'THE LAST VALLEY'. MY 25TH BOOK. EVERY COPY SOLD ENABLES 'THE KUPATA PROJECT' TO CHANGE THE LIFE OF A UGANDAN SCHOOL GIRL.

About twenty years ago, I starting writing my first book on a clunky word processor I had picked up in Comet. I have a vague memory of endless hours of painfully slow typing. I had absolutely no idea if any of the words I was getting onto the tiny screen were any good whatsoever. After fifty or so pages, I bit the bullet and printed out the first few chapters. Much to my surprise, people seemed to like them. More than that, they wanted to know what happened next.

So I finished the book and 'One Man's Meat' was born. It did OK. Thankfully lots of readers gave me the only feedback I was really interested in hearing – 'couldn't put the bloody thing down.'

A few people had plenty to say about my woeful grammar. Nothing new there. Every one of my English teachers had had done the same. Luckily I had no aspiration to become the next Hemingway. If people liked the story enough to want to keep on turning the pages, well, that was good enough for me.

So fast forward two decades and here we are. See the book cover up at the top of the page? Yup. It's another one. My 25^th.

I guess I should probably tell you a bit about it.

I'll start with the nuts and bolts. My last few books have all been written with the goal of raising funds for charity: three books for First Base, the foodbank I manage and one for the wonderful 'Clark's Little Ark' in Sanquhar.

Well, 'The Last Valley' is more of the same. This time all proceeds from the book will be going to the Kupata Project, a new charity Carol and I set up last year in Uganda. Every penny we raise here in Scotland goes to buying sanitary pads for the school girls in Uganda. We have no paid staff, no office, no fat pension schemes, no expense accounts. 

We don't pretend to know anything better than the good folk of Kabale Province. African school girls like Scottish school girls have a period once every month. And when they have their period, they need sanitary pads. Are sanitary pads available? Sure they are. How much do they cost? 50p per pack. And this is a big problem. The average wage in Kabale Province is about £1.50 a day. The price of a kilo of rice is about the same as we pay in Tesco.

Have you done the maths? Buying a pack of 'Always' requires a third of a family's daily income. I wonder how many Scottish families could run to £33 for a pack of sanitary pads? No wonder almost all Ugandan school girls miss up to a week of their education every month. So it's a massive problem with an utterly simple solution.....

Provide sanitary pads.

So that is what we try to do. We don't tell them how to live their lives. We don't pretend to know anything better than they do. We simply pay the bills.

Please check out our website via the link below if you want to find out a bit more about what we are doing.

THE KUPATA PROJECT

Right now we are providing pads to one school – Kamuganguzi Janan Luwum Memorial School. When we delivered our first six month supply in November 2017, the school was home to 250 girls and 250 boys. We have recently delivered our third batch.

So what has happened since? Well, levels of absenteeism and infection have both fallen dramatically. But here is the real clincher. As I write this, the school is home to 250 boys and 412 girls. This seems to prove conclusively what a difference access to free sanitary pads can make.

We now have a waiting list of six more schools who would dearly love us to help them out. Everything is in place to make it happen – we have a secure supply chain all set up and two brilliant volunteers on the ground. We lack only one essential ingredient.

Money.

So with a bit of luck, 'The Last Valley' will raise a few quid and enable us to start helping out one or two of the schools on the list.

For the first time in ages, I have decided to print of some actual paperback copies of the book. 300. So eat your heart out Johnny Grisham! Hell, I guess it could be called a limited edition. Well, actually it couldn't because if I manage to sell the first 300 copies then I will print another 300.

If you would like a copy then you can either email me at markglenmill@aol.com or text me on 07770 443483. Please let me know your name and address and who you would like the book signed to. Then I will stick a copy in the post. Once you receive the book, please put a donation of £12.50 onto our fundraising page - £10 plus £2.50 postage.

Here's the link.

THE KUPATA PROJECT FUNDRAISING PAGE

The proceeds for each copy are enough to provide a year's worth of sanitary pads for one of the girls.

