A fascinating bilingual evening, with Angus Peter Campbell. Fine discussion ensued; on insanity, faeries, prophecy, capitalism, and other forms of mysticism!
Angus reminded us that Gaelic medium education only began thirty years ago; prior to then, pupils were instructed to communicate solely in English. This piece of cultural imperialism has left Angus with the surprising handicap of requiring a Gaelic editor to proofread his written Gaelic.
Following the principles of his great influence, Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message, Angus saw that the pre-electrical world of his childhood on Uist represented the twilight of an oral culture on the brink of extinction (from which cataclysm it has fortunately been reprieved).
Angus is currently writing and researching a novel on the topic of faeries, who feature strongly in all Scots and Irish folk heritage (and were famously featured in Robert Kirk’s 17th century masterpiece, The Secret Commonwealth). Angus remembers a local character from his childhood (Archie McKay) who was seemingly well known for being regularly taken away by ‘the host of the dead’ – an eerie insight into a seemingly alternative world view that pertained before the global whitewash of culture wrought by television.
