Diary – 10 September 2011

Having spent the best part of a year writing my memoirs, I spent most of the summer trying to put them out of my mind. On a brief holiday in the Isle of Lewis, catching lobsters and catching up with friends, I stopped thinking about it. You can consider it part of a rehabilitation package for recovering ministers. I learned to use an iPad. I even appropriated my wife’s Kindle, and read my first e-book: The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes. At a table in the glorious Auberge guesthouse in Carnish, on the coast of the Outer Hebrides, it wasn’t hard to put away politics and economics.

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Now, at the close of summer, work comes back with a bang, or at least a ring of the doorbell, heralding Lesley White from the Sunday Times, which is serialising the book, and our old friend Murdo Macleod, the Hebridean photographer. He took the pictures of me three years ago to accompany a notorious interview in which I warned we might be facing the worst downturn in 60 years.