent, as my son James is one of the competitors, and for the summer's duration our kitchen has been awash with flour and sourdough starters. James shares some of the show's secrets with Shetland Life readers.

We have a unique (these days) photography competition that demands the use of film; another thrilling detective story from Marsali Baxter, regular features like Rosa Steppanova's superb gardening column and Ann Prior's brilliant recipes. And I absolutely love John Brown's hilarious memories of his first motorcycle - a 1940s Velocette.

There's loads more to read and gaze at, and you can either buy the magazine in print form - move fast, though, as it sells out - or download a full pdf version online - you can pay for just one copy and the Pagesuite software is very good indeed. It works very well on an iPad. Get it here:

http://subscriber.pagesuite-professional.co.uk/subscribe.aspx?eid=9b93a5c8-a8fc-4be6-b1c0-7fd92dae25ff

Deep Fried on the Electric Brae

Deep Fried on the Electric Brae

Riding the length and breadth of Scotland

The Magnetic Hill

I can see the slope, the rising road ahead, threading its way upwards along the coastline. There’s a lurch of disappointment in my stomach. It’s been a hard morning, cold and damp and in company. I’m not good at company. I’m not good at people, not cycling with them. They’re inevitably much fitter and faster than I am, and younger, and I’m always taken right back to schooldays, that desperate need to compete, to outpace, to win.

Lactic acid. That's what's burning in my thighs and calves. Over half a century of lazily walking, running, falling over and getting back up again. That's what's wrong with my knees. I can actually hear my knees, if the traffic's quiet, crunching, squeaking and creaking like bits of an old wooden ship asked to cope with a lumpy ocean. 

I'm all at sea. Why am I doing this? I'm out of my depth. These days, I’m not a competitor, never mind a winner. I’m a plodder, a gasper, an agonised get-off-and-pusher.  I’m 56, fat, unfit and fuelled by beer, sugar and fried food. I'm an out-of-breath to the shop for a half bottle of Grouse, four cans of Guinness and a large bag of tortilla chips cyclist. Bryce and his pal Dave, 40-something, serious Sunday fitness riders, are lean and lithe, and although they’re kind and keen to help me along the road, indeed tried to tire themselves out by doing a fast 50 miles prior to meeting me, I can tell that Dave wishes he wasn’t burdened with this heavily-laden, very overweight tourist. It’s the way he races on ahead and waits at farm gates, arms folded, staring at the sky.  His bicycle is an expensive aluminium racer, his lycra-clad body bent around it like a bow.

Bryce is a bagpiper. His lungs are strong, but he’s heard me on the radio and he wants  to chat. "I'm just here for the craic," he says. His cycling clothes are baggier, his bike grey steel. I’m content to let him talk, as my lungs, no longer tobacco-seasoned by still a little emphysemic, are not chanter-fit. I'm not really up to broadcasting the couple of feet from bicycle to bicycle. I'm knackered. I find it difficult to pedal and speak at the same time. I find it difficult to pedal.

“There’s more work than I can cope with" says Bryce, effortlessly. "Every day, or every night. I’m the piper at the Turnberry Hotel, so that’s every day, and there’s weddings, funerals, corporate events. Dinners. I do wee speeches, after dinner things, demonstrate the pipes to tourists. Goes down really well. I have a wee shop up in Maybole, just a wee business, but I’m not there much. I do well with the pipes. There’s too much demand, really.”

Bryce sticks with me, even when I wave him ahead, spluttering with pain outside Culzean Castle. And then, groaning, I crest a wee hill, turn and see that gradually elevating ribbon of grey, wet tar ahead of me. I just want this to end. I want to stop. If these guys weren’t with me, I would stop. Fifteen miles or so I’ve come today, and it’s taken me two hours. What is the bloody point? In a car, I’d be there. No, I wouldn’t have left yet, because I wouldn’t need to be there yet. I mean, I’d leave later because all I have to do is get to Ayr for lunch. Ayr, wha’ nair a toon surpasses, for honest men and bonnie lasses. Burns Central. My dad, my son, my daughter. They’re meeting me there for lunch. To see if I’m still alive. To try and talk me out of this mad caper.

