Fergie is a romantic tale about the ‘homecoming’ of a man who is seeking to break free from his addiction and mental baggage and attempt to rebuild his life on the island of his birth.

It is set on North Uist, a small community in the Outer Hebrides, an island I visited for around two decades, fishing for wild brown trout.

Around 50% of North Uist is covered by lochs containing fresh water, sea water and sometimes a mixture of both.

Loch Obisary is prominent in this story and I have included an ‘endnote’ which contains lots of surprising information.

Although Fergie is grounded in North Uist and its geography and wildlife, it is essentially about its people who live their lives in a close-knit weave and who care deeply for each other.

It could, I suppose, have been set on any of the communities of the Outer Hebrides.

I hope locals who read Fergie will forgive any factual errors and indulge my flights of fancy.

I think most of us are voyeurs, so give it a go.

Fergie is entirely a work of fiction and its characters are not clones of real people.

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Fergie has its origins in a ‘doodle tale’ which started on my iPad mini back in April 2025 while visiting my older son and family in Abingdon, near Oxford. After our visit, Fergie lay dormant until early December 2025 when I was presented with a Writers’ Circus topic ‘about a picture’.

While writing Fergie, I have become inccreasingly enamoured with ‘Perplexity’, an AI search engine which I have used many times over to check facts and confirm (and correct) information dredged from my memory.

As in the recent past, I have self-edited this piece using the ‘Read Aloud’ tool in Microsoft Word.

Aplogies for any errors you might uncover: please forgive, make your best judgement as to meaning, and read on.