When I stopped drinking, I said that the cigarettes were something I would deal with “later”. After 15 years, I have to admit it is, now, “later”.

I’ve stopped smoking and I’m furious.

I was never a heavy smoker. I quit without any bother during my pregnancies but, on the first nights out after giving birth, ten Marlboro Gold were back in my handbag. Then, two years ago, the stressful year my Dad died and our film was released, it crept up.

As I worked on edits of the seaweed book, I sat on a bench outside making roll-ups. I am realising how I organise myself around the promise of that jolt of stimulation, await it, the nerviness I came to think I need to operate, strung-out and hyped-up. Smoking is part of my identity, of being a writer, having a darkness.

I smoke at times of stress and emotion, because it’s sunny, because I’ve had a phonecall, because I’ve finished my work, when I am nervous before an event, when I am relieved after an event. It’s going to take a lot to unpick all of these associations.

I thought I was an exception, somehow I was allowed cigarettes because I stopped drinking. But in my 40s I realise I have to look after myself harder in all sorts of ways and can’t outrun the damage. Around the time Dad died, I started occasionally getting this tightness in my chest, twinges, pangs. And then I got a cold I couldn’t shake for months. I was sent for a chest X-ray and got scared.

My method of quitting smoking is ‘fear’.

I didn’t know that cigarette I had, standing in the street looking at the stars one night after getting off a Zoom, would be the last. But it didn’t feel that good; my body was rejecting it.

When this paper comes out it will be five months since I smoked. In these months I have noticed that my teeth clenching and jaw ache has reduced. I have put on almost a stone in weight. I’ve managed to do a public event (at a comedy club!) and run a weeklong workshop. Sometimes I’ve wanted to smoke so much it’s brought me to tears. I wrote a good line and wanted to smoke. Later, when I re-read the page and got to the good line, I wanted to smoke again.

In those moments, I feel lumpen and dull, with no way of celebrating. On one hand it’s just the odd cigarette. On the other hand, it’s having to change my personality.

I have been going through a miniature version of what I went through getting sober of alcohol. Is life just dealing with the same old shit over and over again in slightly different forms? My tendency to addiction reoccurs, my attachment to things that hurt me, dirty nicotine desire, part of a very human nihilism, the taste for a little bit of poison,

I need to acknowledge the grief. Two things can be true at once: I miss smoking, miss a certain image of myself and my youth, but also: emphysema is real.

Sometimes now, instead of smoking, I have a Big Cry. And this is growth, a new era. I know from experience with alcohol that if I can ride out a craving, it will pass and I will be stronger and I will be glad. I need my lung capacity for swimming, for breathing, for screaming.

The benefits, of course, are manifold. It felt good to throw away the foul jar of butts from the windowsill. I don’t have to wash my hair as much. My sense of smell has become more acute, which surprised me. After working through the frustration, what’s left is freedom.

The chest X-ray came back clear. The twinges are most likely stress and grief, the heart aches of life. I’ve quit smoking in honour of this beautiful aching life.

I usually write about Orkney-connected subjects in this column but this month I have to tell you about one of the best things that has happened to me this year, here in Yorkshire.

For seven years now we have lived on a street which leads onto a wooded valley. Back in the early spring, in the woods with the kids, exploring an area just off the footpath, my son’s 7-year-old friend noticed a hole. We peered inside the large, oval cavity with a well worn path leading up to it and decided it could, maybe, be a badger sett.

My friend on Papay was selling a trail camera and sent it down to me. A few days after the discovery, we strapped the motion-activated camera to a tree opposite the hole and left it for a couple of nights.

I brought home the camera and fiddled around with the tiny screen. There were lots of shots of my own blurry face and of the kids, playing around in front of the hole. Then, just what I was hoping for but didn’t know if I’d get: badgers!

I was so excited that I called the children, who had just got into bed, downstairs (They have mentioned this since, kids love it when adults break the rules. They loved it when, on a hot day, I took my jeans off and drove in my pants).

There are ten shots of single badgers leaving or re-entering the hole. In the last shot there are two badgers together. The photos are timestamped and show a badger leaving the sett at 20:24 and returning at 05:35. I am delighted by the idea of them being out there, all night, so close. I discuss with the children how we and the badgers occupy the woods at different times of day. My 8-year-old said “so, to them, we are the badgers”.

I changed the camera to video setting and put it back up. This time we get back a few short videos of the badgers waddling out of the holes with their distinct swinging back ends.

We started learning about badgers: the UK’s largest carnivore. Their main food is earthworms and they can eat hundreds in a night. They often have their setts on the edge of woodland so they can go and hunt on the open fields and often live surprisingly close to human habitation. They have a sense of smell hundreds of times more sensitive than ours.

We get in touch with the Calderdale Badger Group. They want to know they locations of badger setts in the area so they can be protected. Badgers and their setts are protected by law.

It has been a year of wildlife spotting around here. I have seen more roe deer this year than ever before and I think I spotted a watervole. Otters have been seen in the river where it passes through the middle of town. We share our local patch with other mammals, with squirrels, shrews and hedgehogs.

I often pine for Orkney and think about how my own childhood on the farm was different from my kids’ small town upbringing. Both places have their enchantments and there are many animals here not found on the Scottish islands.

Badgers are now in the imaginations of the gang of kids on our street and they have found more holes. I come to realise that woods are riddled with badger infrastructure. Knowing that badgers are our neighbours has expanded my conception of my local area. The woods are richer and bigger than I realised: they go deep.

Every few months I leave my family. I tell them I’m going, and take off alone to write.

This time, I take my laptop and notebooks, teabags and noodles, and drive our campervan out of town, up onto the moors. I turn off along a secluded road just a few miles from home, a curving single track between moor and reservoir, which isn’t the fastest route to anywhere. It’s a local beauty spot and probable dogging meet. The layby where I park up is littered with whipped cream nozzles.

Most of the time, I write at home, during school hours. It doesn’t come easily. There is pain, struggle, weeping, gnashing of teeth etc. But I have learned to look straight ahead and push on, building the words slowly.

But once in a while, I need to be able to write into the night without stopping for children’s teatimes and bedtimes. I need some uninterrupted alone time. So here I am, in a van of one’s own. Virginia Woolf with a chemical toilet.

I’ve got into a new book project, too deep to turn back, up to my neck in it. My aim is to reach the end of my first draft this week and to do this I need to lock myself in a small space with my manuscript.

From my little table in the van, I watch a kestrel hunt, hovering and diving repeatedly. Ewes with lambs come alongside, the tips of wind turbines blades rotate over the hilltop. A few people pass: van drivers taking the scenic route, boy racers, dog walkers. The same places are attractive for a writing retreat and fly tipping.

I have a few chapters printed out which I pencil scrawl over with deletions and additions and arrows before transferring the changes digitally. I’ve quit smoking and instead eat an entire packet of Choco Liebnix biscuits.

At first, I’m looking out at the long view over wide reservoir and distant hills. Then, the mist comes in and the van is in a cloud. The van becomes a bubble containing me and my book, locked in, on a layby somewhere on a Yorkshire hillside. I always sleep well and dream well here. The van is full of all the dreams that we have had, all our sleepings. Full of kettle steam and incense smoke.