If you are like me and prefer digital reading, the book is available in the Amazon store for £5. You can find it via this link.

'THE LAST VALLEY' IN THE AMAZON STORE

The proceeds from each digital sale will sort out one of the girls for six months.

Before getting onto the subject of the book itself, there are a couple of other things. If you feel you might be able to persuade a few friends and family members to buy a copy, I would dearly love to send you as many copies as you need. Go on. Release your inner sales person.

Also I am more than happy to hit the road to hawk a few copies, so if you are involved in a Rotary club or Round Table of WRI group and you are always looking for a free of charge monthly speaker, then I'm your guy. Have books, will travel. You can get hold of me via either email or mobile.

OK. That's the nuts and bolts pretty much done.

The book.

For what it's worth, in my own opinion it might just be the best thing I have written yet. Obviously I'm too close to it for my view to be worth much. But there it is anyway.

The back story to 'The Last Valley' goes back forty years to the autumn of 1979. My life was about to spin off in all kinds of new directions. In fact it was already happening. My days as a Blackburn school boy were done. I was on a year off en-route to the cloistered Disneyland of Magdalene College, Cambridge.

My sights were set on a four month overland journey from London to Nairobi in an old Bedford truck. Which meant by hook or by crook I needed to come up with about £1000 by the spring of 1980. An ad in the Lancashire Evening Post alerted me to the chance of earning £65 per week plus commision. It seemed worth a look. A phone call won me an interview in one of Preston's less salubrious pubs. It turned out the job involved the door to door selling of loft insulation. The boss of North West Insulation Services was a crook to his toenails. A living, breathing caricature of a 1970's gangster. Sheepskin coat. A host of thick gold rings. A white Rolls Royce. He bought me pint, tossed a few papers at me and told me to read them. They were letters of complaint from members of the public who were outraged at the high pressure selling techniques deployed by his troops.

A broad Mancunian voice which would have walked into any episode of 'Life on Mars'

"If I don't get at least two letters like this about you in the first two weeks, you're fucking fired, right?"

And that was that. Three pints of bitter and I was hired.

I started knocking doors at six in the evening and kept on going until eight thirty. I averaged about a hundred a day. 90 would slam in my face. Ten would give my pitch a hearing. Four would sign on the dotted line and stump up a £20 deposit.

It all ended in tears when my boss and mentor vanished from the face of the earth leaving hundreds of angry punters and a police investigation. Rumour had it the man of the hour had hopped it to Hong Kong. An outraged article in the Lancashire Evening Post said the police were looking for an unknown salesman who had sold uninstalled loft insulation to six residents on one small Blackburn street. Thankfully by the time the article rolled off the presses, the unknown salesman was somewhere in the middle of the Sahara desert.

Anyway. It was evening work which meant my days were free. One afternoon I parked up my VW Beetle and bought myself a matinee ticket at Preston's crumbling Odeon cinema.

I had been waiting for 'Apocalyse Now' to hit the big screen for months. When I took my seat, I checked out all corners of the large cinema and realised I was the one and only punter. Which felt pretty damn weird. The lights went down and napalm lit up the jungle to a Jim Morrison overlay.

'Lost in a Roman wilderness of pain where all the children are insane...'

The next two and a bit hours put a hook into me which has been with me for four decades. How many times have I watched the film since? Christ knows. Maybe 20. Maybe more. I can virtually recite it word for word.

Further enquiries told me the inspiration for Francis Ford Copolla's masterpiece was an 1899 novella by Joseph Conrad. 'The Heart of Darkness'. I duly bought myself a copy and the back cover told me the story was all about a journey up river into the depths of the Congo.

Which of course was exactly where I was headed care of my efforts as a doorstep salesman. So I packed the book away and determined to read it once our truck made it all the way to the banks of the great river. Several months later I found myself sitting on the terrace of a crumbling old Belgian bar drinking a bottle of warm Primus beer. The vast river flowed by below me. The humidity was off the charts, but it didn't botter me much. By the time we reached Kisangai in the heart of what was then Zaire, I had gone pretty much native.

