A week of Slow Living Habits soft summer rituals in the Scottish Highlands

Welcome back to the Scottish Highlands guys. I've just been doing a little bit of work in Costa. I'm in the car today which may be confusing to some people because I'm normally in my wee camper but that's requiring a little bit of mechanical work that my partner is kindly doing for me today. I haven't actually worked for a cafe for a little while but I fancy doing it today because I've got some focused work to be doing this week because I got my copyedits back from my debut book Scottish Art of Living Slowly and I handed in the manuscript back in the middle April so this is now essentially the detailed edits coming back from the copy editor so it's not complicated stuff it's quite straightforward um it's just time consuming because it's kind of line by line little edits and grammar and formatting things like that so I'm kind of plugging away at it this week because it's due back to my publishers at the beginning of next week and thought therefore having an hour or so focus time in a cafe probably would be quite useful. So I thought I'd take you on a few slow days in my life and maybe show how I balance having some work deadlines alongside trying to live at a gentler pace especially as we are now into summer in the Scottish islands which I know can be a busy time for a lot of people and it's traditionally been the season I've struggled with but I'm trying to embrace it more this year as I have the last couple years and I am learning to love it in its own right. Now I'm going to pop to Tesco's before it gets too busy and then head back to the tardy home. Hello baby girl! He's twitching! He's twitching! Oh mama's home! I know! Mama's home! What are you saying? Excited? I'm excited! To consider what it might be like to practice being at ease. Allow your mind to begin to quiet down. We've come on a bit of a rainy woods walk this morning which I quite like. I think forests are nice in the rain and it's been really like a light drizzle at the moment um but it looks pretty set in so I think we're just gonna stay, well I'm gonna stay waterproof all the way around but it's a forest I've not spent a huge amount of time with. It's Ord Hill which is just above Inverness um across the North Keswick Bridge and I actually came here for the first time a few weeks ago with a friend but we ended up doing a different loop. We followed the Walk Highlands trail which I wouldn't actually recommend, I would recommend just coming to the proper car park um here at the Forestry car park and just do one of the loops. I'm doing a circular one today. I think it's like gonna take about an hour and a half maybe a wee bit less and yeah it's quite nice. It was a bit muggy yesterday so I'm glad it's raining and I always like to do like a different walk or a longer walk with Pi at least once a week just to give her and me a little bit of variety. Walking is something that I do no matter how busy I am it's always something I have to fit in for her obviously but also for me because I just thought myself I would not have my walk. So I've just come back from the library and thought I would share my mini haul with you guys because there was a couple of books that I've requested in which is very exciting. The first one being this one, A Bookshop Summer by Stephanie Butland and this was actually recommended to me by one of my Substack members. I have a chat over there where we're often dropping in books that we're reading or that we've enjoyed recently and she popped up a photo of this and I was like instantly like I really need this on my summer TBR. It looks like a cute kind of feel-good contemporary fiction and I have read Stephanie Butland's book Lost for Words I think was the title. So I think there's a few in this, not sure if it's a series but sort of revolving around this bookshop. I think that one was one of the earlier ones and it's this bookshop set in Yorkshire and in this book it's centred around them hosting a reading allowed book group and this is where four strangers come together and they have surprising results. So I really enjoy reading books for lots of different characters. It reminds me actually of one of the books that comes to mind is The People on Platform 5 or The Passengers on Platform 5, I can't remember. I read that a year or two ago now and I really enjoyed that. That was a great reminder to kind of interact with other humans. I think we're so used to just sort of keeping ourselves to ourselves or looking at our phones. You don't like look up and engage with people around us and that was about people on a train, fellow commuters that ignored each other for a long long time and something happens that means they all have to kind of start talking. This looks like a really lovely feel good read and absolutely perfect for the summer. And the second book I got is One of the Girls by Lucy Clarke and I put in a request for this because in the spring I read, or in the winter even I think, I read Lucy Clarke's book The Hike and I actually just finished shooting my roundup of the best books I've read in 2026 so far for my Substack members and that book quite surprisingly ended up on there because although I read a lot of thrillers I don't often rate them that highly because I think sometimes the writing can be a little bit subpar. I am very much influenced by like the writing style in terms of how much I'll enjoy a book and pacing can be off. I think it's quite difficult to write a good thriller but that The Hike, the one I read before was an excellent example. It had a great suspense, great pacing all the way through but also had more depth. It had great atmospheric writing in this Norway forest where it was set and four different women and we really got to know their characters and it impressed me so I was like I want to read more from this author and I think this might be one of her bestsellers and I don't know much about it apart from the fact it's set on a holiday location and on the back it just says we were all dying for a holiday, a beautiful remote island, blood orange sunsets, towering and a building swell of lies between friends but who will kill for it which sounds you know very intriguing and it looks to be a similar thing with that previous book. It's set across different points of views, I'm not sure how many. I'm also not sure if this is set in the summer but I felt like it gave some vibes like kind of holiday location and it feels like I've been a little while since I read a thriller so excited to get into this one. As you guys know I'm a big advocate for libraries. I think that they do so much good but I think one of the things that I really love about it is they really align with my values in terms of doing things slowly and with intention because I think it's so easy to consume these days, it's so easy even with something like books you can order on Amazon and get it delivered the next day. We are very impatient as a culture and I quite like the fact that if I want to get a book from the library and if I put in a request it can take a wee while for it to come through. Sometimes it's only a week or so but often it's weeks I have to put in books in advance because there's only a certain number of copies especially if something is really popular and I alternate between doing that and getting secondhand books. Occasionally buying new but I just think there's something quite nostalgic about the idea of waiting for a book to come in, it's something I used to do as a child quite a lot and it reminds me to be patient and I don't have to have everything instantly and I do like waiting and that anticipation and like I say libraries are a great sustainable way of reading. Obviously it's low cost free way of reading and they're wonderful community resources as well so it's definitely going to my library once a week, once every couple of weeks, it's definitely like a habit or a ritual that is close to my heart and something that I always recommend people to do whenever they can even just to supplement your reading. It can be a really lovely way of slowing down as well as still having the joy of curling up with a good book.