This newsletter could be about winter. It could be about how tired I find myself when the day has turned into night so very early. This newsletter could be about change. It could be about the arrival in a new city, about trading Loch Fyne for Glasgow, about saying goodbye to what once was. This newsletter could be about regret, about frustrations and disappointments, about the weight of the world and the urgency of the horrors that appear to us. This newsletter could be about friendship, about the warmth and kindness of strangers, about the anticipation I feel for the year ahead.
Instead, the first newsletter of 2025 goes back to September last year. To an enormous car camping trip my partner, Ed, and I made. To me, wrapped up in layers of merino wool and waterproofs.
Parked up, overlooking the most beautiful view of Tarbert—a ferry port on the Isle of Harris, where the rocks and tiny islands rising out of the sea and laying just beneath the surface of the water create a maddening maze for boats to navigate—I finally say it.
I’m resentful.
I’m feeling bitter about the way things have gone lately. Bitter at the world. Frustrated at myself. Overwhelmed by the weight of the horrors that I see via a tiny phone screen. I want to scream. I want to cry. I want to throw something.
And so, I do. I shout. I’m so angry, I say to the rocks and the hills and the mud and the sky and the sea. I’m so sad, I say, because I am. And the grass doesn’t bend to my sadness. And the rocks don’t respond to my tears. But you do.
The world around us is so still. We are so far from any people, any homes. The sun is setting and the wind eats at our exposed faces. I let out the anger and the sadness and the disappointment. I feel so silly and childish that it still all hurts so much. And then, the relief. The relief to have said it. To admit that regret has been eating at me; resentment, frustration. That it will, of course, be fine. That all of this will fade as time passes, as things change, as it sinks back into the scenery of my life.
And then, we get the speaker from the car and use the patchy 4G to stream music worthy of dancing to. We host our own dance party on the hill overlooking it all, because, well, what else can you do? In the cold, wrapped up in a million layers, gloves and a balaclava, we dance it out. We laugh. We sing at the top of our lungs and jump and wave at the one car that goes past. I stir the pot while you prep the fish. The very dregs of September hang on and now October is appearing, and it’s cold. The sky is so blue, so dreamy pink, the sea so calm. It’s easier to admit things when you’re away from it all. When it’s just you and the hills and some cows mooing in the distance.
I found something out there on that hill. I left something there too. It’s not all miraculously better but I’ve felt lighter ever since.
In the final week before Ed and I left our life in Argyll & Bute to move to Glasgow, we went down to the loch to say our goodbyes. I wrote about it and shared it on my Instagram. How, more than two years ago, Ed first came up to work at Inver on a short contract to support the final three months of the 2022 season. I came and joined him for the final 4 weeks and thus began a love affair with rural Scotland.
I’ve fallen in love with a few things in my life. And the quiet, spectacular beauty of that area is one of them. My heart felt at home, felt settled. Land and home resonate deeply with me. They hold my work, frame my stories; my characters are shaped by the places they stand.
The person I am leaving there is vastly different to the person who arrived with a suitcase full of books and heavy jumpers. I can think of many times I’ve arrived somewhere with a suitcase full to the brim. Hopeful. Anticipatory.
As the breadth of 2025 spreads out before me, I hold a candle up to the shapes of the year yet to solidify. What will come of life in this new city? Who will I be as the bells toll on the next Hogmanay? I hold such warmth as I reflect on the woman who sat in a caravan spilling out words onto my trusty laptop, arranging and rearranging and slicing them up, watching them appear on the white page. Shaped into stories of characters who breathe the various outlines of me and those I’ve known and loved. I look with such love at the woman who sat with new friends, sharing whisky, red wine, cups of tea, hot chocolate, pouring stories across the patterned furniture, hearing the rain pound down on the caravan roof.
“I knew he would be my friend when I met him,” she tells me over video call. I’m in my new living room, at a table found in a vintage furniture shop, sat on a garden chair, drinking tea on a Sunday, calling my friend. “You know when you just know that someone is your person?” We’re talking of friendships as adults. She’s telling me of a new friend, and of that feeling of when you just know someone will be your someone, someone you’ll adventure with, you’ll laugh with. It’s all yet to come. “I just knew it, I just knew we’d get on - you know how you just sometimes do.”
I tell my friend over the tiny screen how glad I am to be at a point in my life where I’m not worried about impressing strangers. Where the more authentically I’m myself, the warmer those connections are, the likelier the spark of friendship is. To be someone else is exhausting.
As storm Eowyn battered Scotland yesterday, I thought of the various storms in my life. The time a snowstorm hit so bad that I was stranded in Chicago for two nights and called upon friends I was lucky enough to have in my life who generously saved me. Or when rain so bad hit the caravan park and burst the banks of the stream, plunging caravans nearly underwater, tearing decking away and out to sea. I remember a storm so terrible as a child in Los Angeles that the power went out and I hid under the table while the adults spoke to one another by candlelight.
Yesterday, we prepared for the storm as though the same may happen, secretly a little excited by the prospect that we’d be plunged into darkness and forced to contend with non-electronic-based entertainment. Head torches ready, camping lanterns looked out. Shopping bought in, candles stocked up, board games ready.
No equipment was needed and after the storm passed and my workday was over, I found myself in the pub sharing drinks and anecdotes with friends. Perhaps that’s what it comes back to. That we weather the storms. Rewarded by moments like these; chips and laughter and the kindness of others.
I like my newsletters to have themes, to have stories. A solid shape to them. I think this one is exactly the squiggly, curious, illusive shape it is meant to be. No strict beginning, middle, and end. There is no rising action, no crisis, climax, and resolution. I think that this newsletter is - as I wrote above - holding up a candle with curiosity at the shapes of the year yet to form. I place no bets on this year, no expectations. Afterall, I’ll live in it, whatever shape it takes.
TO READ: I have an enormous collection of books on my reading list - the joy of receiving books for Christmas and of an excuse to buy many more! Two I am especially excited to read include:
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by Robin Wall Kimmerer
Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler
TO WATCH: I watched Little Women over Christmas for the second time. It is a beautiful watch that left the room in sniffles.
A playlist for the shapelessness.
I’m glad to be testing a new schedule with this newsletter now that I feel ready to commit to it again. Stay tuned for the last Sunday of every month. Let’s see if I can stick to it for 2025.
Thank you, endlessly, and as always.
