Author: Gail McNeillie

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The Arc of Our Covenant

We’re pleased to list the Contents of Archipelago 2:3, currently typesetting, for publication as early in 2024 as can be managed. If you’ve not placed an order already, do please consider doing so. It helps us gauge the print-run while guaranteeing that you don’t miss out, as too many people did with 2:2, for which we are looking into the possibility of short run reprint, after we’ve paid the bills for 2:3. With best regards. Editorial Frontispiece: Lyn Youngson – In Memory of a Gannetry Alan Riach – The Arc of Our Covenant Nicholas Allen – Hy-Brasil Moya Cannon – The News from Tramore Michael Longley – Six Poems (‘Sarah’s Goldcrest’, ‘The Otter’s Funeral’, ‘Coracle’, ‘Whoopers’, ‘Jonquils’, ‘Blackcap’) Edna Longley…

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THE RENDEZ-VOUS

We’re back, moored up, at the Isle of Whithorn, and working night and day, burning the midnight oil in the Wheelhouse, to prepare the typescript for Archipelago 2:2. Our catch is one of the best (and biggest) we’ve ever landed. So there’s a lot of work to be done, checks and balances, and ‘casting off’, in that other dialect, of the print works, and not the nautical one we so crave the moment we tie up at the harbour wall and find ourselves in dull and deadly lubberdom. As you see, on this last trip, we managed, by expert reading of the stars, to meet up with the intrepid kayaking historian David Gange, inspirational devotee of ‘big seas and small…

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All At Sea

This is how we are in August, all at sea, searching the waste of waters, fishing for issue 2:2. There’s only a temp in the office, to package orders, stalk through the Post Office with the mailbag, and drop in at the PO Box. There, the other day, to everyone’s delight, awaiting collection was a copy of the latest issue of the ASLEF Journal (that is the journal of the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers & Firemen). We’ve long been in negotiation with ASLEF over a discretionary Archipelago subscription rate for the membership, many of whom have been dropping in at the London Review Bookshop and buying their copies there at the standard rate. This has more than once led…

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ARCLIGHT

Welcome aboard the latest addition to the Archipelago fleet. One of our readers came upon her in Dundee harbour on, to be precise, 9 March 2021 CDE (Covid Delta Era) and after a phone-call with the Northern Lighthouse Board, we sealed the deal, well within our Tax year, enabling us to write her off at once, as we prepare to finance 2:2. She was ours in return for twelve copies of Archipelago 2:1 on condition we tow her away promptly. We haggled, starting the bidding at six copies, but the Board would have none of it. So twelve copies it was. A lick of paint and a few new fittings and there we were ready to put out. It was…

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