The Sixth Day.

So, there’s wasps and then there’s bees. There are gods and there are mortals. Does immortality breed conceit? Arrogance? Decadence? There is the universe, and man, and God inbetween. Beaches, lakes and oceans pacify man because they are more timeless than he is. Does God get bored on a beach? God doesn’t have the clumsy inconvenience of flesh to distrct him in his pursuit of creation - whether creating it, cataloguing it or merely sitting within it and drinking tea. A man will stare for hours at moving water but rarely for anything more than a few minutes at a moving ant. I went on holiday and thought a lot, but only discovered only one real, truly original fact:

It is so hard to write a novel without a laptop.

The Second Day.

A vole runs back and forth across the threshold - one morning to the left, by the evening back to the right. Clouds we passed look like letters spelling out a word I couldn’t properly read. My iPod died and I coudn’t listen to Patrick, but I didn’t mind. There was sea to look at on my right, and mountains on all sides. Grey troubled skies chased a horizon licked by thunderclouds and veils of rain. On the road from Inverness I listened to Moby for the first time in years as the green and the grey flashed beside me like my memories of Scotland - university - Richard - 7 years ago - how we would go everywhere in his car listening to Groove Armada, Air and Moby. The sense of it all - the simple order of a circle gave me contentment, a peace and self awareness that hasn’t once left me since I got here. I feel like different person - like the same person who’s become different. It all sort of makes sense. I dyed my hair black again. It looks false, but I like it. I love it. There’s no point in dying your hair if it looks natural afterwards.

The iPod was charged by the time I came back, allowing me to finish listening to The Childcatcher whilst I wrote this. I love Patrick’s voice. It’s the rightful soundtrack to anywhere with saltwater, a rockface and rain - the scent of sheep’s wool and mushrooms sprouting from the earth whenever you open the door.

Skye is beautiful, but in a sort of raw, strange, desolate way. All that space - empty, wordless, lifeless. Just salty seaweed and heather trampled underfoot. From my bedroom I look at the sea stretching endlessly to the north, nothing beyond the lighthouse that flashes two bursts of green light into the darkness whenever the sun goes down.

But now, while it’s still light, sheep chew at the earth behind fences - kept in sensible ordered pens for protection from their own mindlessness, whilst the farmer’s tamed wolf waits at the gate. We can’t reach the beach. Not yet. But there is water eveywhere. The sea is constantly in sight - water, water and water.

My mind feels so busy here - or is it just that my busy mind now has room to work, to think - to expand in this huge open space away from the home and I had made my gallows. The air is so very fresh and endless. I am drinking more tea than usual and smoking much much much less. I’ve had one cigarette since we got here.

Jon has been unknowingly charting the changes. With each photo he takes of the boy with the blue-black hair in the soldier’s coat that billows in the wind, looking like Hamlet upon the clifftops, I have become less likely to forget - to lose this age-long repression, bursting out of a thick skull into the same person I always was, who is so different to the person yesterday that I had become. I will make my eyes blue agan - pretty and fake. I love pretty fake things - plastics, glass and bright colours. They make me happy, they make me laugh. I like to dress myself in woolen coats and keep my head down towards the ground because there’s a passive beauty in pretending to surrender. I like changing beneath a camouflaged chrysalis, pretending to the passing world that I’m just the same as the branch on which I’m sitting. I like keeping secrets and making wishes that I never tell a living soul.

Now here comes the rain once more.