Teller of tales..

My Rotary Club meets in this restaurant, looking out onto the Pentland Hills where Robert Louis Stevenson used to spend his boyhood summers at Swanston. "Tusitala" means "teller of tales" in Samoan.

Stevenson, who settled in Samoa in his declining years, was revered among the islanders. He died in 1894, and was buried on the summit of Mt Vaea outside Apia.

I visited there in the 1980's and, guided by a party of 6th Form boarding school girls (it's a long story), sweltered up to the top on a December afternoon to visit the grave site with its magnificent views over the Pacific. On the tomb are engraved the last two lines of this poem (slightly misquoted).

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.


Yesterday was an amazing sunset over Edinburgh.