Educating Peter

Peter's mum and dad are worried. Over the last twelve months, they've noticed ferocious changes taking place in their son. It's not just the mumbling and the cloud of melancholy that seems to hover permanently over his ever-more-militant mop of curly hair. It's not even the oversized trousers or the numerous metal chains that hang off them. The problem is that Peter, who is fourteen and Tom Cox's wife's cousin, wants to be a musician - a rock star preferably, but anything else that involves a guitar, gets him bags of money and free CDs and gives him access to unlimited scantily clad groupies will suffice (as long as it's not classical). Uncoincidentally, ever since the advent of this new ambition, Peter's grades at school have plummeted from very good to somewhere below mediocre. What is to be done? In the spirit of intellectual endeavour, Peter and his music-critic uncle, Tom Cox, set off on a journey to find Britain and Ireland's musical heritage, to get the inside track on whether being a musician really is a sensible thing for a teenager to want to do. They travel to the Outer Hebrides to meet Vashti Bunyan, the cult folk singer who travelled from London to her home on a hors