Later I lie on the bed with the laptop propped on my knees, thinking hard and typing in bursts. The usual gnawing despair and small breakthroughs. Occasional cars shoot past in the night, blasts of light and music. Occasionally I happen on a phrase that pleases or a thought that feels original or true. I sit in the same place for hours, pillow behind my neck, falling deeper into the work than I usually do. Home, a few miles down the hill, has receded like a distant memory.

I just read the 1978 novel Gaining Ground by Joan Barfoot, just reissued by Faber, about a woman who leaves her husband and children to live alone in an isolated cabin, without clocks or mirrors, where she chops wood and grows vegetables. There is a romantic appeal but I don’t need nine years, just 24-72 hours, once every so often, to tend to my ideas at my own pace.

Lately I’ve been trying to meet creativity positively, learning that art doesn’t have to mean struggle. Writing doesn’t have to be smoking and angst, it can be soft and delicious.

I wake up in the van and carry straight on working in bed with cups of tea. Later, I drive back down into town, back into the world of clocks and mirrors, in time to get the children from school. It was good to leave and it’s better to return, over-caffeinated with a complete first draft, coming back down from the hill and out of the cloud.

In January, I marked ten years since my first book was published. On the same day, the sale went through of half of my late father’s farmland - leaving the other half in my name: The field with the caravan and the land along the shore. Since then, I’ve been dealing with the paperwork involved in being a landowner. This week, I’m filling in the forms applying for an Agri-Environment Climate Scheme. HY/23073/02139 is the code assigned to the piece of land I know as the Outrun.

I spend a lot of time at my desk here in Yorkshire, looking out at a wooded hillside and stonebuilt terraces of houses - and writing about Orkney. May is in full force and the woods are alive with birdsong and the freshest greens, home to deer, squirrels, water voles and badgers: all species not present in Orkney.

Last month, on a filthy day, two Heddle cranes came to the farm to take down the grain tower. The tower, thirty feet tall, was a water tank from the old Kirkwall Power Station, ingeniously repurposed by Dad. It gave a distinctive silhouette to the farm that I used to give people directions. The tower, now disused, was becoming unstable and dangerous so we had to arrange for it to be removed.

We watched from the caravan as the crane operators worked, cleverly maneuvering between and above the old farm buildings. In the lashing rain and wind, they first winched up a man in a crate who attached chains to the tower. It was perfect viewing for small boys. Then the whole thing came down, the two cranes rotating it from vertical to horizontal and lying it on the ground. Then the tower was lifted onto the back of a huge lorry and driven into Kirkwall to be scrapped. After they were gone, the place was safer and tidier but diminished, part of my Dad and history of the farm gone.

A few days later, two chaps from the RSPB came to visit and we walked up to the outrun. Talk of application forms and points systems mixed with my childhood memories of Highland cows and catching curlew chicks in my hands. We talked about how some grazing is beneficial for ground nesting birds, keeping the grass thinned out so chicks can run through it. We searched in vain on the slope where, in the past, primula scotica has flowered. We found an owl pellet filled with vole bones.They promised to return a few weeks later, when the grass had started growing and the farmland birds began nesting, to do a survey of curlew, oystercathers, redshank and lapwing.

Having this land is privilege and possibility. I am grateful for everything my father gave me. My responsibility and plans for this land are what has been on my mind and in my dreams. One morning I woke up in a panic as if I’d just realised that Dad is no longer there.

It is a special type of habitat known as marine heath or viking heath, never ploughed, with a particular mix of salt-resistant grasses and plants. A photo from 2015 shows it at its summer best with wild flowers, clovers and grasses. In the past it has been home to primula scotica, arctic terns and great yellow bumblebee but I’ve not seen any of these for years. With luck, the right management will encourage the plant life which will bring insects that in turn support birds. My hope is to see one of these ‘species on the edge’ on the Outrun again.

I have written about this stretch of coast and indeed gave its name to my first book. It is the money that I made from that book which means I don’t have to sell the land, and can instead work to look after it. In this way, the land and my writing are in a symbiotic relationship.

Of course, the land mainly looks after itself, petals unfurling, Atlantic crashing, worms digging, as I write at my desk 500 miles away.

I’m queasy in the back of a van in Helmsdale. I planned to write this column on the Hamnavoe from Stromness to Scrabster but I am not a good sailor and spent the crossing lying flat, my chicken tikka with rice and chips sitting uneaten.

We were up for easter, and slept nights at the old caravan which shifts and creaks in the weather. The waves were magnificent. I sat with the children down on the rocks that edge the farm and it seemed as if they were rolling above us, crashing and rumbling, loud machinery. The north wind blew perpendicular to the waves on the west coast, skimming off canopies of spray, which caught the sun and, seen from a certain angle, created brief rainbows in the glittering crests. Seabows? Wavebows?

My younger son walked the shore picking up bones: spine of rabbit, scapula of sheep, breastbone of oystercatcher. My older son helped me with some experimental underwater photography. I showed them the old well on the cliff field and warned them not to go inside it as it sinks right down to the sea, just as my parents had told me. Sometimes there’s a sense of the decades collapsing like a concertina and not being sure what generation I am in.

It’s strange when you have lived somewhere then move away – for years perhaps – and return to the same people in the same routines as if nothing has changed, like some kind of timeslip. I pass younger versions of myself and recreate scenes from the film of my book. On the ferry to Papay, I met a young woman who told me that my book was the reason she was visiting and she reminded me of myself when I first visited the island, more like the me of the book than I am now. And in the Stromness charity shop, someone walked in carrying a copy of that book in her hand, marked half way though, like an unrealistic prop in a play. Coming back here, art and life intertwine confusingly.

At the farm, the sunlight, so gratefully received at the battered end of winter, bounces off the metal roof of the caravan, glints off the silver sea. In Birsay Bookshop, I picked up a copy of Orkney the Magnetic North by J. Gunn from 1932. He gives an attractive explanation of what makes the light here special: “The ‘sky’ here means a whole hemisphere of illumination, not a mere strip as in towns, or even a segment, as in mountain valleys. There is light falling everywhere at all angles, and even the deepest shade is illuminated by rays from a wide sector of the sky.”

So often it’s the light. On the peedie plane back from Papay, the quality of the spring light shining off the open sea, stretching deep and all around, was so beautiful and also just like how it was the day I flew to Kirkwall after hearing that my Dad had died. That light opened my heart with unexpected precision and I was tearful all weekend. It’s not surprising that I should be thinking of Dad as he is all around here, after now more than two years without him.

The boys were sad to leave their Papay friends and I had a moment of feeling very torn about living in one place and having so much of myself in another. I am frustrated that I can’t live in two places, that I am forever part dislocated. Most people have some version of this I know.

But looking at it the other way around, I am lucky to have more than one place to call home and to be able to spend time up here with my children. Tonight we sleep in a van before continuing south, a journey taken many times, returning to our steep sided Yorkshire valley, and we carry with us the spectra of wavebows, lit by rays from a wide sector of the sky.

