Jane Aldous‘s latest poetry collection, More Patina than Gleam, is a strange book – it tells interlinking love stories set in Jane’s home town of Edinburgh, and was inspired by Jane’s 70th birthday, and something her mother said when Jane was a child.

The 70th birthday link was to write 70 poems – sonnets, but Jane’s mother’s input was to say that she often thought she should have run away from her marriage when she was young, and take Jane with her.

From this Jane creates the story of Linda, a runaway, and her daughter, Ange, arriving in Edinburgh from England in the early 60’s to become Lady’s Companion to Elsie,

an elderly, refined woman in a house that is held together by willpower and love – more patina than gleam.

When Jane talks about the book, one of the loves she never mentions is her own – for Edinburgh. Her love of the place shines out from every page, and I suspect she’s never noticed it, so ingrained it is.

Some of the places she talks about in the poems are long gone, or wilt behind hoardings, but over the next few weeks Jane is taking people on poetry walks around some of the locations that feature in the poems, the Royal Observatory, Blackford Hill and Pond, Observatory Road, finishing with tea at West Mains Allotments…

A novel way to experience a book!

Tickets (free, or you can pre-order a book to pick up on the day, or have it sent to you) via eventbrite