Alternatively, if you'd like to see some articles in full, then there are two with a wildlife theme in Ayrshire-based magazine Xposé available on the web. Paste the following link http://www.xposemags.com/downloads/xpose_april_07.pdf into your browser for a .pdf version of their April 07 issue. Rowena's articles are on page 24 (about a Wildlife Crime Officer) and page 30 (about rangers at a National Trust for Scotland property).

In their March issue you can find one she wrote about poet Rab Wilson on page 32. Check it out at:
http://www.xposemags.com/downloads/xpose_march_07.pdf

She currently has a travel article appearing in a web competition - why not visit http://www.traveling-stories-magazine.com/have-lie-will-travel/ and have a look at it. It's called Have Lie, Will Travel. Be sure and give it a rating, by clicking on the relevant numbered star at the top of the article...

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“What price chocolate? Well, it depends on who you ask.

From chocolate’s first use by the Olmecs of Central America to the multi-billion pound industry it is today, many have considered it precious. The Mayans gave us the name we use today from xocolatl, a drink so prized its use was restricted to the male elite.

The cocoa beans it was made from were used by both Mayans and Aztecs as currency. The Aztecs even had cocoa currency units: 400 beans equalling one Zontli while 8000 cocoa beans was a Xiquipilli, the equivalent of a sack, which is how it was denoted. When they conquered a tribe, Aztecs demanded payment in cocoa and there are records dating from 1200 that show such deliveries.

Christopher Columbus noted how highly the Mayans regarded cocoa beans during his fourth voyage to the Americas, in 1502. He didn’t think much of them, though, believing they were merely almonds; it was Hernando Cortés who took them back to Spain almost twenty years later.
Valdez, another Conquistador, wrote how he had been able to buy a slave for 100 cocoa beans; this was the same amount of beans that would have bought a turkey hen according to an Aztec document of 1545.”

This piece won the Alastair Walker Trophy for best General Article at the Scottish Association of Writers conference at Erskine in 2003 and Mensa Magazine published it in April of that year.

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“I’ve tried diets. No matter who, what or where it’s named after, I’m bound to have done it at some point. There are so many different ones... But I’ve attempted them all.

There have been diets aimed at virtually every part of my anatomy (hip, thigh, bottom, tummy...). I’ve never quite understood why they didn’t just call one the Pear-shaped diet and be done with it.

Then there are all the different kinds of diet: high protein; carbohydrate; fruit (what was that about pears?). There have even been ones based on Mars bars or ice cream. And you wouldn’t believe some of the combinations that I have had to try...

There was a rallying cry, a while back, about “fat-free”. I couldn’t believe my luck when I saw the wrapper on a packet of double chocolate muffins emblazoned 95% fat-free. “This is the one for me,” I thought.

That was until I got it home and realised that, fat-free or not, the things were still absolutely loaded with calories. I could probably still eat them - so long as I only had them one chocolate chip at a time.”

This article appeared in the ‘Lighter Look at Life’ section of My Weekly on 26th September 1998.

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