FORECAST for the Suez Canal, please . . . no wonder the lass at the weather centre thought I must be two antis short of a cyclone. But an expectant father gets nervous, doesn't he?

Before any other acquaintances start imagining that Morag and I are going for second helpings from the family cake, I should explain that the wee surprise we're awaiting is my latest book. This is the time of pacing the floor and getting on everyone's nerves until the parcel arrives; three years work hurtling down the track in the wee van of Jim, the Papa Westray postie.

Then, for a while you can allow your ego free rein to enjoy the finished product - stories of the Scots in Australia and New Zealand this time - before it hits the streets.

On this occasion, however, it's been a bitty more complicated. Publication was originally scheduled for April 23, St George's Day of course, also Shakespeare's birthday and World Book Day this year, as it happens.

However, the road from word processor to printed product recognises no anniversary signposts and is strewn with pitfalls and delays.

Printing of the book, in the Spanish province of Navarra, was held up for two weeks while my publishers, Canongate of Edinburgh, negotiated a co-edition with Melbourne University Press. The deal was done and dusted and although MUP are only taking 1600 copies initially, it's a nice wee starter.

The books are currently being shipped Down Under on board the good ship Australian Enterprise, destination Melbourne.

This journey of several weeks meant that the publication date has had to be put back until May 14 in order that my literary offspring can appear simultaneously in bookshops both here and in the antipodes.

That was when the fun began. I am trying, from my Orkney kitchen, to follow the long voyage of my books to the other side of the world, from Bilbao to the city of the Yarra, imagining them in the midst of the Indian Ocean stacked in the dark and steamy hold of some tramp steamer next to a consignment of computer parts or arms supplies for the Australian monarchist movement. The silliness grew wings. Phoning the weather centre for a forecast for the Indian Ocean, tracing the route across my dog-eared school atlas, reading anxiously of twentieth-century buccaneers patrolling this part of the world - I had to have a lie down.

The fact that these rogues might find my splendid history of the Scots' contribution in Australia and New Zealand of better value as wadding for their cannon was too much to contemplate.

Pins were marching smoothly across my campaign map until last weekend when I caught the latest news on the Australian dockers' strike.

Apparently there had been fresh and increasingly violent exchanges on the picket line, police baton charges, court action, government determination to break the strike. Nothing was moving in and out of the ports. It all sounded pretty serious stuff.

Perhaps getting the consignment to Australia will just be the start of our problems. We must wait and see. I can imagine my book - picket line ammunition - being chucked around Melbourne docks before we're finished.

I had just about recovered my equilibrium yesterday - fair weather was forecast, pirates were taking a vacation, and burly dockers celebrating a court victory when on my bookshelf I happened upon Great Mysteries of the Oceans.

Would you believe it, enormous sea serpents are reputed to have dragged ships to the bottom. Where, I hear you ask - in the Indian Ocean, where else! Pass the tranquillisers. Parenthood - what a responsibility.

n Far Off in Sunlit Places is published by Canongate on May 14 at #12.99.