Kerry Hudson

1 month ago | heraldscotland.com | Kerry Hudson

Still, it was a dream that I couldn’t let go, and so this month I convinced my husband and four-year-old to come Interrailing with me. I did it for the plot, my husband for love, my kid for the mini-packets of Oreos that magically appeared from my rucksack at each train station. Read more by Kerry Hudson We're clearly not a fancy hotel family. How do other people manage it?

1 month ago | heraldscotland.com | Kerry Hudson

I. Am. Exhausted. AH, the dulcet tones of our night in a fancy hotel in Stockholm. A delight for us and, I imagine, those sharing neighbouring the hotel rooms. Our wee boy is four now and thanks partially to my job and us country-hopping to try and find secure housing, he’s extremely well travelled. Four is a "good age" – he’s fun, engaged and chatty. At this age, you can reason, bargain, share your favourite 90s pop and get them excited for the trip in advance.

2 months ago | heraldscotland.com | Kerry Hudson

There are now more children in poverty than during the mid-1990s (Image: Getty/Derek McArthur) Six years ago, I published a memoir called Lowborn: Growing up, Getting away and Returning to Britain's Poorest Towns. To write this book, I returned to some of the poorest streets in the UK, where I had grown up, to discover if anything had changed for families in the intervening 30 years. In Scotland, this meant visiting my old estates in Airdrie, Coatbridge and Aberdeen.

2 months ago | heraldscotland.com | Kerry Hudson

The Experimentarium, Copenhagen (Image: Kerry Hudson) Until I hit my forties, I believed there were two types of traveller. There’s the splurger, who goes away once a year and lets the good times roll, believing the cost of everything on holiday is something to worry about on the flight home. Then there’s the scrimper, going local and cheap wherever possible. I have always been very much in the latter camp, first because I was broke and because I wanted to travel more.

2 months ago | heraldscotland.com | Kerry Hudson

I grew up in communities steeped in poverty, indeed, in every aspect of inequality, on council estates around Aberdeen and North Lanarkshire. In the 1980s and 90s of my youth these were communities where children had few opportunities and little hope, more so because they witnessed adults struggling with that same poverty often further entrenched in mental health or substance abuse issues.