And then the strangest thing happens.

I'm getting ready to expend more muscle-crunching, cramping effort on climbing the slope ahead of me when I notice that I'm freewheeling. Up the incline. I look at Bryce, beside me. He's laughing. 

"Aye, it's something, isn't it?" Suddenly, I know where I am. We are on the Electric Brae. The Magnetic Hill. I am in the grip of a mysterious power. Gravity has no authority in this part of Ayrshire.

I've known this slice of road since childhood, in fact, but never on a bicycle. It was a place parents loved to experiment with cars, when automobiles were fewer and further between, and you could stop one on this stretch of road without risking tail backs, collisions and raging tattooed BMW drivers who've been watching too much Jeremy Clarkson. And wee kids loved it. The sheer weirdness of it. A hill that didn't work. A slope which had anti-gravitational properties. It was the rock, we were told, full of iron. Magnetism. Would it work with…with a Reliant Robin, which was made of plastic, I asked? Who knew? Certainly not my dad in his VW Beetle, his Vauxhall Cresta, his Ford Zephyr. He parked them, facing uphill . He switched off the engines. They crept spine-chillingly forward, sometimes. 

Sometimes they didn't move at all.

On a bike, though, you seemed to fly up the Electric Brae, known locally as Croy Brae. It was like being pushed by God up the A719 between the beautifully named Drumshrang and the negative-sounding Knoweside. My mount, hugely laden with panniers front and rear, and made of quality American steel, surged of its own accord towards heaven, or the Craig Tara holiday park just a bit further on towards Ayr. Against the wind.

It's an illusion, of course. An optical illusion. There are so called 'gravity hills' or 'magnetic slopes' throughout the world, though this is one of the most striking and most famous. General Eisenhower, who was gifted an apartment in nearby Culzean Castle by a grateful Scotland after World War Two, was obsessed with the Electric Brae, and would bring all his guests to see it in action. Hundreds of American soldiers and airmen based at nearby Prestwick flocked here during the war, and tens of thousands of of curious gravity-haters have investigated it since. There used to be metal signs, but souvenir hunters stole them. I wonder if they tested them for magnetism when they got them home? Now there's an immovable granite cairn, bearing this inscription:

The ELECTRIC BRAE", known locally as 'CROY BRAE'.

This runs the quarter mile from the bend overlooking Croy railway viaduct in the west (286 feet Above Ordnance Datum) to the wooded Craigencroy Glen (303 feet A.O.D.) to the east.

Whilst there is this slope of 1 in 86 upwards from the bend to the Glen, the configuration of the land on either side of the road provides an optical illusion making it look as if the slope is going the other way.

Therefore, a stationary car on the road with the brakes off will appear to move slowly uphill.

The term 'Electric' dates from a time when it was incorrectly thought to be a phenomenon caused by electric or magnetic attraction within the Brae.

I'm thrilled, magically transported to a world where cycling uphill does not hurt, where freewheeling everywhere is the rule. I get the same feeling I did when i first let out the clutch on a motorbike, and felt the marvellous, joyous thrill of powered two-wheel balancing. I was defying, painlessly, the power of the landscape, the power of the world to hold me down, hold me back.

Copyright Tom Morton 2012. To be continued...

Provisional programme for Co-op Verb Garden at Belladrum Festival

Here's a link to a pdf on Scribd of the provisional Co-op Verb Garden programme for this year's Tartan Heart/Belladrum Festival.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/101675290/Programme-v3-0-Publicity

I'm performing both a version of The Fairly Good Show (mostly songs and a bit of poetry) and, with Jon Beach from Fiddlers in Drumnadrochit, one of the great Scottish whisky bars, the Whisky Conversations tasting/show, with music, poems and three spectacular drams for everyone who can find a seat.

