Alexander McCall Smith

The author of the No.1 Ladies Detective Agency is the consummate 'feel good' storyteller, with 28 million copies sold in 46 languages!  

https://alexandermccallsmith.com/

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Jeremy Lee 0:13

Today's guest is best described as a distiller of good cheer. His books have sold over twenty-eight million copies in 46 languages. Welcome to you, Alexander McCall Smith.

SPEAKER_00 0:33

How are you feeling? Thank you very much indeed, Jeremy. Thanks for the invitation. I'm feeling fine. Thank you.

Jeremy Lee 0:39

Well, look, I usually start, I'm going to call you Sandy. I usually start, Sandy, with a sort of skip through a CV, which normally leaves me breathless, and it will on this occasion, because for those who aren't familiar with you, and there will be some listening, you were born in Zimbabwe, you came to Scotland to study, you became professor of medical law, you started writing books, in particular The Number One Ladies Detective Agency. And that's the series that has sold over 20 million copies in English alone. Followed up by, and I might get this order wrong, the wonderful series of 44 Scotland Street novels, which is the longest-running serial novel in the world and is serialized in The Scotsman, and the Isabel Dalhousie novels and the Von Egelfeld and the Perfect Passion series, and one I haven't yet touched on, but I'm looking forward to it. The Ulf Waag series set in Sweden, which I don't know whether it's your description or somebody else's, which is known as Scandy Blanc, which I absolutely, except for, you know, it sounds a bit like a pudding. I love it. And you've written standalone novels, children's books, and I see just about to, if you haven't already, by the time you're listening to this deal, come up with a third collection of poetry. So that's one hell of an œuvre. It's over a hundred books. And you know, you're a serial writer in both senses of the word. One final statistic, Sandy. Is it true that if you've not got that much on that day, you will write 5,000 words or so? And even if you've got a busy day, you'll write a thousand or more.

SPEAKER_00 2:31

Well, it used to be true. I I used to write about 5,000 words a day. I've I've rather cut back on that. Nowadays I like to write between two and three thousand words, uh words a day. Sometimes in the past I was able to write more than 5,000, but but now I I feel comfortable at about two to three thousand words uh every day. I have to do that because I'm more or less committed to writing five books a year. So you can't really sit around and wait for the muse to come and tap you on the shoulder. The muse is usually occupied elsewhere. So you you have to sit down at the table and write the books.

Jeremy Lee 3:14

For the benefit, well, for my benefit and others for whom thousands of words starts off feeling like a bit of an ordeal. Did the words come easily to you? Does it flow naturally? Do you start with a framework? And once you've got that done, the story moves along of its own accord. Is that how it works?

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Yes, generally it does. Um I'm very fortunate, and I I consider myself very fortunate in that respect. I'm very conscious of my good fortune in that I don't have to sit there and agonize over the words. The words do come out. I think that fiction is created in the subconscious of the writer to a very great extent. And so the subconscious mind is making up what is happening or what will happen on the page, and then you sit down and so try to access that. So I think the issue is really developing the brain pathways whereby you get in touch with that part of your mind that is creating the story, and then you act as an emanuentis in a sense. You just let it come out. So I do write quite quickly. I usually write at about a thousand words an hour. So I will sit down and I go into, I suppose, what the psychiatrists might call a minor dissociated state. I'm aware of my surroundings, but uh I'm not entirely aware of them. And uh I just sit there and and the words come to me. And I I don't really have to do much editing, in fact, very little editing at all. It all comes out fully formed. It's rather like I imagine hearing a tune. If you're a composer, you hear a melody. Even if you aren't a composer, you can create a little melody in your mind where you aren't deliberately, consciously constructing it, it just flows.

Jeremy Lee 5:10

And in your case, the series are hung, if you like, on a whole set of returning characters. So, by way of the briefest of introductions, the number one lady's detective agency in all its glory is set in Botswana, and the key characters are Mara Motswe and her sidekick, although she probably wouldn't like to be described as that, Mamakutsi and their respective husbands, and the wonderful, godlike character of Ma Potaquani, who runs the children's home. And it's all set near the capital of Habaroni, if I'm pronouncing it correctly, in this idyllic environment where I know it gets too hot out there, but the sun is shining and the landscape is huge, and the people are kind of in the main good. So these are your characters, this is the basis for it. Tell us how you came to arrive at these characters.