So I sat and I read. Five bottles later in the thicking light of an African dusk, I was done. And another forty year old hook was well and truly embedded.

A few weeks down the road from Kisangani, we climbed up and out of the jungle into the jaw dropping beauty of North Kivu. Everything about the magical heart of Africa got into me. Things got a tad hairy when the Rwandan border soldiers refused point blank to let us in which meant we had to bribe our way into Uganda. Our journey north to Kenya was extraordinary. A couple of months earlier, the Tanzanian army had invaded and thrown out Idi Amin. The road was littered with burnt out vehicles and walls were pockmarked with bullet holes. But the people were in full on party mode. Those few days made an indelible impression on the nineteen year old me.

I returned to the region a few years later to find it devastated by the Aids plague. And then a vast insanity descended. What started with the Rwandan genocide morphed into Africa's very own Great War. Five million died and North Kivu became a jungle version of Mad Max.

Zaire became the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the DRC became a by-word for complete and utter anarchy.

Thankfully Uganda by and large managed to stay clear of the madness. In November 2017, Carol and I made our way to the Kabale region in the south west of the country and set up the Kupata Project.

All of which brings me to right now. Once I made my mind up to write a book to raise funds for the Kupata Project, I needed a story. Well, duh!

I needed a story which would make its way from Scotland into the depths of North Kivu. A journey. It didn't take so very long for a long lost afternoon on the banks of the Congo to make its way into my head.

Why not a 2019 version of Joseph Conrad's epic tale? Why not indeed. And once the thought was in my head, the story of 'The Last Valley' quickly started to take shape.

In 'The Heart of Darkness', British sea captain Marlowe heads up river to find the mysterious Mr Kurtz. In 'Apocalypse Now', Captain Willard heads up the Nung river into Cambodia to find and kill the renegade Green Beret Colonel, Walter E Kurtz.

In 'The Last Valley', Malone, a Glasgow private investigator is hired to find the missing Gregor Curtis, the son of a hedge fund founder.

Have I done any kind of justice to Conrad's work of genius? And have I done any kind of justice to the terrible beauty to be found in the very heart of Africa? Well, that is not for me to say. I have done my best. At the time of writing I only have one review.

I'm of Mark's generation so I encountered 'The Heart of Darkness' and 'Apocalypse Now' around the same time and remember the impact they had on me. 'The Last Valley' is a worthy descendent, and Mark the perfect writer to do the update, because with Mark you always get uncompromising, real and honest writing about the dark places others avoid or manipulate. Like all his works it hooks you quickly, grips you and doesn't let you go from beginning to end. Oh, and you're giving money to charity at the same time. To a real, honest charity as down to earth and necessary as the story being told. Best fiver you'll spend all year! 

Thanks for that Cally.

I hope all readers will find themselves in a win, win situation. Even if you hate every single one of the 54,000 words I have written, at least you can know your purchase will have enable an African school girl to get a full, uninterrupted year of education. You will have made a huge difference in one life. Maybe a life changing difference. And yeah, yeah, this all sounds pretty New Age, but it also happens to be true.

One book sale = A full year's worth of school for one girl.

And that my friend means a small flicker of light in a place which has been home to such overwhelming darkness.

So I guess that's my sales pitch pretty much done. I hope you buy a copy and I hope you like it. I hope you buy lots of signed copies as Christmas presents for those hard to think of anything male relatives! I hope you nudge a few pals to give it a read.

And I hope we can sell enough books to help out the six schools on the Kupata waiting list.

So once again, here are the links..

To check out the Kupata Project.

THE KUPATA PROJECT

To order an actual, physical book call or text me on 07770 443483 or email me on markglenmill@aol.com. I'll send out a signed copy and once you receive it you can pop a £12.50 donation onto our fundraising page.

THE KUPATA PROJECT FUNDRAISING PAGE

If you prefer your reading digital, the book can be found in the Amazon Store right here.

'THE LAST VALLEY' IN THE AMAZON STORE