The Least Useful Man in Scotland
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He has seen the future. He has not got the manual. Aidan Petrie counts pallets for a haulage firm outside Dyce. He is forty-three, divorced, perfectly adequate at his job, and has never once in his life wondered how the tap works.
In the autumn of 1696 he wakes on a midden in the Aberdeenshire parish of Kirkhowe, in the second year of the worst famine in Scottish memory, wearing a fleece and carrying a telephone that is never going to ring again. They think he is a vagrant. Then they think he is mad. Then they listen. Water that runs out of the wall. Light without fire. Food that keeps for a month. Carriages with no horses, machines that fly, a world where nearly everyone can read and nearly everyone lives to seventy. Kirkhowe has never heard anything like it, and Kirkhowe is starving, and Kirkhowe would very much like some of it now, please. And that is where it all falls apart. Aidan can describe a pump. He cannot build one. He can tell you that generators need magnets and he cannot make a magnet, or a wire, or the machine that makes the wire. He has spent his entire life inside a machine he never once looked at, and every single person in the parish is now waiting, politely, for him to begin. He has exactly one useful thing to tell them. Wash your hands. Boil the water. Move the midden away from the well. It costs nothing, it needs nothing, and it works, and for the first time in his life Aidan Petrie is publicly, provably right.
Then somebody asks him why it works. A very funny, quietly savage novel about the distance between knowing what a thing does and knowing how it does it, set in a Scotland where being interesting was a dangerous thing to be, from the author of *The Longest Post Round* and *Good Standing*.
In the autumn of 1696 he wakes on a midden in the Aberdeenshire parish of Kirkhowe, in the second year of the worst famine in Scottish memory, wearing a fleece and carrying a telephone that is never going to ring again. They think he is a vagrant. Then they think he is mad. Then they listen. Water that runs out of the wall. Light without fire. Food that keeps for a month. Carriages with no horses, machines that fly, a world where nearly everyone can read and nearly everyone lives to seventy. Kirkhowe has never heard anything like it, and Kirkhowe is starving, and Kirkhowe would very much like some of it now, please. And that is where it all falls apart. Aidan can describe a pump. He cannot build one. He can tell you that generators need magnets and he cannot make a magnet, or a wire, or the machine that makes the wire. He has spent his entire life inside a machine he never once looked at, and every single person in the parish is now waiting, politely, for him to begin. He has exactly one useful thing to tell them. Wash your hands. Boil the water. Move the midden away from the well. It costs nothing, it needs nothing, and it works, and for the first time in his life Aidan Petrie is publicly, provably right.
Then somebody asks him why it works. A very funny, quietly savage novel about the distance between knowing what a thing does and knowing how it does it, set in a Scotland where being interesting was a dangerous thing to be, from the author of *The Longest Post Round* and *Good Standing*.
Format:Paperback
Language:English
ISBN:B0HLXF72KC
ISBN13:9798178820322
Release Date:October 2026
Publisher:Independently published
Length:294 Pages
Weight:0.87 lbs.
Dimensions:9.0" x 0.7" x 6.0"
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