Woken by 1yo up around my head in slightly damp pyjamas, trying to sneak my nipple into his mouth. 4yo is down by my feet. Dom left for work early. It’s before 7 so I doze a little. Meanwhile, 4yo climbs the chest of drawers, finds my makeup bag and draws several thick circles of deep pink around the outside of his mouth, making me laugh when I wake up and see him, and quickly take away the lipstick. I get up, wee, get 4yo to wee, change 1yo’s nappy and dress him and get us all downstairs. 1yo eats three weetabix - and some fruit and fibre - while 4yo just picks the raisin and bananas out of his. I try to coax him to eat more as I unload the dishwasher and have a cup of tea and bagel while tweeting about one of my dreams and text Dom a photo of the lipstick. In the background, the Today programme breaks news of a school shooting in Texas. I turn it off and give each of the kids an extra kiss and cuddle. Back upstairs. I pick out 4yo’s clothes and challenge him to a race to get dressed. 1yo is roaming and opening cupboards. I get dressed then go back to 4yo and he’s got only his pants and has got himself under a blanket, reading a book. He’s annoyed that I have ‘won’ so.... I take my dress off and put it back on exaggeratedly slowly, allowing 4yo to put his clothes on before I finish and ‘win’. OK. While this is happening 1yo has emptied a bottle of laundry liquid on the landing. Shit! I lift the rug, shower it off and leave it drying over the bath. Then I put on a load of laundry, wipe 1yo’s snotty face, to protests, and give him a toothbrush while telling 4yo that although his lipstick is nice, he can’t wear it to school. I look at my phone calendar and realise it’s school photo day! I chase 4yo and pin him down, using my cleanser to try and remove the lipstick - fairly unsuccessfully - and comb his hair. He’s repeating “I want to wear the lipstick” and crying as I try to talk to him using the gentle communication techniques I’ve read about. Look at the clock. 1yo has pooed. Change his nappy. Wipe more snot. Shoes on everyone. Find 4yo’s library book. Pack 1yo’s bag with toys and nappies and my work bag (what do I need?) while he’s shouting for a book to hold. Moving hoover and boots out of the way to get the pram out of the door. Running down the hill with the pram, 4yo holding on. My tights are falling down, I should throw them away. Get to school and the gate is closed, we’re late, so I have to ring the bell to be let in, while trying to wipe off the last of the lipstick… then continue across town with the pram, it starts to rain, I should have packed a cover. I drop 1yo at his granny’s no time to chat… back down the street to the cafe. Hi to the waitress and order a coffee. Sit down and open the laptop just in time for my 9.15 Zoom meeting. I’m ready to start work.

Walking up the hill with a backpack of groceries, and maybe it was the drudge of routine or the weight of responsibilities or just a certain quality of the changing light, but I felt for the first time in years a flicker of that old ‘screw everything’ feeling and a faint impulse to drink.

Spring equinox is my soberversary. My last drink was 20th March 2011, a last blast before I started a week of medical detox then entered rehab. I have now been sober longer than I drank. I have now lived fifteen years of feeling relieved - still - when I don’t have a hangover after a social event. Fifteen justifying every frivolous spend as money saved on booze. Fifteen years of gradually building up my life without smashing it down every few days. But, still, there are dark reminders, regular dreams of drinking and the rare and disconcerting cravings.

At this distance, I am able to consider what has been the biggest factor in keeping me sober. It hasn’t been rehab or the 12-step programme, although these were very helpful in the early years. It hasn’t been wild swimming or birdwatching, although these things are important parts of my life. I can see now that the biggest thing keeping me sober has been my writing. I broaden this out to mean creativity, through which I have found purpose and self respect.

One of the best things that someone said to me when I was first trying to stop drinking was ‘you need a project’. My project became The Outrun and sometimes I feel it all got a bit out of hand but maybe that’s what happens when you channel the energies which were going to a drinking career into a book. Never underestimate the sheer force of an addict. I found in art the freedom I was looking for in intoxication.

What is the value of this individual self improvement in a world of much worse suffering? What is the point of recycling when war weapons are bombing oil depots and poisoning the air? I think about what recovery can teach us more generally. A major lesson of it is very simple: it’s about taking a pause to think before acting, about breaking impulsive patterns. We learn about self knowledge and taking the longer, harder path rather than instant gratification. I often think how anybody, not only addicts, would benefit from working the 12 step programme, including world leaders.

I am writing this column for the newcomer: the newly sober or those considering it. When people contact me, exhausted with drinking, I say: take it one day at a time. I say, talk to your GP or find your nearest AA meeting. If you can get to 90 days, your chances for the long term are good. I say that although it feels like drinking is all you like doing and all your attempts so far to control it have failed, there is another way. New pleasures and beauties will gradually come when you allow space for them. I say hold tight and if you can come out the other side you will know that we are the lucky ones.

Often I feel I have written of addiction and recovery quite enough. But then I keep coming back to it. I wrote, grandly, in my diary last year: “It has become my purpose to embody the possibilities of sobriety.” I suppose I meant that when I post online about talking at literary festivals, or making elderflower cordial, or exploring megaliths with our children, when 15 years ago I was broken and felt like I was at a dead end, I am an example of life after taking a leap.

The deeper I get into this, the more I realise recovery is ongoing. I still have the occasional cravings and continue to struggle with compulsive behaviours, specifically internet use and smoking. I repeatedly try to control the former and stop the latter, never succeeding, somehow telling myself with both that I need it for my writing. But this is the first time in a year of writing these columns that I haven’t read over a final edit with a cigarette. It’s never too late for a second chance and change is possible.

When I worked for the RSPB more than ten years ago, I was lucky enough to be sent to many of Orkney’s islands surveying for corncrakes. I got a taste for island exploring and around that time visited all twenty inhabited islands - including Auskerry and Gairsay - apart from Papa Stronsay.

I only spent one night on Eday so decided to return this week, for a night in a van - in mid February. I caught an early ferry, alongside lighthouse engineers and SSE workers, stopping at Stronsay and Sanday, before coming into Eday.

On the way I was reading a couple of books about the island I’d picked up from Orkney Library. One starts with the sentence “Eday is small”. Indeed just a few miles long with a population of 111. My first impression is of a peaceful island, barely another vehicle on the road and no other tourists to be seen.

It’s the first dry day in weeks and I set off to walk the 10km Heritage Trail, opened in 1986.

In the first hour, I’d watched ducks from a bird hide, got up close to the immense and beautifully-lichened Setter stone (now my favourite megalith), crawled into Vinquoy cairn with a headtorch, watched a hen harrier through binoculars, and crested a hill to a view so big and a wind so fresh I went “woo hoo” out loud. Not bad for a Wednesday morning.

I sheltered down by a drystone enclosure to eat my sandwich then continued along the crest of the peat hill to the furthest, highest point of Eday: The Red Head. From here, I looked out to the uninhabited island of Faray and over to Papay, managing to spot the house on the beach where we were living two years ago.

