A dark and stormy night

You could have cut the atmosphere in the bar with a blunt knife. Outside, the weather had clamped down with a vengeance in the way it sometimes can on the west coast of Scotland, and the fishing boats had taken shelter: the result being that fifty boisterous, raucous and slightly fuddled fishermen were crammed into a room meant for twenty at a pinch. The bar was on the other side of the hotel, away from the guest quarters where I was supposed to be. It was my own fault: I should have known better.
I was perched in a corner holding a whisky the size of which you'd never get served anywhere else in the bar without seriously endangering your credit limit, watching the barman dispense whisky and witticisms with equal rapidity. There were more genuine characters per square foot in that small room than you'd find anywhere outside its counterpart in some port like Halifax or Honolulu. Seamen all over have a way of enjoying themselves that’s unique, usually involving trying to drink a bar dry and find a face to smash in. I was content to make myself very small and just watch and listen.
The evening wore on, the noising level increasing in logarithmic proportion to the volume of whisky consumed, and inevitably I found myself watching a particular couple of fellows hunched over a table looking as if they were solving the riddles of the Universe. Maybe they were at that, but the puzzled frowns and expressions of intense and pained concentration indicated I.Q.s about one level up from the average house plant.

The smaller one, only about six foot two and two-twenty pounds felt my gaze in the end. You do that, don’t you: feel someone looking at you. It’s something to do with E.S.P. I imagine, or a guilty conscience. Anyway, he swung round slowly, baby blue eyes traversing the length of the bar like twin hawks looking for a juicy mouse, until they settled on me. I looked away sharply, but not sharply enough. Talk about across a crowded room! I wish he’d been called Sheila, or Morag, but I had a feeling it was just Jock because he couldn’t spell anything as complicated as Hamish.
Funny how simple actions can bring instant attention, like pushing back a chair and standing up. He stood up, the chair scraped back, and there was instant hush. Just like that, magic!
Jock came through the crowd like Moses parting the Red Sea: it sort of parted as he moved, another bit of magic that made me wish I could do the same with the wall at my back. He stopped a yard away, swaying a bit and surrounded by a miasma of whisky fumes that must have really kept the flies away as I had a feeling it was semi permanent. But perhaps I was being unjust: maybe working on a fishing boat made you want that kind of personal deodorant.
“Who are ye starin’ at?” The tone did not make it a polite enquiry.
I smiled in what I hoped was a disarming manner. “Certainly not you.”
“Ye damned well were. An’ ye were listenin’ tay a private conversation, Mr Nosey Parker.”
My smile evolved from disarming to placating. “How could I possibly hear anything in this noise?” There was no noise. Sprint would have loved it.

“How could I possibly hear?” The man mimicked my English accent and moved closer. I tensed and put my glass on the bar. What had been totally innocent looked like turning ugly if I didn’t do something to create an atmosphere of calm and brotherly love and all eyes were turned in our direction in delighted expectation. Jock finally realized we were the focus of attention and decided to push it.
“Look, I’m sorry if I’ve offended you,” I said. “And I'm sorry you think the way you do. Let me buy you a drink to show there’s no harm meant.”
I might have been talking to the wall as things suddenly came to head when he grabbed a fistful of my sweater, thrusting his reddened face in mine. I reckoned I had a couple of seconds before the inevitable happened.
Then the barman came to my rescue. He placed a full glass on the counter and leant across.
“Whoa there,” he said.”`What d’ye want to be fightin’ this fella for, Jock? He ‘s never done ye no harm Leave it be an’ take a drink: that way ye’ll no be sorry.”
“It’ll nay be me that’s sorry,” Jock replied. By God, I was right. “I’ll smash his face in.”
The logic of the thought process escaped me, but the barman just shrugged and beckoned with a conspiratorial air.
“Jock,” he whispered loudly. “D’ye ken James Bond?”
“Aye,” said Jock, with a puzzled frown.
The barman jerked his head at me and hissed urgently. “Yer man there. Yon’s James Bond.”
The effect was little short of miraculous. Jock’s baby blues widened as he went full astern, and there were a couple of snickers from the audience. Then someone at the back of the room struck up a tune on a battered accordion and moments later the bedlam was again at force ten, the incident forgotten.

The Disputed Barricade

This is with my agent. Anyone interested, drop me a line.

We have the distinction of living in a time in which our collective acts will decide the fate of all nature on Earth. Many of Earth’s billions are justifiably worried and embittered by the state of the environment and the results of multinational summits have had disappointing results, bringing further outcry and demands that those in power exercise that power for the good of the Earth and its people. The notion that we are at the mercy of big business and governments has been reinforced by each failure to make positive progress. But there is a movement gathering strength and the people feel betrayed, and that can be dangerous for those who fail in their duties.

Virgil Conlan, the protagonist of “THE DISPUTED BARRICADE” embodies that frustration as he leads the way through thought, beliefs and actions that will validate the feelings of those who read this novel.

“THE DISPUTED BARRICADE” is a novel in tune with the world pulse, and will strike a sympathetic cord in that like so many flawed heroes he is to some extent out of sync with society’s norms.

After half a lifetime as a mining engineer in many parts of the world, I have seen both sides of the environmental fence, seen the appalling destruction uncontrolled industry can wreak, and played a part in achieving positive results. This had placed me in a unique position of having had real experience when it came to writing this novel.

There may have been other novels about the environment, but none have the angle of a biography, none have the combined elements of decline, redemption, violence, tenderness, love and loss, and as powerfully as “THE DISPUTED BARRICADE”.

“THE DISPUTED BARRICADE” is the story of a man with a mission, driven to mount a one-man crusade to save the last great wild places from the depredation of industry. He has talked to those in power, tried reason, and having come against a stone wall of vested interests, political obstruction and industry whose god is money, decided to get their attention the hard way and hit them where it hurts: the balance sheet.

The story is a biographer’s exploration of the man, which takes place at an old beach house on Tasmania’s wild West Coast, inter-spaced with four chapters in which he successfully sabotages an off-shore mining dredge in the Chilean islands, a mining operation in the United States’ Rocky Mountains, and a logging project in British Columbia, Canada.

Conlan’s background, from a young man of Anglo-Irish descent in London’s post-war slums, through independence, a failed marriage, a disastrous affair, alcoholism and despair, to his final awakening and new found sense of purpose on a sheep station in New South Wales’ Blue Mountains, is explored over a spring and summer of wild days and calm, in which the biographer and narrator uncovers his curious semi-religious beliefs about the earth, and comes to understand the roots of his near fanatical love for it.

It is also a love story, and culminates violently in a contracted attempt on Conlan’s life, and his return to Chile to finish the uncompleted job: his rendezvous with death at the disputed barricade.