I trained as a newspaper journalist with EMAP in Spalding, Lincolnshire and worked for the Oxford Mail and Times before coming to Scotland with my husband Ray Perman in 1975. Since then – 51 years, 3 sons and five grandchildren later – my work has evolved through newspapers, magazines and books, to new media publishing. And woodland gardening.
My career as a journalist helped me to discover that so-called ordinary people are always doing extraordinary things. The cult of celebrity (swallowed so eagerly by much of our media – new and old) ignores the rich abnormality of normal people, demeans the unrecognised triumphs that all of us achieve in our everyday lives.
In recent years my work has taken new directions. I still enjoy editing printed publications, but there is also the creative challenge of digital communication.
Since 2011, I have had the great pleasure of working with an innovative young company Walking Heads (part of InnerEar) using spoken word with moving images to reach a wider audience. We bring the best of old and new knowhow together: digital reach combined with real life immediacy and a simple curiosity about people and places.
Scotland’s political landscape opens challenges too. As co-editor of Sceptical Scot, launched in 2015, with my colleague and friend David Gow, we are exploring what kind of Scotland we are and might become.
Before that, five years as a director of former Edinburgh City Centre Management Company, discovering the value of public space, helping to start Poetry in St Andrew Square. ( The Poetry Garden thrived briefly but still lurks beneath the surface.)
Plus 15 years of community voluntary work in Leith ( Leith Open Space, informal shadow scheme, Opening Doors and World Kitchen in Leith).
Now, living near Kinross, Ray and I are members of Scotland’s Gardens Scheme and part of a new environmental community group Greener Kinros-shire.
Somehow it all fits. Our manmade and and wild worlds are always entangled. It seems more urgent than ever to make that connection in the age of constant crisis: pandemic, Putin, war and colliding realities of Climate Change.
With the on-off closure of Sceptical Scot, I return to the website my sons created for me as a birthday present way back in what now seems the different world of 2005. I hope you will enjoy exploring a world of curious ideas with me.
