It’s National Apple Pie Day.
A strange fact that makes me think of Walter.
Let me tell you about this encounter with a stranger — and the moment I began to understand I was building hospitality-led English experiences in Scotland, when all other language holiday options were designed to pull people towards generic classrooms.
The Weekend That Stuck
Nearly thirty years ago, I was working at the Changing Room Gallery in Stirling. That summer, the staff were invited to crew at an alternative music festival called Le Weekend.
It was unusually hot for Scotland.
I was given airport pick-up duty with my boyfriend at the time. For three days we drove musicians around in a hired van, listening to stories, accents, opinions, rhythms of speech from places we had never been.
That’s how we met Walter.
He was from Detroit. He had a festival pass, but no accommodation.
So we invited him to stay with us in my tiny farm bothy.
What a Bothy Is
A bothy is a basic rural shelter. Traditionally bare essentials.
Mine was small, white, and square — like a child’s drawing of a house and adapted for farm workers to live in.
It had a fire. A tiny kitchen. Cows outside. Wind moving across fields.
It was not luxury. It was my home.
The Apple Pie
To thank us, Walter baked an apple pie.
He told us he was travelling across Europe and baking one in every kitchen that hosted him. A proper, from-scratch American apple pie.
I can still see him standing in that tiny kitchen, sleeves rolled up, cinnamon and butter warming the room.
At the same time, my boyfriend made a field recording on his minidisc player. He captured:
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the crackle of the fire
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the rattle of pots
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cows lowing
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birds moving in hedges
Because I concentrated so hard on listening during that moment in time, it’s all just fixed in my head.
All the sounds – and the scent of warm, cinnamon and butter filling my home.
Goodbye New Friend
We dropped Walter off at the bus station, to continue his journey to somewhere else.
Just like the sound recording, I’ll remember the gesture of him baking us a pie for as long as I possibly can.
That’s the power of a perfect human gesture.
His visit touched my life.
Shortly after Walter’s visit, I went to America to study for three years. I was away from Scotland for thirteen years. I left America after graduating and spent 3 years in Belgium and a further 7 in France. Eventually, my heart wanted to return to Scotland.
Before Blue Noun Had a Name
Years after the bothy, I came across the Japanese idea of Ikigai.
In the West, it’s often drawn as four overlapping circles.
The four elements are simple:
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What you love
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What you are good at
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What the world needs
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What you can be paid for
The intersection is often described as your “reason for being.”
At the time of the apple pie, I wasn’t building a business.
I was hosting. Helping a stranger on a mission. Paying attention.
But looking back, all four were already there.
I love welcoming people into my space.
I was good at making people feel at ease.
The world needs heart-led, responsible businesses that solve real problems rather than manufacturing fear or scarcity.
English teaching was a craft I would later train in — a skill that could sustainably bring me into conversation with people from different cultures.
Blue Noun did not appear fully formed. It took years to become a system, a structure, an offer.
But the essence was already present in that kitchen.
The power of sharing food from one culture to another.
The way conversation deepens over a table.
The way memory anchors itself to scent, sound, warmth.
The Dutch have a word for that kind of atmosphere: gezelligheid — a shared ease, a feeling of warmth without performance.
That pie held it.
And I recognised, much later, that this was the kind of space I wanted to build around language, long before I knew this term.
Walter’s pie was a blueprint.
Generosity, warmth, true cultural exchange, trust.
Designed by Caring
That instinct — to notice a traveller, understand what might make their experience better, and do something about it — became much bigger than this one story.
It now sits underneath the way I design Blue Noun: how I work with English, how I welcome people, how I think about Crieff and the people I work with, and what I want tourism to give back.
Sharing Food on a Blue Noun Holiday
Food is an important part of every Blue Noun holiday, but not simply because we want you to eat well.
Sharing food gives people somewhere to meet.
Some of the best conversations of the week happen while we’re cooking, putting together a picnic, sitting around the table after a day out, trying something local or deciding what to do with whatever is in the fridge. There’s no need to manufacture a speaking exercise: there is already something to talk about, ask for, explain, offer, taste or laugh about.
We make time for food. We use good, local, healthy and organic ingredients where possible, discover Scottish produce and speciality foods, take packed lunches out with us and usually share several evening meals during the week. Sometimes cooking itself becomes part of the experience.
It also gives the holiday a rhythm. We go out and explore, then come back to the Blue Noun Hub, make tea, find something to eat and talk about what happened. Stories get retold. Questions emerge. New words return in completely different conversations.
And importantly, not every meal is an English lesson. Sometimes dinner is just dinner. But when people are relaxed around a table, English has a habit of becoming something they are simply using rather than something they are trying to learn.
That matters at Blue Noun. Language grows through shared experiences — and sharing food is one of the oldest and easiest ways we know to bring people together.
We don’t do ‘Cake Fridays‘ at Blue Noun.
Any day is cake day!
Cake happens because you’ve climbed a hill. Because you discovered an artisan bakery. Because it’s someone’s birthday. Because you love baking and a rainy afternoon turns into making something together and inviting people you’ve met that week to come and eat it.
Or there is no cake because you’d rather put your wellies on and get into a river.
Cakes and pastries in a Fortrose bakery, visited on a trip to watch dolphins near Inverness in the Scottish Highlands.
Further Information
A Guide to Blue Noun
Invisible Expertise
Lightness in practice requires depth underneath. The training and experience that support our work are outlined here.