And that's a point - there are seats in the Verb garden. Soft seats. Big, cushy sofas and armchairs...

But don't fall asleep! There's loads more happening. Interviews with people like the Wombats and Rachel Sermanni (I'm involved in this) the annual music debate, which I'm chairing, and I'm also interviewing the founder of the Black Isle Brewery, which may involve beer. Probably will, in fact. Plus comedy, political debate and much more.

It's also worth pointing out that the Co-op has a shop immediately opposite the Verb Garden where you can get all sorts of Co-op foodstuffs, drinks, fruit and sandwiches at normal supermarket prices.

See you there, I hope.

The Word Magazine. Quite good. Not good enough.

Amid the wailing, gnashing of teeth and rending of chinos from Gap, I have to say that I'm not surprised by the demise of the magazine I will always call Word (changing to THE Word seemed a hubris too far, even for what was at times a preeningly self-delighted publication). I'll miss it, though. I bought it every month, often reluctantly. I hated its sixth-year-common room, cool-rich-fucker superiority, its adherence to a couple of truly terrible columnists, its amateur photography, and latterly its appalling cover art. But there were, albeit erratically, great reads in there, and though it was copy edited and laid out with the dodgy enthusiasm and inaccuracy of the hurried, harried and underfunded, the commissioning/listening to contributors' ideas was often excellent.

Mojo's all-consuming, all-annotating tedium and self-righteous 'authority'I found unbearable. Uncut - inheritor of prime 80s Melody Maker beermonsterism and speedfreak comedown post-modernism - was tiresome, like listening to ranting acquaintances in the pub recalling past glories. Yet both these magazines still find big readerships - Mojo around 87,000 a month, Uncut 62,000. Word was shifting a truly embarrassing 22,000 at last count, and it seems that Guardian Media and the other investors eventually saw that the plug would have to be pulled.

The employees of the magazine will find other work if they're smart and committed enough. It probably won't be 'full-time', pensionable employment, but then, who does have such luxury nowadays, in the temporary-contract media world? The Hepworth/Ellen editorial axis will doubtless do other things with their contacts, reputations and the security which comes from carefully invested cash gained from a lifetime of start-ups, sell-ons and general groovy entrepreneurship. The best Word freelance writers are already working for other magazines, notably the sleek, heavily-funded (Bauer Media, like Mojo) Q, now edited by a former Word worthy and completing its appropriation of Word style in the latest edition by adding a free cover CD to its editorial arsenal. They're sitting around the 75,000 circulation mark too.

Much has been made of the move to digital tablet-consumption of magazines, and how that affected Word. I don't think that was the issue. Everyone's tackling that and generally failing to make it deliver, and Word's cheap and cheerful put-a-pdf-online approach was, well, OK. The problem was they were dealing that hand to a tiny body of subscribers. And those who bought Word, that minuscule group, were generally buying one of the other rock menopause monthlies as well. I know I was. So why advertise?

Truth to tell, Word was that prefects' school mag, written by and for its writers. I'll miss Mark Ellen's personal, often lengthy replies to my critical emails. Rob Fitzpatrick's expansive enthusiasm. But I can find Rob elsewhere (in Q). I can read Hepworth's blog. The fact is that Word was a middle-aged fanzine masquerading as a glossy, taking on perfect-bound (dearie me, it always felt so flimsy...)heavyweights on the newstands, rejoicing in the superior likemindedness of its readers, failing to invest in the kind of expensive, big-time reportage that it needed to, taking too many shortcuts in production. Photographing famous authors 'on the fire escape with the in-house camera': that's local newspaper stuff.

It had a vibrant online forum, fulfilled all the current parameters for cutting edge publishing success, and failed. Because it was good, but not good enough. Funded, but not heavily enough. Edited, but not well enough. The cover CDs were never quite good enough. And in the end, once the big money moved in to replicate its strengths, it proved itself unnecessary.