A year to the day since I was last here, I am back. In the little cottage. Same room. Same view. Same feeling of peace. Just under two hundred miles from Glasgow, but a million miles from the perpetual motion of city life and the the gravitational pull of family. No longer an atom flying around the nucleus of obligations and children. Or is it the other way around…
The sun has burned off the mist and now reveals the random folds of the land. The mountains to the north are still spattered with snowfields. I can hear birdsong. A lilting staccato twitter amongst the whin and gorse. There is the odd sound of new arrivals. Of squeaking floorboards and moving furniture as other people arrive. There’ll be shuffling small talk and guarded views at the dinner table shortly, but all that will change as the days pass
Why am I here? I’m not exactly sure. I fit somewhere between the quiet professional writers and the voluble dreamers. In any case, I need to write with the kind of single-mindedness that good writers do. To plow on with a series of short stories that might perhaps morph into a novel, or to start something fresh.
Whatever. I’m glad I’m here. It’s serene and beautiful in a way only Scotland can do in the month of May, when all is new in the world. As if it was the first Spring.
The Absent Minded Scribe 