As I approached the cliff top, I smelled the unmistakable guano, then I was looking down on hundreds of fulmars riding the wind. In his phenomenal book about seabirds, Adam Nicholson describes how fulmars need a brisk wind, a gentle breeze is annoying to them but once it’s really blowing they are “the wind-spirits, alive with an evolved ability to live with the wind, in it and on it, drawing out its energy…”. writes about being “storm born” and feeling at home in wild weather and I understand what she means. I feel emotional watching the sea birds so content in their surroundings, playing, reminding me of my kids zooming up and down our cul-de-sac on scooters.

As I am walking, I am writing in my head. Taking walks has become an essential part of my process. When I am typing I am in the thick of it but, when I walk, sometimes, it’s like I’m able to rise above my piece of writing and see patterns and connections. Occasionally, in the right weather conditions, I am soaring like the fulmars.

My phone died and I took photos in my mind: of red stone and tangle, or wrack and wraith, of a grey heron unfolding itself and rising from a ditch, of a recently deceased sheep, of a not so recently deceased sheep, and, inside a chamber of neolithic tomb on a hilltop on this small island: of a disintegrating piece of cardboard marked ‘amazon’.

The best bit comes toward the end. A big, low, dark animal is moving - an otter! I watch it through my binoculars, with a clear view of its characterful face. Then it is coming towards me, strutting, and I put the binoculars down, standing still and open mouthed. Will it come right past? But it notices me, whiskers twitching, and runs off down the beach and into the sea and I am able to watch, for some minutes, its lolloping swimming, which I’ve never witnessed before. I am so happy to share a world with this beautiful wild mammal.

I arrived back at the van with aching legs in the first sunshine in the whole month. I got lucky with this trip. This column is my encouragement to Orcadian readers to visit one of the smaller islands this year and see what you can find.

The day this newspaper comes out is exactly ten years since the publication of my first book The Outrun. After the movie I’m quite sure readers have had enough of me talking about that book, but it does lead me onto a couple of things.

Eighteen months previously, I walked into Kirkwall Job Centre to sign off the dole - I’d been claiming Jobseekers for a couple of months - and when they asked for my new job title I was able to say ‘author’ and it was one of the sweetest moments of my life.

The other big moment from that time is when, after being given permission, I posted news of my book deal online. I remember sitting at the end of the bed in that little Stromness flat where I had been very lonely as the comments started coming in. Three hundred likes! What a high, for someone who felt washed up and forgotten, an alcoholic in early recovery. The flood of attention and approval was intoxicating.

And I’ve been chasing that dragon ever since, deeply addicted to internet validation, charting my literary progress for regular digital dopamine, making life decisions guided by the sniff of a future hit. I got into wild swimming and the cold water high was amplified by the buzz I got posting photos.

For a while when I dreamed, I would simultaneously dream of how to tweet the dream. I think about how I am both enhanced and entrapped digitally. I think about how my nervous system is intertwined with algorithms created by American tech corporations, like how the rhythms of the factory and the 9-5 became part of workers of the industrial age, or how farmers always have an awareness of their animals and crops. We are porous, new iterations of human forming under new conditions.

I was there, 20+ years ago, on early 00s message boards, on friendster, on livejournal. Writing is a solitary occupation and my colleagues, friends and readers are inside my phone. My writing has developed by continually being beta tested on the networks.

Gradually, however, I notice that the internet is less fun for me, more of an endless timesuck, a cacophony of content and a source of anxiety. Mostly, I manage to leave my phone downstairs in the evening and read a book but, if I am tired, I allow myself a scrolling binge and in the morning feel regretful and remember nothing of what I saw.

In recent years I often take time off social media - a couple of weeks or a month - when I’ve got a deadline and need to concentrate on writing. I delete the apps but feel I am, as people say in AA, “white knuckling it”, waiting for the relapse when the behaviour comes back at full force.

I also think a lot about how people’s strengths are often the same things that will destroy them and of how our flaws can also be qualities. Addictive tendencies can be harnessed and used as a creative force.

I’m probably going to take a big chunk of time offline in 2026 while I work on a new project. I continue to write about how the literary and the digital intertwine, about energy and land, the stimulating and weird, the networks we are trying to negotiate.

Lots of others have got hooked on this feeling. When I started swimming with the Orkney Polar Bears in 2012, there were just a handful of us and now there are masses of swimmers everyday at Inganess, Scapa, Ness and Evie. Of course some people have always swum around Orkney’s coasts and children used to learn to swim at Warbeth before the indoor pools were built but this current iteration of ‘wild swimming’ is a distinct wave, swimmers getting warm by jumping straight into dry robes, heated cars or - for the lucky - a sauna.

Wild swimming has become so popular - with the attendant commodification: branding and gear to buy - that writing about it now feels cliched but it plays an important part in my life, an important part of how I live sober. I have swum year-round for 14 years now. I’ve swum through writing books and raising babies, though solstices and equinoxes, sunrises and moonsets. I swam with friends and alone. I swam on the day my second son was born. I swam on a midsummer night when noctilucent cloud rippled over the reservoir. Last year on Papay, our house was on the beach and I swam most days through May and June, with seals, swans and terns.

I’ve had a new burst of swimming enthusiasm this winter, going two or three times a week, after the school run, or first thing while everyone else is still in bed, catching winter sunrises. Here in West Yorkshire, we are a long way from the sea, but there are a few spots that I dip. One is a pond in the woods, where herons nest and frogs bubble, forty minutes’ walk away. The others involve driving, then an uphill walk and open views of the moors and folds of the Calder Valley.

I usually wear a swimsuit, wetsuit gloves and boots, and a wooly hat. After a moment of doubt when I wonder what the heck I’m doing, I wade in without too much hesitation. I do head-up breaststroke and don’t stay in for long - just 45 strokes in the winter when the water temperature is often below 5 degrees C and feels icy. I urge anyone trying outdoor swimming to respect the power of the sea, consider safety and to listen to their bodies and not stay in too long. Despite its popularity, winter swimming is fairly extreme and not for everyone.

A plan is forming to swim everyday in January, then come to my desk energised. I have decided through experience that very cold days with a clear blue sky are the best swimming conditions, when the cold is at its purest and more clarifying. My children have learned to swim and I hope they will join me in the summer. I am grateful for Wednesday evening lessons at Stromness Swimming Pool in the late 80s for learning water confidence and the strokes that remain in my muscle memory.

As well as exercise and a way of being immersed in the natural world, people swim outdoors for mood-boosting, mental health benefits. I know that swimming is not a panacea. It’s not an answer to poverty or illness or the shareholder profit motive and overconsumption that is stripping the world of its natural resources and exploiting the most vulnerable. But, this year, I’ve experienced anxiety: low-level, perhaps hormonal. I’ve worried about my role as a writer, about my public image, my usefulness, and the ethical quandaries of writing about my own life. And I have found that when I have a cold water dip in the morning, my anxiety is much reduced for the whole day. In fact I feel actively good. It is such an effective remedy - for me - that I have come here to tell you about it. My nebulous worries about status or other people’s opinions are blasted away and replaced with a broader, deeper appreciation of the basics, of a beating heart in a world full of weather.

