A small stir of Scots

I wonder how much my enthusiasm for Alexander McCall Smith’s stories about Precious Ramotswe, the founder of The Ladies No. 1 Detective Agency, came from reading them while in a French hospital recovering from an emergency operation?  Grateful to be transported from my hospital bed to Botswana and find myself in her company I wouldn’t have heard a word against her. And when his first Edinburgh book came out called 44 Scotland Street, where years ago I once had digs, did I allow a nostalgic bias to creep in? But here’s Love Over Scotland, and I have no excuse for any bias, nostalgic or otherwise.

Many of the original cast reappear. Bertie is still the same compulsively truthful, precocious six-year-old who greatly endeared himself to me by setting fire to the Guardian while his father was still reading it. Thanks to his mother he’s even more fluent in Italian and a good enough saxophonist to get into a teenage orchestra, despite being 13 years too young for it, by his heart-stopping rendering of ‘As Time Goes By’.