The final part of the Tunesmith Trilogy sees Jacques travelling from his home by the River Tweed to his father's spiritual home in the French Pyrenees.  Following a series of tragic losses and his own debilitating accident, he begins his own inner journey, rediscovering faith in life.

Surrounded by kind, thoughtful strangers from countries all over the world gives Jacques a new fund of energy.  Finding himself in a special rôle with a challenging future, he needs time alone, spending several weeks high in mountains where late snow has closed many of the paths.

Researching Feeding the vultures took Percy Stewart to the Pyrenees for three months last spring. There he walked over three hundred miles between the Atlantic and his old stamping-ground, the valleys and mountains which form such a spectacular backdrop to the Grotto shrine in Lourdes.  His journeys and the people he met along the way provided so much fascinating material that his vultures have grown wings, and what began as a trilogy is fast becoming a quartet!

In the seventies, eighties and nineties, Percy Stewart had some close encounters with vultures at high altitude along the Spanish Border, but last year he was astonished to see thirteen of them circling low over the rooftops in the town where he used to live.

'The fact that thirteen of them had gathered in one spot, circling so tightly, almost certainly indicated a large mammal of some kind, which I can only assume had become stranded on a patch of gravel where the river flows right between the big hotels.

'In a Spanish village I met someone who immediately became a good friend.  He's a great wildlife photographer and on the hills facing his house there is a clearing where people place animal carcasses - road-kill, dead sheep and cattle from the farms and so on.  He literally does feed the vultures!'

In the book there are many other surprises, some of them rather dark, and all of them based on things which Percy Stewart really experienced, or very nearly did.

'Some of the most uncanny things have to do with fictional names which I have given to various characters.  In 2023 there is the motorbike which suggests Hetty's name, found just a few miles from here a year after she had appeared in Tunesmith, tinsmith.

'Last year someone I met in France turned out to have the same name as his late wife's fictional name in TT and Pilgrim.  As usual, her name came out of the blue and she appears as another key character in all three novels.

'Most recently I was listening to someone in one of our Tweedside pubs, talking about Hatty Jakes, his favourite actress, whose name had subconsciously given me the idea of Hetty and Jacques.  I don't quite believe in the supernatural, yet clearly it was already written in the stars!'

In Tunesmith, tinsmith, we learn that Jacques loves travelling on two wheels.  In 2023 Percy bought a motorbike, so that he could write from first-hand experiences of Jacques' journeys far beyond the Tweed Valley cycle-rides which he had fictionalised the year before in Tunesmith, tinsmith.

'By sheer good-fortune, when I saw it there in the garage, the BMW bike happened to have a number-plate which corresponded perfectly with Hetty, the love of Jacques' life. I had no hesitation in buying it immediately, even though I hadn't ridden a motorcycle since the eighties, and never anything this big.

'In a car or campervan I feel cocooned from the natural environment, rather like sitting on a sofa watching a film, but on a bike or on foot the whole process of seeing, listening, feeling, remembering and writing is infinitely more organic. Last year I was tasting spring-water straight from the rock, and without it I would have died: certainly better than drinking it from a bottle bought in the supermarket!  Once I even drank direct from a lake, high in the mountains as snow and ice melted.

'Last year's journey was largely on foot, and thus it became the best journey of a lifetime...so far.'

'The walk began on the shore of the Atlantic.  I wanted to keep on going all the way to the Mediterranean, but sadly the three-month Brexit rule combined with bad weather, so I was unable to reach the eleven thousand-foot peak which I had patiently waited nearly fifty years to climb.

'What a shame that greed and politics get in the way of ordinary people living a simple, fulfilled, happy life!'

'Now that Feeding the vultures is almost complete, I am setting off on the motorbike to fit the final pieces in what has become a huge jigsaw-puzzle.

'Right up to putting the final pages to bed early this morning, threads which I had introduced three years ago were appearing on the page, and now I have found the ending which the triology needed all along, so that all of the journeys make sense in one huge and beautiful picture of life here in the Scottish Borders...which is all part of a wonderful network of life on our planet.'

'Two days ago I tested an expedition-type sleeping-bag, made in Derbyshire a few miles from where a large a large chunk of this book is set.  It was a joyful moment to wake up overlooking the Tweed hours before dawn and find that the tent was a sheet of ice inside and out, and the frost on the grass was almost touching my nose when I unzipped the fly sheet, but inside the bag I was absolutely fine.  

'Over a hundred swans had gone to roost just across the river and my zip didn't wake them. With the mist and red J.M.W Turner sun which came up over Northumberland after the stars and a red-fringed half-moon had faded, and the first blackbird singing in trees a few hundred yards away, it was sheer magic being able to lie there surrounded by thick frost, a lifetime first at the age of nearly sixty-eight!

'Perhaps this year the tiny tent and cosy sleeping-bag will make it possible for me to climb my favourite mountain, which will give a whole new perspective to the books, the culmination of a lifelong journey.'

'There is some tragedy in these three novels, some of it genuine and some fictional, but the overwhelming feeling is wonderfully positive and uplifting, full of joy....simply because the process of living and writing the stories every day has been exactly this.  They have been a tonic for me, and people tell me that they have the same effect on readers who don't even know who I am.

'Now the adventures continue, hopefully for three months before heading home to wrap it all up and hand the next volume to the printers.  After Feeding the vultures, a wonderful character who first appeared in Pilgrim looks set to take up the story.'

Pilgrim

Tunesmith, tinsmith

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Detailed background information on all of the novels is available upon request.