In contrast to Celtic Fringe, which was only christened with a title when the book was finished, Royal Macnab was shaped by its title – or rather, by the meaning of the title.

By the time I started writing, I had been cooking on the local sporting estates for four or five years, and thought there was probably a book in it. It’s a closed world not seen by many people, and is an odd time warp, a throw-back to the days when the upper classes could afford to run stately homes without opening them to the public, and supporting the enterprise with cheap labour – going into service was a family thing for many that went back generations.

The research began with my own experiences of working as a cook on four estates, the people I encountered, the stories I heard and saw, and the landscapes that formed the backdrop to the kitchens where I cooked. Being married to a game fishing fly tier and wild trout fisherman didn’t hurt either – my husband’s technical knowledge of tackle and waters, tactics and technicalities was a great help throughout the four-year process of putting the book together.

The theme has been explored in Isabel Colegate’s excellent The Shooting Party, a sharply observed book built around the class differences existing between upstairs and downstairs, and more recently in Gosford Park, a fabulously intricate and rich original screenplay that explored a variety of tensions between the guests invited to shoot at a country house, and the staff who serve them.

Both stories were set between the Great War and the Second World War, and although grouse shooting formed part of the backdrop in both these tales, the main concentration was on the social order. As well as writing about the interface between guest and estate workers, I wanted to integrate the processes of stalking deer, shooting game birds and fishing for salmon, the management of estate wildlife as well as property.

It seemed to me that a story set in a similar environment, but in modern times, might offer some new ground – the social order had gone through radical changes and the sporting estates constitute a weird hangover from the Jeeves and Wooster heydays. Instead of people spending a lifetime in service, there were young people hired in for the sporting season, many of them travelling, between school and university, or earning tuition fees during college breaks, waiting on wealthy guests with backgrounds in industry and commerce as well as titles.

In addition, the history of the English country house, while it had parallels, did not reference a vital part of the historic backdrop to the Scottish sporting estates – the clearances of the 18^th and 19^th centuries. The estate I cooked at most frequently during the eight years I worked as a lodge cook was not a country house converted to the purpose of country pursuits; rather, it was purpose built for it, created to capitalise on the rich salmon resources of the river on which it lies.

In a John Buchan story set between the wars, John Macnab, I found more pieces of the puzzle I was slowly fitting together. A group of bored gentlemen on holiday in the Highlands set themselves the challenge of poaching a deer, a brace of grouse and a salmon over a period of five days, from neighbouring estates. It’s all great fun and very gentlemanly, and is the root of the Macnab, still attempted today, with the difference being that the deer, grouse and salmon must be caught within a day.

One day in the kitchen, I was listening to a ghillies’ conversation when I heard the mention of a Royal Macnab. I didn’t know what it was and was delighted to be told that it constituted the same sporting challenge as a Macnab, with the added stipulation of bedding the lodge cook. It was one of those great moments when a writer, having a mass of murky ideas mulling around, suddenly sees a clear way forward. 

On Christmas Day in 1997, our kids were given a video copy of The Muppet Christmas Carol, and it has been part of our festive season ever since. You could say it’s as much a part of our Christmas as the turkey and presents, and is one of those family rituals faithfully observed every year. Our kids have grown up with it. In the first months we owned it, they watched it relentlessly, as children do, and before the next Christmas rolled around, they knew every word of every song, and pretty much every line of dialogue as well.

Last Christmas, it was apparent that our original video copy was much bashed, loved to death and barely playable, so we replaced it with a DVD copy in the summer, put it on the shelf and waited for Christmas Eve. Fifteen years down the line, Christmas Eve 2012, we took down our shiny new DVD, opened a bottle of wine and sat back to indulge.

All was going well until the moment where Michael Caine’s Scrooge is taken in hand by The Ghost of Christmas Past, and forced to revisit the moment where his sweetheart of several years makes the painful but eminently sensible decision to dump him because it’s obvious he loves money more than her. At this juncture, there is a terribly affecting song, When Love is Gone, which she sings to young Scrooge while his crusty present-day self stands behind her weeping.

The problem was that on the new DVD we had purchased, not only had the love gone – the song had gone as well! We were incensed!  A major edit had been arbitrarily carried out without any indication on the DVD cover that we would be purchasing an incomplete product. As well as being robbed of four minutes of screen time, the film suffers – we spent the next fifteen minutes feeling as if we had fallen up a step. The song is an important step on Scrooge’s character arc, and cutting it out means that his subsequent dialogue with the GCP, spoken while he is weeping – which he wasn’t before the song, which isn’t there anymore, had started – doesn’t make much sense.

So I am curious to know why the cut was made, and if Disney in its wisdom has since thought better of its decision and issued another version with the song restored. I notice that a lot of other people have complained about this edit next to the clip featuring the song on You Tube.

It is also an interesting departure from the current Disney trend, which is to salvage duff songs from the cutting room floor, splice them into what was a perfectly good film in the first place, and then have the cheek to release an inferior product as a Special Edition. Beauty and the Beast is not improved by either the positioning or content of Human Again – the work of the song has already been done by the characters, and it interrupts the dramatic momentum of the plot.

In the same way that Special Edition covers boast new material, it might have been appropriate for The Muppet Christmas Carol DVD edition to carry a banner stating, “Not the original cinematic release – major song cut from running time.” I don’t suppose it would stimulate sales, and nor would “Bad song spliced in to increase running time and give us an excuse to hike our price” do anything for the numbers attached to Beauty and the Beast.

Ah well, I’ve had my rant. Before next Christmas, we will be attempting to find a copy of The Muppet Christmas Carol which is intact. I may be gone for some time ….