(and for the book to match the movie, click here)
There otter be something else to do on a warm and lazy Saturday afternoon, but whatever it is, I prefer to watch one of my old favourite movies again, "Ring of Bright Water", a beautiful albeit not entirely faithful film adaption of Gavin Maxwell's book of the same name.
Gavin Maxwell, who died from lung cancer in 1969 just fifty-five years old, was a Scottish naturalist and author who became famous for "Ring of Bright Water" and its sequels, which described his experiences raising Iraqi and West African otters on the west coast of Scotland. The title of the book was taken - without acknowledgement - from the poem "The Marriage of Psyche" by Kathleen Raine, who said in her autobiography that Maxwell had been the love of her life - platonic, as he was gay which at the time was punishable by prison or chemical castration.
In the book he describes how, in 1956, he brought a smooth-coated otter back from Iraq and raised it in "Camusfearna" at Sandaig Bay on the west coast of Scotland. He took the otter, called Mijbil, to the London Zoological Society, where it was decided that this was a previously unknown subspecies of smooth-coated otter. It was named Lutrogale perspicillata maxwelli (or, colloquially, "Maxwell's otter") after him.
I leave you with "Memories of Maxwell", a BBC TV programme screened in 1999 to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the author's death.