SPEAKER_00 6:19

Well, I I worked in Botswana. I had a long association with the University of Botswana of the years, and I worked for a shortish time at the University of Botswana and lived lived in Cabroni, the capital. And I found myself really beguiled by the country and by its remarkable people. The people are really very agreeable people indeed. They they tend to be relatively quiet people, cautious people. It's a cautious, rather quiet culture, but very courteous. And this strikes the visitor to Botswana very strongly, actually. People go there and they discover this world where people seem to treat one another really rather well. That's something which really, really impressed me when I lived there and got to know the the country. Now, Botswana, like any country, um, has its weaknesses, has its faults. Nowhere is without fault. But in Botswana's case, I think it is a country uh in which you find certain values really quite strikingly accepted and made much of. Kindness, courtesy, you get a lot of that there. And um, I was struck by that, and I ended up writing about it in a way in which I hadn't originally anticipated. I decided to write uh the story of a woman in Botswana who sells the cattle, left her by her father, and she starts a little business which is the number one lady's detective agency. And I I chose that really as a means of saying something about the society, because with a detective agency, you can get people coming in with all sorts of problems. Um, there's no crime in these these books. These books aren't about crime, they're about people's personal problems. So having that vehicle, the detective agency, as a means of writing about the society was quite useful. And then once I'd invented the characters or discovered the characters, I suppose, they must have been there in my subconscious based on people I'd met in Botswana. Once I had those characters, they took a life of their own. They became, I suppose, more fleshed out, and I really felt very much in love with the place, with their world. And this is now really 27 books later. I'm still writing about them.

Jeremy Lee 8:48

And I'm I'm not sure I'm one of your biggest fans, but I am a huge fan. And I got this, which might surprise you. That is a copy of the first book, and it is it is a special copy, this one, because I bought it at auction, an auction run by Penn, the Writers Association, who are all about defending freedom of expression and stuff like that. And what makes this particular copy special is, as you will remember, that it has some notes that you've written in it. And I had a look at this earlier on because I was thinking about how the strong characters all happen to be women, and and you've written at the bottom of one page Mara Motsway is fond of men, but she understands their weaknesses. That's something you wanted to point out. There's another wonderful note about talking to a publisher who, in fact, didn't go on to publish the book. You say he changed his mind, questioning whether you needed to give a bit of background because the agency was being approached by somebody who ran a school where they had lost a child. And you talk about your decision to put it in because, well, it was necessary by way of background, and it's just fascinating. If you ever get the opportunity, dear listener, to go to, I suppose to go to a book festival or whatever, or to see the notes that the author him or herself has written, it's very special. This is one of my prized possessions. I wanted you to know that. I'm I'm pretty glad that you have it, Jeremy. Well, there was competition in the room, I can tell you that much of it. So it strikes me that a lot of the work of the detective agency revolves around moral, ethical, or even everyday dilemmas, sometimes questions of protocol. And what I think marks you out, and generally speaking, one sees it very rarely, is that you present both sides of the coin. I don't know whether you do that deliberately, but if somebody has erred, you explain why. And it's all about sort of forgiveness. It's extraordinary, and that I guess is why you become known as the distiller of good cheer, the purveyor of feel-good, as people might say these days. I mean, that's all deliberate, I assume.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Yes, I suppose it is. I think uh I write about what I want to write about, and I suppose I write about it in the way in which I feel is right for me. You're right to say that the books do talk about forgiveness. That is something that I am very interested in. I think that forgiveness is a is a very central value, a very central consideration in our lives. And indeed, in my previous existence, when I was a law professor and I was running courses in some of the moral aspect of uh the criminal law or indeed of medical law, which was my particular speciality, I found that a very interesting subject from the philosophical point of view, in that we have to forgive people, we have to show mercy to people. If we don't forgive people, we really keep going an awful lot of old business that just clutters up our lives. And if you can't forgive people, you can't, to use a popular expression, you can't move on as you have to move on if you're going to be any good at living in this world. And so forgiveness is really, really important. There's a moral duty to forgive as well, in appropriate circumstances. Now, there are issues associated with forgiveness. People actually have to acknowledge wrongdoing, they have to understand that what they've done has caused harm to others and so on. But at the end of the day, forgiveness is something which I find moves me greatly when I see it. I think that it's uh it's a great virtue in this life. And we live, I'm afraid to say, in a world in which there seems to be a lot of emphasis on retribution and getting even with people, blaming them, punishing them, punishing people left, right, and centre. And I don't think that necessarily helps the moral tone of our society. And I think we have to be prepared to forgive. And I wonder sometimes whether we are saying enough about forgiveness in our society, whether we are stressing that particular value enough. We're stressing accountability, we're stressing punishment. If anybody does anything wrong, there's very quickly there's a braying mob. If you look at the way the social media operates, forgiveness is probably the last thing that the social media has in mind when it gets going. So Maharmatri does have that, and that's something that I found in my conversations with people in Botswana, my getting to know people in Botswana, there was a forgiving attitude in many respects. It's uh maybe a cultural feature of that particular part of the world, but it is there, and I find myself very impressed by it.

