About Happy Haggis

How We Got Started

The idea for Happy Haggis started late 1999. It came about whein I was taking a walk up the Royal Mile in Edinburgh. As I looked around the tourist shops I noticed all the usual Scottish 'touristy' items such as dolls in highland dress, highland cow (heeland coos), and Loch Ness Monsters. It struck me there were no soft toys, t-shirts, key rings or anything featuring a haggis. I then realised that I'd never read or heard of any stories featuring haggis.

Several days later I was talking to a friend about this and we thought it would be fun to write some stories ourselves. And so on that day Hamish the Happy Haggis was born. Armed with pen and pad we both came up with ideas for a stories and got to work on them.

Luckly, another friend was a very good painter and caricaturist. We asked for his help with the design of Hamish. After all, we needed to get an idea of what Hamish looked like. All three of us put our ideas forward and the best parts were combined to create the look we wanted.

We were very fortunate in that we got a lot more help than we could have ever imagined from our caricaturist friend. Not only did he go on the become our illustrator but he helped greatly with our wirting. There was so much to learn; typing, spelling, punctation and grammar. We also had to develop the Happy Haggis characters, find names and traits. The more stories we wrote the more ideas for new ones would come to us. It was a lot of fun.

The stories that we have illustrated are rare and there are a few more written that we sadly never had time to illustrate. Sadly our illustrator friend moved away and he could no longer help us. This seemed to be the end of Hamish and his gang of frinds and let many years pass buy without moving forward. The stories and illustrations had done nothing but sit on our computer hard drives and it's about time we brought them back to life and release them onto an unsuspecting world!