Shona McMonagle’s Desert Island Discs
Posted on April 1, 2025
To celebrate the publication of the latest book in the Miss Blaine’s Prefect series, author Olga Wojtas has written a guest blog post.
In Shona McMonagle’s latest adventure, she finds herself on a desert island. At a loose end between foraging for food and solving murders, she decided to compile a Desert Island Discs playlist for her time-travelling missions so far.
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Golden Samovar
When Shona was in Imperial Russia, she taught the aristocracy to Scottish country dancing, trained a lapdog, was mistaken for a princess, survived numerous attempts on her life, and hosted a tea party. One of the few things she didn’t do was sail down the Volga.
She also met Beethoven, who wrote arrangements for 25 Scottish songs.
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Vampire Menace
During Shona’s visit to the French village of Sans-Soleil, she encountered a wolf, and was amused to find that it was almost as though it understood every word she said.
She was intrigued to find strong North-east of Scotland links in France. This is a sad song about locals doing away with an innocent monkey in order to get salvage from a shipwreck. Hartlepool pretends the incident happened in the North-east of England. It didn’t.
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Weird Sisters
Shona always thought “Brochan Lom” was an innocuous Gaelic song about porridge. Her encounter with three witches revealed that it is in fact a powerful mystical incantation.
She was able at last to set the record straight about Macbeth, outrageously defamed by William Shakespeare, which led to other travesties such as Verdi having Scottish witches singing in Italian
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Gondola of Doom
There was a nasty moment when Shona was in 17th century Venice and thought she had created a temporal paradox by predicting Gilbert & Sullivan’s “The Gondoliers.” But she seems to have got away with it.
Shona is an expert in the Venetian dialect, which is quite different from Italian. She knows, for example, that “I come from Edinburgh” is vegno da Edimburgo rather than vengo da Edimburgo. She has therefore chosen this Venetian song, a poem by Pietro Buratti set to music by Reynaldo Hahn.
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Uncharted Island
There was a lot of singing of sea shanties on the Uncharted Island. Shona thinks the best sea shanty she’s heard is by Nathan Evans, despite the fact that he comes from Airdrie, which is near Glasgow.
She also felt the other Nordic countries were mean to the Finns, so in order to redress the balance, she’s chosen this song by Finnish folk music band Värttinä.
Miss Blaine’s Prefect and the Uncharted Island by Olga Wojtas publishes on the 10th April 2025.
After a visit from Miss Blaine herself, involving a bad-tempered exchange about Robinson Crusoe and improper book shelving, Shona has a new, confusing mission. She finds herself on an island, with little in the way of clues to help her decipher why she’s there. Despite initially wondering if this might be a rare treat from Miss Blaine, she soon realises this is no holiday. She has been cast away in the Baltic Sea – and it’s the fifteenth century!