Jeremy Lee 14:38

Don't take this in a general sense, but specifically when it comes to blame and inciting anger, do you believe there's any chance of turning the clock back? Of winding it down, as it were.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

I think that probably we might be able to do that to an extent in that we can we can look at where we are at any particular point and say, is there anything wrong with where we are? And if we find that there is something wrong with where we are, we can do something about that. We can as a society do something about that. So if we decided that there were unpleasant things happening in society, then if we want to go back to the situation before those unpleasant things started in society, I suppose you could call that turning the clock back. And yes, it is possible to do that. I would argue very strongly against any suggestion that stressing the role of forgiveness is an old-fashioned position. I'd say that uh it's a perfectly acceptable, realistic position. I'm not saying that we forgive everything, we mustn't, but uh I do think that we need to understand why it is that people do the things they do. We have to be able to put ourselves into the shoes of other people and see the world through their shoes. And if we do that, I think we may find that we are forgiving them certain things or that we're more understanding of their position. Look at all the conflicts that we've got in the world. A lot of those are flow from the failure of people to understand the other person's point of view, to understand that compromise may be necessary. And compromise, really, I suppose, is the way that we resolve a lot of these unpleasant situations. How do wars end? Wars end through one side having overwhelming power and being victorious over the other side. Some wars end that that way, other wars end by the side saying, Yes, we understand your pain, your hurt, we understand your point of view. Let's see whether we can work out a modus of vendi living together in peace. Seems to me to be the rational way to approach these things.

Jeremy Lee 17:07

Of course, rational, yes. Whether it's the human instinct, it is for some I I think I would argue that it is for the majority of us. But there are pernicious influences, says he.

SPEAKER_00 17:21

Well, I think that's right. You know, Jeremy, I think if you take take a concrete example, look what happened in uh Northern Ireland. I lived in Northern Ireland for a year at a very bad time. I my first job was lecturing at Queen's University in Belfast at a very, very bad time of the Troubles. It really was awful one of the worst times of the Troubles. Low-grade civil war was going on, there were explosions, all sorts of things happening. It was pretty, pretty grim. Northern Ireland has transformed. They transformed themselves through the peace process. Both sides actually had to do quite a bit of forgiving, and a lot of them did. I talked to people who really probably had good reason to feel bitter about what happened at the hands of the of the other side, this is on both sides, but who actually rose above that, and it really is a different country now. It's really totally different. There are still some people who would want those divisions to continue. There are still some political tensions, and I think one shouldn't be naive about that, but nonetheless, it is a very different country. Another example was South Africa, with the peace process there, where people actually really came together with worked with truth and reconciliation commissions and so on, and peace broke out, and people moved from one situation to another without the bloodbath.

Jeremy Lee 18:51

Maybe as I get older I'm becoming less patient, strangely. Or maybe I'm just caught up in this whole notion that everything these days happens so quickly, and the solution to most of these things from a distance seems clear that it has to end in negotiation. So why the hell don't we negotiate? And it's sort of frustration and impatience, I guess. Let's pull away from all that because I'm anxious to dive back into feeling good about life. One of the things that's I just have to ask you, because there are some aspects of modern life that are noticeably missing from the world of the number one ladies' detective agency. And you probably know what I'm gonna say. So this is a detective agency, albeit a modest one. And you kind of think that their life would be easier. In fact, perhaps their work would only really be possible with the aid of a computer and the internet, and yet there is no mention of either, which I am sure is deliberate. Why have you made that decision?