Yesterday I woke up thinking about Sule Skerry again. This tiny island reoccurs in my writing and in my dreams.

I’ve never visited the skerry, although maybe I’ve glimpsed it. On a clear day, from the Sandwick farm where I grew up, it might just be possible to see its tip on the horizon or its light at night. Sule Skerry lies 37 miles out west, and I’ve always felt it at the fringes of my imagination.

A skerry is barely an island, between an island and a rock, and Sule Skerry is just 800m long. There is just one building on Sule Skerry: a lighthouse built by the Stevensons in 1895, which was the most remote manned lighthouse in the UK until its automation in 1982. No one lives there now. Nearby is Sule Stack, an even smaller islet, home to a gannetry and we see the gannets along the shore - white arrows, messagers from faroff. Even further out lie the islands of North Rona and Sula Sgeir.

My adventurous friend Martin has visited Sule Skerry twice and says “it’s a very busy island, the thin soil honeycombed with rabbit burrows”. Thousands of seabirds nest there including puffins and the rare Leach’s Petrel. Landing a boat is tricky and visitors will have a cliff scramble.

The island inspires art. It has its own ballad, ‘The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry’, covered by many folk musicians including Joan Baez and The Unthanks. with the haunting refrain “I am a man upon the land, I am a silkie in the sea” and a dark ending. The tale of ‘The House on Sule Skerry’ was passed down in Sandwick for generations and retold in Tom Muir’s The Mermaid Bride, and tells of two Sandwick fishermen from North Dyke (where I grew up) who find themselves ashore on Sule Skerry in a storm and there meet a local lass who went missing years before. It’s another twist on the selkie story and it seems her fine husband is sometimes a seal.

Sule Skerry’s appeal is partly to do with the perpetual romance of lighthouses. I’ve just read Michael Pederson’s Muckle Flugga, a fictional fantastical account of the Shetland outpost. For me, it’s also to do with how the Lighthouse Board describes the isle on its website: “It is almost out of sight of all land”. I find that sentence - with the crucial ‘almost’ - devastatingly beautiful.

I have of course wanted to visit myself and at the start of 2020, was planning a trip with Orkney musician and composer Erland Cooper, who made a 2019 album titled Sule Skerry but had never been. We had chosen a date (or window of dates to allow for weather) and organised a boat but the plan was halted due to the pandemic and then the birth of my second son.

Maybe it’s better in a way to have never been? One of my favourite books is Judith Schalansky’s Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands, subtitled “fifty islands I have not visited and never will”, filled with fascinating stories. I can keep reading, looking at old photos, nautical charts and satellite pictures, listening to the ballads. Sule Sule remains a place of yearning. It’s a sad song, a symbol of desire. A Sule Skerry of the mind.

When I think about how geography has formed me, I think about how I grew up looking out to that westerly horizon, with everything that seemed interesting out of reach. Sule Skerry is like the mythical island of Hether Blether which can be seen but never reached. It keeps getting further away. For me enchanted islands have been a metaphor for addiction, a desire that can never be sated. I don’t drink any more but I still know the wanting, the obsession. I know that things that don’t quite work can be more desirable than things that do.

Maybe I’ll manage to get to Sule Skerry one day, hitching a ride with some bird ringers or lighthouse engineers, but perhaps it’s enough just to know it’s out there, Atlantic-battered, coated in puffin guano and sea salt, almost out of sight, the island always just over the horizon.

In the centre of a deep cold rockpool, I have a revelation. At the end of a warm day, I go down to the chain of pools where we swam as kids. It’s low tide, the water has warmed slightly over the afternoon. I slip in without too much hesitation, swim slowly and look around. After spending much of last year studying seaweed on Papay, I can now see what a fantastic array is here: large swaying sugar kelps submerged, giant ponytails of thongweek dancing on the surface, the walls of the pool thick with the red seaweeds including dulse and carrageen, as well as various wracks. There is even some pepper dulse - ‘the truffle of the sea’ - and I break off a piece for a nibble. It’s a phycologist’s (scientists who study algae) dream. I am aware of the great beauty and my great luck, a mermaid in my own pool.

Annie Dillard talks about how a writer has to “give voice” to “your own astonishment”, to follow the subjects that call to you. For the last two years, for me, it has been seaweed but until right now in the rockpool, I have never quite understood why. I have a moment of clarity: Abundance of seaweed is deep in my memories, I have formative sensory experiences that I need to examine and revisit.

The next week I visited the Pier Arts Centre to see Buss o Gress / Tuft of Grass by Rebecca Marr and Valerie Gilles, looking at grass species and their traditional uses. A phrase struck me: “This exhibition is about remembering something at the edge of our memory”. It feels the same with seaweed, learning about them is like uncovering something I almost already knew. At home, I browse their beautiful book When the Grasses Dance, with poems and photos about individual species of grass. “Grasses have been overlooked in our society’s state of plant blindness”, the introduction states. The diversity of grasses is being remembered just as it is being lost. Monocultures of mainly rye grass dominate the islands, producing super livestock and bringing prosperity but we also know that biodiversity is declining.

A few days later, I had a visit at the farm from local naturalist Tim Dean, author of The Orkney Books of Birds and of Wildflowers and The Wildlife of Orkney’s Coasts and Seas, three fantastic volumes illustrated by Tracy Hall and Anne Bignall which are never far from my desk. I’d invited him to have a look at the land I have inherited from my Dad. We walked slowly along the shore fields, stopping to examine and identify the low-lying plantlife. Tim kindly shared his knowledge, pointing out that the yellow flowers all over the cliff field are not dandelions but Autumnal Hawkbit, finding Sorrel, Thrift and different types of Plantains including Buck’s Horn. Up on the outrun there is quite a bit of heather. The land could probably be classified as ‘coastal heath’, which is found in exposed locations where the vegetation is strongly influenced by salt spray.

I have walked over these fields all my life but have never known the names of all the grasses and plants. I find it very powerful to begin to learn. I have a feeling of things coming into focus, what was an indistinct mass gaining shape. Putting names to things means we are able to appreciate and quantify the richness - and to protect these species-rich grasslands and seashores. There is value in following your own enchantment, your idiosyncratic interests, in looking closely. Primula scotica (The rare Scottish Primrose) has grown on the outrun in the past but I haven’t found any for years. Tim encourages by saying it should still be in the seedbank. I hope that with the right management, including reducing grazing, these special plants might reappear and thrive.

Joy comes in unexpected moments. Sometimes it’s happening on the right combination: a train journey and a good book, a cigarette after a nervewracking event. This week it was overhearing a surreal conversation between my sons; it was three ideas coming together to make a piece of writing.

I worked away last week, tutoring at the creative writing centre up on the hillside, surrounded by trees. Days of perfect autumn, crisp mornings and golden light. I’ve done a few of these courses now and each time I think it is a risky endeavor. It feels precarious bringing together a group of people who want to write about their lives, who are often just beginning to find their voices and tell their stories, who are raw and emotional. And these brave people are put together with tutors who are neither trained counselors nor teachers, but have written a book or two. And we all work and eat and live together. It’s a social experiment filled with danger and possibility - a sweet spot for writing.

