There is a tendency among academic critics when writing a study of a writer to identify the writer exclusively in his or her creative work and to narrow the writer's life into writerly doings and writerly relationships. Writers of MacCaig's generation generally had to earn a living in a job which often had little to do with writing; they had family and social relationships, and writing poetry sometimes had a slightly furtive quality. Some people who met MacCaig later in his life could not believe that he had taught full-time in a primary school for twenty-five years. It has been reported, accurately or not, that colleagues of Wallace Stevens in the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company could not accept, when he died, that he had written poetry and some poets and poetry readers had difficulty in seeing the poet as the Vice-President of an insurance company. Many of Norman MacCaig's friends and acquaintances had artistic connections of some sort. Many, however, had no such connections; this was particularly true in Assynt where, incidentally, by and large, he did not write. He wrote at home in Edinburgh.

As we have seen in the previous chapter, a large and motley collection of people appear in his poems. Various random encounters provided material for poems and he seemed specially pleased to commemorate events and people from outside any obvious or self-defining poetic circle. His work as a gardener during the Second World War reappeared in a poem almost forty years later, the poem ‘How to cover the ground':

Whether the man is a functionalist who wishes to prepare the ground for vegetables or a puritan who cannot stand decoration is irrelevant. The humour is in his dogmatic absolutism.