SPEAKER_00 20:07

It is deliberate. When I first wrote the books, because we're going back the first time that I set pen to paper with the short story that started Mara Motsyov, that was 1996. And then the books, I suppose, have been mainly published at the end of the of the last century, and then every year since then. At that stage, people did have typewriters, and the personal computer was just coming in. So, in a way, I don't follow very strict sense, chronological sense in the books. The books are meant to be in the present, but they're not really entirely in the present. They're in in some uh odd time frame where they're features of the present, but they're features of the past. And I think that as far as modern technology is concerned, I have resisted the temptation to put them in because I think that if you introduced computers and if you introduced Google searches into that sort of book, their work would be simplified to the point of not being very interesting. Because if we want to find out anything, it's just a few clicks and a few keys and the keyboard being pressed, and we get the answer to everything. Now, that really rather spoils the fun of looking for the solution to problems. So it's in the same way in which antibiotics would really uh spoil opera. In La Berne, Mimi is suffering. You know, all you'd have to do is give Mini a dose of the appropriate antibiotics, and the opera would end in Act Two. So I think that technology, the modern world, really spoils the complexity of the world. And of course, this is an old view that technology. Insults the dignity of life. Proust, for example, said that steamships insulted the dignity of distance. Now he was writing about steamships. Imagine what he'd say about modern um aircraft.

Jeremy Lee 22:16

And in 50 years, people will be saying the same about this notion of having machines that you carry around with you, maybe, as opposed to machines that are implanted within you. Who knows? I want to move on because I also want to talk about my other favorite series. And I'm digging into one now. I'm I'm halfway through Bertie's theory of ice cream in the 44 Scotland Street series, which I absolutely love. If listeners aren't already familiar with how it works, you write it chapter by chapter for publication in The Scotsman. So it's following in the tradition of Dickens and Thackeray, I think, and many, many others. The difference being that yours has now become the longest-running serial for publication. God knows how many books. And again, this gallery of characters. I'll I'll mention just because it makes me smile, some of my favorites. There's Bertie, I've already referred to. Who, listener, is forever seven years old. Maybe, Sandy, you can explain that, maybe not. Bertie has admirers who we, the reader, we don't necessarily admire very much, in the shape of little Olive and Pansy, who are quite evil. There's the saintly Matthew and his family. There's the thoughtful Angus and Domenica and their wonderful dog Cyril, who I'm trying to train my dog Sydney to be like. And but she's got a very long way to go. There's the absolutely awful narcissist Bruce, who looks at himself in the mirror and smiles in admiration. And there's Big Lou, and I've never met a Big Lou, but I hope to one day. But Big Lou runs a cafe and kicks off the day for her regulars with what tastes like the most wonderful bacon rolls. So here's this gallery of characters, and obviously more, who inhabit this particular part of Scotland. Now, there are so many questions about, you know, I visited Scotland lots of times. I've taken shows to the fringe, I've held my head up in triumph and the reverse. Strange enough, I can remember the reverse much more vividly. And my last two visits to Scotland, I should tell you, have been to sign up politicians, both very different. The late and, in my view, great Alistair Darling, and the slightly less likable Ruth Davidson. But don't let me descend into bitching, which is, you might think, an English trait, or at least to be very open about it, to somebody who you know one doesn't live with. Because a lot, I'm coming to my point now, a lot of the novel is about civility, is about the way one behaves if one's part of this particular Edinburgh set. And maybe it's a civility that imbues Scotland. I don't know. What I'm trying to say is, as a Londoner now living in Suffolk, it seems almost, not quite, but almost as foreign a world to me as Botswana does.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

That's very interesting. I think that uh Edinburgh is quite a civil city. There's a very strong civic sense, so people feel a certain sense of being citizens of the uh of the of the city. Generally speaking, it's quite a polite city. People are usually reasonably polite to one another. So I'm writing about a particular section of uh Edinburgh, Edinburgh, like any city has all sorts of different worlds within it. I'm writing about one which which I suppose represents some of what might have been the traditional values of this uh of this city. It does exist, I think that I'm I'm writing about people of the sort who who's who still live in this city. It's set in the Georgian Newtown, and there is in the Newtown a sense of being part of a rather interesting, varied community in which people, generally speaking, treat one another with civility and have a time for one another. That's I think the thing that possibly distinguishes it is is people having time to talk to one another. And I think that is something which we're losing, perhaps in some larger cities, because of the pace of life. But in Edinburgh, that idea of civilized conversation and conversation in which you can spend some time engaging with the others is still there. So uh it's also a very beautiful city. Edinburgh, Edinburgh's a bit like an opera set. Living in the new town of Edinburgh, you feel as if you're on an opera set.

