It was the biggest surprise of my life to wake up to ‘Islandeering: the woman walking on the edge of Britain’s hidden islands’ being the featured ‘Full Story’ on the BBC news site.
I had had the pleasure of a telephone interview with Steven Brocklehurst of BBC Scotland a few weeks earlier. He’d asked me if I minded him recording it so that he could extract the detail later when he wrote his article. He immediately put me at ease with his humour and enthusiasm for finding out more about the project. With the flurry of the book launch I didn’t think to ask when the article might appear. The first I knew of it was a good friend emailing me saying ‘…bloody hell Lisa you are in the news’. All I could think of was thank goodness I hadn’t done something awful!
I wrote to Steven afterwards and thanked him hugely for writing such a great piece, he replied ‘Glad you like it, it’s always more difficult to summarise something that someone has been working on for so many years. The story has been pretty well received and got about 600,000 page impressions’. I thought that maybe his ‘pretty well received’ might be a slight understatement.
Well in the end my infamy lasted a couple of days until the Islandeering story was usurped by the Royal Baby’s arrival, calls for Teresa May to resign and some sort of malfunction of Lady Gaga’s dress. I think that’s fair enough!
Thank you Steven and thank you BBC.
