Enjoy your journey

The author and former High School pupil told the pupils and guests that she reached her vocation after a long journey.

“Congratulations to you all on your excellent work and talent, and on being part of this fantastic school,” said Rosemary. “It’s a tremendous honour for me to be here talking to you and it gives me the chance to thank this school, because it saved me.

“Things were not peaceful when I was at school, either in my family or in the community, and my escape was to become a swotty wee thing. “This school was my haven. People don’t often say that school can do that for you, but it can and it’s very important.

“But being a swotty wee thing doesn’t necessarily take you in the best direction and I want to talk to you today about vocation. Vocation has been described as taking a badly paid job out of choice, but it’s every bit as important to us as love or the need for home.

“Your vocation might be to do with those prizes you have there in your hands. Or it might not. I remember when I was only five or six sitting at a desk I’d made. I turned a doll’s cot upside down and leaned on the end of it and I was completely absorbed in writing.

“The world turned to silence outside my ears and nothing else mattered. I’ve no idea what I was writing, probably rubbish, but that sense of absorption, of being right with the world, that was there then.

“So - is my vocation happy now, quietly purring, knowing that I have a publisher for my next novel and that readers are out there waiting for it? Yes. Very much so. I’ve reached the right place by lots of wrong turns, and every one of those turns was necessary.

“I couldn’t live as happily as I do now without them. I know that every time I sit down at my desk to write a chapter or a piece of journalism, I am still that swotty wee thing doing her homework for school. And I enjoy that. I love it. I’m grateful to this marvellous school for it and hope that you all leave here with something just as valuable, just as rich, if not more so.

“Congratulations again to all of your for what you have achieved and will achieve, and may your vocation go with you.”