Jeremy Lee 27:26

Just to go back on what you were saying before, is there's a phrase that nostalgic centrist politicians often use. And maybe it was true. I think it was true once upon a time at Westminster, where people were able to disagree agreeably. Yes. And that's much more difficult to find in London, possibly in any big city. And the 44 Scotland Street novels are absolutely full of it, because behind closed doors there's no shortage of curiosity, shall we say, and being critical. But face to face, it's terribly polite, almost to the point where I mean it doesn't go over this line, in my view, but it could easily, where the politeness is a bit of a mask, and behind it is maybe hypocrisy is too strong a word. Nobody calls Bruce out, and Bruce is the most extraordinary, for those who don't know, the most extraordinary narcissist. He understands completely why women fall at his feet, and if he were one, then he would too. Nobody says to him, Bruce, stop adoring yourself.

SPEAKER_00 28:44

Yes. No, that's right. I mean, he is uh a terrific narcissist. He has this very uh strong, pungent hair gel, clothes-centered hair gel that he he can't resist a shiny surface to look at his profile. But I did actually in one of the books, I think it's two books ago, I had him struck by lightning. This is something that the readers really enjoyed. I remember I was at a literary lunch in Sydney years ago, and these two ladies came up to me afterwards and said, Please will you sort out that character, Bruce? Have something really unpleasant happen to him, preferably involving a steamroller. And I thought this was a little bit a little bit extreme. And I said, Well, he survives the lightning strike, and of course, he undergoes a complete conversion. He goes off to Pluscaden Abbey in the north of Scotland to become a monk. It doesn't last very long, but nonetheless, lightning has that effect. Now, I can give a bit of a spoiler in relation to the one which is appearing in The Scotsman. Bruce is approached by a television company that wants to do a program about people who've had dramatic things happen to them, and they've heard about his being struck by lightning. And they say, We want to tell your story in this sort of reality television series that we're doing. And he says that's great because he's an ex-narcist and likes the idea of being on television. So they say we'll recreate that situation where you're walking down Dundas Street in Edinburgh, and we'll show the viewer what happens. So he says, that's fine, and he starts to do it, and he's struck by lightning again. And that's thereby disproving the adage that lightning doesn't strike in the same place twice. You can get away with that sort of thing, I think, in this sort of serial novel. So I do not quite uh lapse into magical realism, but I do have things which really are a bit unlikely. So, Bertie, for example, as you say, Bertie's been seven for eight years or something like that, and so on. So there's a certain element of fantasy in it, but at the same time, it is anchored in reality, and and there has to be enough credibility. The uh some of the characters have to be credible enough, the events have to be credible enough for people to say, well, this might just happen. So I have odd things coming in from left field. For example, there's uh into Big Lou's Cafe comes the committee regularly of the Association of Scottish Nudists, and they go and they're they're having constant problems because they're arguing with the Glasgow branch of the association, and they're also very cross with the committee for taking them on their summer outing to Glen Etif at the height of the midge season, that sort of thing. It's all ridiculous, but it's uh it's great fun. I have tremendous fun writing that series.

Jeremy Lee 31:39

I can tell. I mean, talking of the ridiculous, you have this Italian nun whose name you're going to reel off now.

SPEAKER_00 31:48

Sister Maria Fiore de Fiore de Montagne. She's a striking character, she's a socialite nun. She's done terribly well since she uh came to Scotland. She's had a meteoric social rise, got onto all sorts of committees, trustee of the National Gallery of Scotland, all of that sort of thing, and is now wearing a tartan habit, very fetching, black watch tartan habit. And she's a ridiculous character. There's a big big role for her in the current one, which is currently appearing in the Scotsman newspaper, which will be come out as a book later this year, in that she discovers that she actually has a Glaswegian connection, which is great fun. Very little of the action happens in Glasgow, but Glasgow's always there as a force, as as another planet to the Edinburgh planet. Bertie wants to go and live in Glasgow when he's 18. He wants to get away from his mother, and he's told that when you're 18 you can leave your mother and go and live in Glasgow, and that's his great ambition to get to Glasgow. So Glasgow plays a bit of a role in this.

Jeremy Lee 32:51

I love the way a moment ago you described the nun as a socialite nun, as though as though that were some kind of religious order. Yes, the little sisters of the rich. Well, that's an interesting and occasionally recurring theme in this podcast, which we don't have time to talk about now. Tell me something. There are, I read, there's a stream of Americans making their way to come and live in Edinburgh. Have you noticed any yet?

