when real life is put on hold

I apologise for having gone a bit silent of late.  The deadline for my Natural History Museum story has just passed and the last weeks have been a sleepless haze of trying to orchestrate days to spend in the library reading books (on dinosaurs, dodos, fossil hunters, collectors, regency life, English seaside towns, Darwin, evolution...) and then late, late, late nights working on the story after the girl has finally gone to bed. 

What a contrast to today. 

Today I am sitting at a small desk, totally alone in a white-walled, glass-fronted cube.  Beyond the glass, there is a pond lined with wild flowers, and a field running down to an enormous loch.  Beyond the loch are mountains, their blue-grey silhouettes interleaved as they stretch into the distance.  The clouds in the sky are barely moving. 

I’d say it is silent, because after the city this feels like silence, but that would be a lie, because if I listen I can hear birds calling, water running, the occasional bleating sheep, and earlier there was the patter of light rain.    

I woke this morning after one of the first straight nights of sleep since my daughter was born.  Apart from three slow-heavy highland cows who came up quietly this morning to drink from the pond, I haven’t set eyes yet on another living soul.  I have no mobile phone reception.  No internet (I will have to make an excursion later in order to post this blog).  Nothing is being asked of me.  I have simply been gifted “time to write”. 

Can you tell that I’m still reeling a little at this present reality?

I’ll be here at Cove Park on the West Coast of Scotland for a one week residency.  Right now, at the outset of my week, the days are stretching ahead full of potential, a previously unimaginable expanse of time and space to focus uninterrupted. 

It won't be a week of total hermitude (did I just make up that word?).  There are others here.  I met a few of them last night.  There’s a Swedish jeweller called Lina in the cube next door to me (our “cubes” are in fact architect-converted ex-shipping containers) and James, a Hackney-based ceramicist on my other side.  Somewhere up the hill there are even a few more writers - a poet-novelist from the Shetlands called Jen Hadfield who won the 2008 T.S. Eliot Prize, and Olufemi Terry, winner of last year’s Caine Prize for African Writing.  I’ll have a chance to talk with them all later when we’re going up to the communal centre for a glass of wine this evening. 

Anyway, if you’ll excuse me for now, I want to get back to work, but I’m sure I’ll find the time while I’m here to post another blog or two, as recompense for my recent absence.  For now, I’ll leave you with a photograph of the view from my window, it even includes one of my new bovine companions...