Alexander Stuart

Many many thanks to Ann Totterdell for this wonderful postcard of Fraserburgh , the nearest "big town" to the tiny Scottish fishing village, Rosehearty , where my dad was born and grew up.  It's a bleak part of the NE Scottish coast (farther north than most of Norway) and my few childhood memories do not include sand, rather grey slate roofs, but the picture here of beach huts prompts some perhaps imagined distant stirring.  In any case, lovely to be reminded of it. Thanks, Ann x

Scarlett Johansson in Under The Skin. Ryan Gilbey has an excellent article in today's Sunday Times about British filmmaker Jonathan Glazer's movie, inspired by ("adaptation" seems too literal a word) Michel Faber's deeply unsettling novel, Under The Skin. The film stars Scarlett Johansson as an alien predator (of sorts) who picks up male hitchhikers in the seemingly unlikely landscape of Scotland. (I'm half-Scottish; somehow science-fiction isn't a topic you most immediately associate with Scotland.) I worked on the first three drafts of the script, before Jonathan - over the period of a decade - took it in a totally new direction, including the intriguing device of having Johansson pick up unsuspecting real-life hitchhikers (who were later persuaded to sign a release for the film - or not, in some cases) and see what came next, courtesy of a camera hidden in her truck. Ryan was kind enough to quote me twice in his piece. You can read