SPEAKER_00 33:23

Yes, I have met some people who've uh moved to Edinburgh recently. Yes, I I gather, I gather that they they are.

Jeremy Lee 33:32

Well, I hope to see one or a family appear in 44 Scotland Street at some stage. Because I'd quite like to see how the others regard them and whether or not the others are interested in why they're there, and whether or not that's specifically to avoid the kind of America that it's become under Donald J. Trump. But that's my own particular obsession. Actually, one last question before we we have to round this off. I could go on for so long about your books. Listener, if you haven't yet started out on the journey of reading Alexander McCall-Smith, you really ought to. Going back to Scotland Street, we talked a little bit about the role of civility, the role of politeness. Widening out that out slightly, it seems to me, maybe it's just the way you present it, but it seems to me that the Scottish identity, so to speak, is a very positive one, which I can't help but compare to the state of the English identity, which appears to be quite lost, even to some extent, embarrassed. It feels like it's sort of gone wrong. So the question is, what's Scotland doing right that England at the moment is doing wrong?

SPEAKER_00 35:11

That's such a big issue. I would say, well, firstly, thank you for your positive view of the Scottish attitude. The Scottish attitude does have many positive features to it. I think, like any attitude, it's got negative ones as well. But I think that it's important, and particularly important when this matter is discussed in Scotland, to bear in mind the positive features in the English attitude or approach. I think England is a very tolerant country. I think there's a profound decency in the English. Now, often that you don't hear that being said necessarily as much as it needs to be said in Scotland. But it is true. I find there's a decency and kindness in in England. I really do. And I occasionally in my my books, I've recently in my new collection of poetry, there's a poem about that, about a few days that I spent in rural Cambridgeshire, and talking about the Englishness of it. And there's a there is a gentleness and a tolerance. I think that there are obviously other things that one might remark upon, and I think that there's been I think you put your finger on it when you talk about a certain embarrassment that people in England might feel, and I think that they need not be embarrassed. I think it's you have to be aware of your history, and I think you have to face up to your history, but you shouldn't mean that you deny some of the positive features that one would find in the culture, and I think there are a lot, and I think those should be celebrated. I think people in England should acknowledge them. I certainly see them, and I think a lot of people abroad see them. There are a lot of Anglophiles out there, you know, people who feel very positively towards England. So they do exist.

Jeremy Lee 37:13

I think I know what we lack, which is an English Alexander McCall Smith. I think we need somebody to write about life in an English town and an English city in the way that you do. I, for one, would race to read that. Listen, we've run out of time, Sandy, which is sad. There's a question I wanted to ask you, which, to be very honest, I forgot to ask you at the beginning. However, out of order it sounds, I have to ask you this now. Because reward, or rather, success, to put it the other way around, success comes with rewards. And I read somewhere, I don't know if this is true, that with some of your rewards, you've invested in a tweed tailoring business. Is that true? How's it going? And where can one get one of your tweed suits?

SPEAKER_00 38:09

Well, yes, there's a lovely firm in Edinburgh called Stuart Christie. And it's, I think, either the oldest firm in Edinburgh or the second oldest firm, a tailoring firm which goes way, way back. And they've got some marvelous people working in Stuart Christie, creating gorgeous Scottish country clothes, maked kilts, trous, tartan trous, jackets, all of these things with Scottish wools, Scottish textiles. And part of that, Stuart Christie bought comparatively recently a marvellous old mill in uh Aberfoldy called Glen Lion Mill, which has got these beautiful old machines churning out this terrific tweed. So I became involved with these people and and joined them in their venture. And it's a marvellous way of, I suppose, supporting something that Scotland has always done really very well, produce lovely fabrics, tweed. One thinks, for example, of Harris tweed, which is done on the island of Harris. It's that sort of thing, but there are all sorts of other tweeds that are done. I'm all in favour of uh of tweediness and corduroy and various other.

Jeremy Lee 39:31

I'm of a corduroy age, even if I don't live in corduroy mansions. Sandy, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a treat, it really has. You're looking well. I find it hard because there are other things one needs to read. But my goodness me, if you can churn them out, then I can bloody well read them. So I I will carry on trying to get to each and every one. I'm one Isabel Dalhousie behind, and that's on my desk. I can look at it from where I'm sitting. Carry on giving us that wonderful good cheer. And being that person who champions celebration, forgiveness, and all things good. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Well, Jeremy, thank you. I've so enjoyed our conversation. Thank you very much for inviting me on your podcast. Thank you.