It has been a little while, but as I mentioned, the day before yesterday I got another email about P Wyndham Little. I seem to get at least one a year, for the last 4 years or so. If you don’t know what I’m on about, the short explanation is that in 1997 I found a set of letters left neatly folded on my doorstep, from a person called P Wyndham Little. They weren’t in an envelope or addressed to me, they were just left there. In about 2002 (vague guess) I decided to put them onto my website, and see if anybody found them on there. And gradually the response has been quite surprising, as it turned out that several people had also had similar experiences. To see what I’ve had in the past, read:
The P Wyndham Little Project 1
The P Wyndham Little Project 2
So anyway, this is the bulk of the email I had recently:
“I don’t know why I googled P Wyndham Little, but I did! For a few years in the 90s, I lived just round the corner from Merchiston Crescent, in SW Edinburgh’s fairly well-to-do Merchiston suburbs – JK Rowling, Ian Rankin and Alexander McCall-Smith all live there these days.
Anyway, I used to happen upon these little scribblings in the street outside my front door all the time. A few friends who I still see these days remember them as well. I would think this guy had been made redundant from Farrant or BAE systems, a big defence / electronics firm in Edinburgh at the time, judging by his occasionally impressive engineering knowledge.
…. I note from my googling that his seems to still be hard at it, leaving messages for BBC’s Nick Robinson. Good to know someone collected this rambling opus.”
This is interesting on a few counts, firstly that this is the first person to have the same experience I did, of having the letters left on their doorstep. Everybody else seemed to have received them mailed to a workplace. Also the literary references are worth noting; I’ve said before that they reminded me of Alasdair Gray, but now I look into that, it is worth knowing that he seems to be very strongly based in Glasgow. Finally, that is the first sighting I’ve had of him online. Of course I’ve no proof that is him online, could just be someone’s choice of login who has also come across the letters, but given his interest in politics, maybe it could be him. I wonder if he’ll ever type himself into google…