Not that I can speak with any authority on the matter, but dying from a cobra bite must really hurt. Just imagine being trapped in a forest without any medical amenities to extract the poison – it’s pretty grim. What’s worse is that these things tend to take their time:thirty minutes, Wikipedia reliably states, before one’s death. Not the nicest of thoughts perhaps, but it struck me while examining a photograph by Ross Fraser Mclean that death, in this instance by a venomous snake, is the final full stop.

We’re all crippled in some way. It might not show, it might not prevent us from moving, or talking, or thinking, but we are all limited. There are things we can’t do; it’s not in our power to change that.

If ever there was a genre we could call Scots Zen, Neil M Gunn was at its forefront. Dipping in and out of the Scots language and philosophical ponderings, the novelist uses this set of short stories to reflect on the many facets of his highland home and bend language to his every whim. The majority of Gunn’s works appeared during the 1920s and ‘30s, seeing the writer through recession and into the aftermath of a world war. In this political landscape he wrote extensively, picking up the James Tait Black Memorial Prize along the way.