(Happy faces and dazed author at Fettes College, near the beginning of the Deathwatch Dash.)The Deathwatch Dash is done and dusted and I plan never to do such a silly thing again. It was very exciting but too much excitement can be bad for a person. I did wear the famous turquoise boots, which turned out to be a bad move when I found myself running through driving rain after we (in three cars) found ourselves locked into a school playground. I then ran slip-sliding through school corridors looking for a janitor who might release us, but never found him; tottered into the school office to find a disgruntled school secretary who was oddly unmoved by my desperation to get out of her school; and ran back through the heaving rain and floods to the car, where an already soaked bookseller was sitting gently steaming.
I spoke to about 700 pupils in the six schools and was asked wonderfully perceptive questions, digging deeper into Deathwatch than I thought we could go. I discovered that they all wanted to get right into the spirit of who the stalker could be, and they came up with many reasons why it might or might not be the creepy (but sad) guy in the museum.
Loads of them bought books, and loads more ordered them because they hadn't expected to want to buy one so hadn't bought money. And a lot emailed me with lovely comments afterwards.
Thank you, as ever, to the Deathwatch team from The Mary Erskine School, Edinburgh. Diana Esland, their teacher, transported some of them around with us all day, and they were incredibly useful and nice. I hope they enjoyed the chocolate biscuits in my house, between events! (Not that there was mnuch between events, but there's always time for chocolate, I think.) Thanks to Diana for her general calmness and efficiency, not just today but throughout the whole project. I'm guessing that more than 1000 emails have passed between us, but my computer crashed when I tried to ask that question.
Highlights: the cheering at Fettes and Merchiston; the excited book-buying at St George's - and their desperation to find money from somewhere ...; the fact that the Head of the Fettes prep-school made the effort to join us; the cakes and analytical questions at Merchiston Castle; the clever questions at George Watson's (and the fact that one of the girls had already put an amazing review on their website); some great pupils at Boroughmuir and Royal High too; and the way that pupils from every school - even the huge and over-heated audience at Boroughmuir, where we all roasted in a greenhouse - listened brilliantly when I read extracts, allowing me to whisper the scariest bits.
I did think I was starting to lose it when I called it Deathmarket, though. Now there's a title for a book ...