Perhaps to mitigate some of the risk, one of the things that I say to the writers on the first day is that they don’t have to write about trauma. Many people are there to tackle a particular difficult aspect of their lives - losses, illnesses, dark legacies - and it can be useful as a writer to go where the pain is but it can also be helpful to go to the joy.

I talk to them about joy as resistance and pleasure as political. I read from Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good by Adrienne Maree Brown: “Pleasure activism is the work we do to reclaim our whole, happy, and satisfiable selves from the impacts, delusions, and limitations of oppression and/or supremacy.” We talk about the power to be found in joys free from commerce: pleasure in nature, in sex, in friendship. We talk about balancing light and shade in our work. And I asked them to write and I’m silenced by fluent and lovely pieces on food and love and sailing at night.

Ross Gay, in his book of daily essays on delight, writes: “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.” Taking this idea, I tune into when I feel good these last few days. I notice the difference between pleasure (a sensory thing, the segment of orange in the sauna), joy (a broader feeling, often in the mornings before the day gets on top of me, a surge of well being, a sense of my own good fortune) and contentment (more lowkey, everyone in the household calm and happily occupied).

I’ve written two books centred on difficult experiences: addiction and heartbreak. In 2023, however, I wrote a monthly column for Caught by the River about doing things outdoors with children and it was my idea with these columns to be guided by joy. My experience of motherhood had been generally positive and I wanted to share the hope and happiness I found in picking berries or planting trees with my boys. But I noticed that I didn’t get as much feedback with these type of pieces. Am I right in thinking that readers want me to suffer? Or that in order to write contentment I have to offset it with tribulation? This is trap of the narrative arc.

On the last night of the course, after an intense few days of working and laughing together, everyone reads a piece of new work, everyone going into emotionally hard places: there are dead dads and childhood pain. Good writing usually involves some sort of risk, whether personal or artistic. But we had created some safety to share these things by knowing that we all have joys as well as sorrows.

This month marks one year since the release of the film adaptation of my book The Outrun, a story based heavily on real events of my life, directed by Nora Fingsheidt. I’ve now had a year to absorb the impact of this big, uncharted, privileged experience. People keep saying to me “have things calmed down now?” and while they have, this project was years in the making, longer in the living and continues. Everyone else has gone onto other things but it will be with me forever.

A key line in the film is Rona asking her lover, “Do you ever feel like you can control the weather?”, and the question of how to harness and integrate your drives and madnesses in creative and non-harmful ways continued for me during the film’s release.

The last year and a half contained several high points, starting with the Sundance Film Festival in Utah then the Berlin film festival. There was a crazy week in Edinburgh in August where the film’s UK premiere opened the Film Festival and there was also a separate stage production of The Outrun running. The next month the film premiered in London and - most importantly - in Orkney at Picky and in Papay at Beltane hostel.

I knew this would be a once-in-a lifetime go on the annual film industry merry-go-round so I embraced it: doing interviews, meeting audiences, choosing outfits, dying my hair furious blue to match the poster. Later in the year, we attended some award ceremonies, peaking with the BAFTAs. I felt by trying to enjoy it all rather than playing it cool, I was honouring the opportunity I’d been given and the work of the team.

However, at many of these times, I had a lot of wobbliness and unsustainable levels of stress and discombobulation. I often felt out of control; my writing had set off a chain of events that affected my whole family. I felt embarrassed, with the knowledge that my life is no more special or dramatic than other people’s. It is the familiar story of an addict. Making my story distinct, however, are the Orkney setting, and the facts that I wrote it, and that, unlike most alcoholics, I was able to get sober. It’s this simple story of recovery and hope that has connected with people.

I have received many messages from viewers, often about their own experience of addiction. I have appreciated engaged responses: the sensitive work of Orkney.com, directing tourists to some film locations; a drag performer who dressed as a seal and came onstage to the‘selkie’ monologue; even some critical reviews were thought provoking (an American blogger said the film was a process of “seeing someone muzzled”). Often it is impossible for me to reply to these responses and I have to be content that the film has done the work.

Weirdness continues. I see pictures of Saoirse Ronan as Rona and I think “that’s me”. When I’m in Orkney, I keep accidentally recreating scenes - when I pass through the doors out to the deck on the Hamnavoe, in Papay shop. Life imitates art imitating life and it’s very odd. But - I haven’t gone insane! Perhaps because these high octane trips were interspersed by returning to normal Mum life and because rather than being occupied with the film’s reception, I focussed on new work - writing most of a book during this time. It’s unlikely anything else I write will have the same scale of audience as The Outrun but I’m determined to keep pushing myself artistically.

When people ask, I tell them that I am very proud of the film but it was a collaboration and the book is more ‘me’. I am pleased that the film has brought me new readers. I do not have further ambitions in the film industry and am quite happy to retreat to books.

Part of the story of The Outrun is when my Dad and I found a lump at the farm which we thought could be highly valuable whale matter: ambergris, ‘floating gold’. It turned out to be worthless but - and it has taken me a while to realise this - by making my difficult experiences into something of worth, the film team made wax into gold: The art is the ambergris.

I can go weeks without leaving my valley town and when I do I’m on a high. My best mood is travelling north alone. North and to the sea. To the Isle of Tiree for the Sea Change film festival.

Each time I get to an airport, I have forgotten how airports work. I remember destinations but not the transit. Leaving Glasgow, above lochs and windfarms, the tiny plane enters a cloud, temporarily unreachable, and I think of all the altitudes this film has taken me. When we emerge, we’re in a different realm - above the inner Hebridean islands: Mull and Iona then descending over the rocky shores and white sand beaches of Tiree. Island of lapwings. Island of excellent chips. Always with that fresh wind, that ocean light.

At the film festival I work with a group of isles teens. One girl writes about how a local beauty spot is boring because it has no reception. I sign books and meet a Tiree lass who is writing her undergraduate dissertation on my work. I discover there are no rabbits on the island, only hares. I learn the Gaelic for seaweed: feamainn. Over two days I watch six films and a programme of shorts. I cry on a stranger, a new friend, after one film stirred me deeply, telling her the big things. I apologise even though we both know this is what we’re here for.

I stay at the end of a track on the west of the island, a passive house, off grid. All of us in the house have moments when we can’t remember things, pat dumbly for our phones, disabled without wi-fi. Here I am in a small island community and within that the community of female filmmakers. I become calmer focussing locally.

I’ve been reading George Mackay Brown. He rarely left Stromness. He was scathing of Orcadians with opinions about Vietnam. But he probably wasn’t wearing clothes made in Bangladesh and using devices made in China. We are part of a global system and have a duty to be informed. But I can have a break: Three nights with no internet. Three days without looking at the news. Three mornings swimming in the sea. I pick seaweed - bladder wrack, egg wrack and spiral wrack - and leave it in the bathroom in a bin bag for when I get back, adrenalised, from the film screening. I answered questions after the movie adaptation of my book, of my life. It’s never not wild. Someone asked, as they always do, what my parents think. Later my nervy edges soften in the seaweed bath.

I leave on the ferry, passing back into landlocked life. Someone asked how I manage living so far from the sea and my answer was unsure. Falafel in Glasgow. Hot chocolate and Private Eye on the train. I realise that it’s the autumn equinox which means I have been sober for fourteen and a half years and in that time have made myself this writer's life and I’m still figuring out how it is to be inhabited.

Changing seasons often heighten my emotions. I am unsettled, agitated, sometimes with a rare urge for a drink but today I want to turn that energy into writing. I want to write my way through the stuckness, knowing I’ll never reach the Certainty Centre.

At Christmas my son got a voucher and at the beginning of the summer I got around to using it - he wanted a water pistol he told me, ok, I thought and went online and after a few minutes found a cheap and fast option, a pair - one for both boys. A couple of days later, when a friend was visiting, the delivery driver arrived and I was embarrassed as he handed me the Amazon parcel containing big hunks of new plastic moulded in imitation of automatic weapons. I am part of the problem, I thought.

I was asked to sign an open letter calling for the UK government to boycott Israel. I look on the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement website list of priority targets while sitting at my desk and see my HP Printer - I just bought an expensive new ink cartridge - and the telly which has a Disney+ account which the children watch. Earlier in the year we got an insurance payment for our stolen van from AXA. I am part of the problem, I think.

I am writing this in a spirit of honesty and guilt. So often I find that people point fingers and see themselves as blameless and but I feel highly aware of my own complicity in the problems in the world: in consumerism, individualism, complacency. I find that our comfortable western lives are deeply economically entangled with the military industrial complex and with Israeli interests and that this is probably why - in complicated and horrifying ways - the genocide continues.

For the last year. I’ve had this churning uncertainty about my work, as a ‘memoirist’, as a ‘nature writer’. I’ve been exploring the seashore connected to the sea that people in Gaza are forbidden from entering. I’ve been researching regenerative agriculture when farmland in Palestine has been razed. I’m writing books when libraries and universities have been destroyed. I’m writing about conservation on a laptop made using minerals that fuel brutal conflicts in Congo.

I’m not going to finish upbeat. I just don’t know. I haven’t bought anything off Amazon since the water guns. I can find almost anything I want or need second hand. We stopped our Disney account. I explain to the children why I don’t like them playing shooting games. I know that problems are structural and there is only so much we can do as individuals but it’s a good place to start. Last night I went to a meeting of our local Green party and that felt like the right place to be. When I got home I heard about the bombing of a children’s hospital in Gaza City.

At Easter, in the caravan, the boys pulled out Dad’s chess set and I tried to remember the moves to show them. For a while when I was a kid, Dad was a member of a chess club with some of the West Mainland’s most interesting characters: the one-armed inventor, the schizophrenic German - and the bipolar farmer, his game as variable as his condition. He taught me to play and now I am pleased to be able to pass on the basics to my children. I am surprised by how quickly they, age 7 and 4, pick it up.

A few weeks later, back in Yorkshire, Dom brings home another chess set and the boys get stuck in again, the younger one particularly keen. Since Dad died last year, I’ve been wearing his shirts. I have boxes of his harmonicas - he played the blues when the mood was right - and I have a notion I might learn to play myself. Then I think maybe it’s chess rather than harmonica. I can play chess like Dad, inhabit his memory. It’s something I can do with the children, something to challenge my ageing synapses.

After just a few games, the 4yo beats me. Check Mate. I hadn’t even let him. Either he is good or I am bad. It’s definitely the latter but I can see that he has qualities needed: spatial awareness, an ability to concentrate and a competitive drive.

I can’t let him win, though, and decide that over the summer, it will be my project to get better at chess. I read Reddit chess forums. I order Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess and work my way through the exercises with a pencil. And the 4yo and I play a game or two a day: exploratory, full of mistakes and surprises. He is a wild, exciting, fast player. There is lots of attack and little strategy. He is not a good loser. I begin to appreciate the deep poetry of the game, in turns maddening and dazzling. You are there carrying out your little plan but the problem is that your opponent has their own plan. I improve, but so does he. Like with writing, the single minded focus required for chess is different to the multitasking mindset needed in motherhood. I have to work hard to sit still and concentrate but still I tend to rush, carried away with the idea of a move without considering its implications.

There’s a Bluey episode where Bandit tries to teach his kids because “smart people play chess” and it's a painful recognition of my eagerness at the 4yo’s interest. It’s perpetually interesting and confronting how having children brings me back to my own childhood, with new memories and insights. Cleverness was valued and I took pride in my academic achievements. I’m working against assuming the same for my children. I often think of that David Foster Wallace thing about unconscious value systems: “Worship your intellect, being seen as smart, you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.”

The Bluey episode ends, as usual, with a gentle lesson to “work on their hearts now, heads later”, which is good for me to hear but I don’t totally agree. If kids show interest in something we are right to support that. It’s all part of this balancing act of parenting: wanting to encourage, but not be pushy; wanting them to know they’re special, but not too special. Dad encouraged me to study maths and physics to a higher level, for pure satisfaction in difficult brain work I still appreciate. Under his advice I began to question the church where I was taken.

I’ll remember this as the summer of chess. Pyjama chess. Naked chess. We played on a travel kit in the back of the van, pawns lost and replaced by lego figures. We set up a board between the boys in the bath, with candles. We played on our holiday back to Orkney where again I sat in Dad’s seat in the back corner of the caravan. The 4yo is usually keen to play - “game of chess?” is our refrain - and I realise that it’s maybe not just the game that attracts him but individual time with me under my approving focus. I have a terrible understanding of how, just as Dad formed me, I am forming him.

At the end of the holiday, my bonny boy turns five. He loves lego, story books, “boffers” (sticks), cuddles and chess. For a couple of weeks he experiments with just the knights, moving them back and forth, testing their capabilities. He enjoys the thrill of the capture, and wants games to continue after Check Mate. I thought a summer of playing chess with kids would make me better at chess but the best thing is that it has made me better at playing.

(Image: The Chess Game by Sofonisba Anguissola)

I’ve been home in Orkney for a few days and every night have failed to, as intended, go out and look for shooting stars. It’s the peak of the annual Perseid meteor shower, full moon week and a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter and I had astronomical plans but either the sky has been clouded over or I’ve been in bed before it was dark enough.

We’ve been out to Papay and I had the idea to go looking into rockpools at night with a UV torch. I wanted to write about Papay at night in the style of Kanye West rapping about LA at night: “Cop lights, street lights” he lists but I would find “moon light, light house”. But it was not to be.

Now I’ve got a day and night to myself here at the caravan and have been working on my book edits. There’s no wifi or phone reception, no telly or radio, and no children to put to bed. The warmth of the day has lulled into evening and I have decided, at 9pm, to just sit with the lights off and observe what happens as it gets dark.

After a golden hour where the light catches the almost-ripe barley, the sun sets in secret, obscured by a band of low cloud on the Atlantic horizon. At first it’s not a darkening but everything getting bluer: A bluening. The tide is coming in and mist is appearing in front of Hoy. It’s less like night is falling and more as if it’s rising from the sea, enveloping us softly.

Ravens croak past and curlews are on the wind. It’s cloudy and I don’t think I’ll see meteors tonight. I don’t feel like Kanye but what I do feel like, back here at the farm where I grew up, is my younger self. I’m a restless teenager not a 44-year-old Mum. I want to drink coffee and stay up all night.

As it gets darker, the caravan windows become mirrors, my ghostly face illuminated by the laptop screen. I remember the painting by Sylvia Wishart hung in the foyer at Stromness Academy where I gathered with friends every morning.

Between the clouds in the east, a red gibbous moon has risen. By 10pm, the headland across the bay is a silhouette. Two or three points of light appear out at sea to the south, blinking. They’re not vessels but something else, probably something to do with the new West of Orkney Windfarm. Instead of planetary conjunctions, I’m seeing feats of marine engineering, like shooting stars landed on the Pentland Firth.

At about 10:45, as I’m watching the sea, the whole southern sky flashes red behind the clouds. I am not sure what I have seen and keep staring. A minute later, it flashes white and I am open mouthed. Lightning, sheet lightning! Totally unexpected.

Over the next hour, more lightning strikes regularly, illuminating the sea and the caravan for thrilling pulses, followed by extremely long peels of thunder, I count 30 seconds. By 1am the thunder storm feels like it is directly over the caravan, heavy rain clatters off the metal roof and my bed is strobe lit and vibrating with thunder. My heart thumps and I feel like I’m on a boat in a sea of storm.

I wished for lights at night and got more than I expected. I’ve seen new lights at sea to power our lights on land. I’ve seen light that struck me open mouthed with awe. Rare enchantments can be found if we look.

Reflections 1 by Sylvia Wishart

With my new book submitted to the publisher, I find myself in a place of possibility. Ideas I have repressed are surfacing. I’m full of plans for things to do and write about, which for me are the same thing. I go back through my old diaries looking for strong images, recurring themes and overlooked nuggets.

I’ve written regular diaries since I was 8 or 9. The journal Mum gave me for Christmas one year was the most dangerous gift I’ve been given. I liked the possibility of having a secret, inner voice and flaunted the ‘Private, Keep Out’ cover.

It’s something many people do in their teens but I have continued, an overgrown adolescent. A photo of French-American eroticist Anaïs Nin (above) with a pile of diaries as tall as herself was an influence. I wrote my university dissertation on the diaries of Nin and Scottish novelist Naomi Michison, arguing for their diaries as a form of literature.

My diaries are where I found my voice and learned to write. There are many lines from diaries that have directly gone into my books - “I grew up next to cliffs, I have never been afraid of heights” - and other entries that have been edited and extended.

I usually write in the evening and usually one page a day. For a decade now I’ve used Italian lined notebooks from Ciak and Staedtler pigment liner pens. I’ve moved around but writing in the diary at the end of the day is a consistent thread, linking me back to my younger self in my Orkney bedroom or London flatshares.

The diaries are my daily workout. I try to stop entries from becoming a list of complaints, instead recording physical details, seasonal observations and moments of beauty. If I meet a friend, I write one interesting thing they told me. Some days it’s a list of everything I’ve googled, on others I copy down passages from the book I am reading. News and politics is a subplot to my own daily life. Often I use my day’s entry to give myself a pep talk. I use it to find out what I think, to write myself toward things, imagining possibilities in handwriting which can then become real.

If I don’t write for a few days, I begin to feel overloaded, and as if my experiences have been wasted. It’s a strange mindset, a shady affliction to both withhold and exhibit. Diary writing, inefficient and inward looking, is not the only way into writing.

At one point my archive of diaries spent years in a friend's attic. I now have two fireproof boxes in the back of a wardrobe, rarely opened. However last week I looked back, swiftly, over the last three years, noting down some of my favourite first lines. There was lots on the absurdity of life with small children: “Sometimes when my four-year-old is embarrassed, instead of talking, he quacks”, and the angst and possibilities of writing: “When something I write is published, I am immediately aware of its faults and just want to do the next thing”.

Reading back, I notice patterns. At times when I was younger and obsessing about a boyfriend, it was when something else was going on - leaving home, my parents divorce. Entries over the recent years repeatedly see me finding work and public profile difficult but finding comfort and security in family life. I can use these observations to make choices in the future.

Living and writing become one and the same and I sometimes choose to do things that will make a good diary entry. When misfortunes come, I am able to examine and shape them: art as survival strategy.

There is a recent Tik Tok philosophy to “romanticize your life” but I’ve been doing it for more than thirty years. I started self mythologising early and so alarmingly successfully that it grew into books and then a film. I peaked, my journaling and main character syndrome out of control.

But I am also stuck reading back these often embarrassing pages by my great freedom and privilege, to be allowed to develop the inner life that has given me so much. I’ve said it is my ambition to write my diary for a living and to my great surprise and delight right now it seems to be working.

I’ve been trying to film the swifts that nest in the roof of my children’s school. From May until July, as I walk up and down the hill to school and town several times a day, usually rushing, I point my phone at the sky. The swifts are so present in my ears and peripheral vision but when I try to capture them, they are gone, just out of shot. They are too high, too fast, too swift. They are getting away from me like the summer.

Now it’s the last day of term, my older boy’s last day at the school, and I have so many short videos of empty patches of sky, recently departed by swifts, just the sound of cars and jackdaws.

It’s my eighth summer in this town and I’ve come to know swifts as its sound. This year I noted they came screaming in on 29th April. They are there in the upper register of my hearing and the corner of my eye, always dashing out of sight. I watch them chasing but I can’t twist my neck, I look into the sun and they're gone.

The children are fledging and so are the swifts. Soon, when the chicks leave the nest under the gutters of the school, they won’t touch the ground for two or three years. The adults come here to our town to breed for just a 12 weeks or so, spending the rest of their year, as I hear Mark Cocker describe on my favourite radio programme Scotland Outdoors, following termite storms across sub-Saharan forest and savannah.

In Hark by I read about the phenomenon of mothers hearing phantom crying. I think I experienced this a little but, now my children are older, it’s phantom swifts. I have a kind of summer tinnitus, a kettle whistle, a hearing aid squeal, screaming at me about the passage of time. I think about how hearing loss and auditory hallucinations often accompany dementia. I think about my Dad and the wind whistling around the caravan, tarpaulins flapping. I think about development and decline, happening all at once, so quick.

We’re in the book bags and swimming lesson years. Like many things in parenting, it’s about finding the right line, between welcoming the next stage and appreciating the present, between rushing and resting. My children are learning to read and to swim, two of the most joyous skills of life, progressing in the way anybody would hope for their children yet denied to many, but yet I can get snagged on routine. Trying to watch the swifts on the school run means looking up, thinking bigger, consciousness raising, tuning into all the screaming marvel.