Day 275: I don't know what I can save you from

Midwinter in the north of Scotland - long, dark nights - and I have been getting interested in astronomy. I've been on a couple of trips, on a freezing hillside after sunset, or sheltering from the wind behind one of the standing stones in the neolithic circle, looking at the canopy of night sky over the low hills and black lochs. My astronomy stance: head back, mouth open, getting dizzy.

For a couple of nights I went out alone after midnight around the town, looking for shooting stars: the Geminid meteor shower. It was too cloudy to see any but I liked being out late in the cold, my clothes over my pyjamas, walking out to beyond the street lights, stunningly sober.

With my wellies heavy on the ground, I'm building a picture of where I am: on earth, travelling, and what the moon, sun, stars are doing out there. I'm thinking about how the seasons and the years happen and how my personal anatomy affects my experience of it; developing spacial awareness on an astronomical scale, pushing my brain out; learning new and pleasing information like that there are three stages of twilight: civil, nautical and astronomical. Nautical twilight ends when the sea is no longer distinguishable from the sky and navigation via the horizon at sea becomes impossible.

Or I hear about how peripheral vision is best for looking into the far distance, so sometimes when you look at an object directly it can disappear. And just why the stars appear to twinkle (it's because of atmospheric turbulence around the earth disturbing the travelling light). I am failing to resist the temptation to treat these things as metaphors.

I've always had four freckles in the shape of a parallelogram on my wrist and now I can see that they resemble the constellation Gemini.

Christmas time's tricky: the associations, the talk of parties. But I have to remember that alcohol wasn't working for me anymore. I remember being so drunk I was falling down, but feeling I'd barely scratched the surface, buying shots at the bar, huge emptiness. Recently I've been staying up late, listening to music on headphones, terrible self-critical accusations repeating in my head. I still hope I will look back on these times from a better place, made all the sweeter by what's gone before.

It's taking more slowly than I would have liked, for things to get better - but - as long as I don't screw it up - each day, each interaction with an old friend, is in the right direction. "I'd never really known you but I realised that the one you were before had changed in to somebody for who I wouldn't mind to put the kettle on".

Day 270: Every step

The morning after the storm, I walked along the shore looking for anything good that might have been washed up in the westerly gales: driftwood or treasure. I found one unusual piece of flotsam - a seal, on the other side of the fence from the sea, perhaps carried by a huge wave. A young straggler, blown off course.

I've washed up on this island again, eight and a half months sober, worn down and scrubbed clean like a pebble. I've got a fresh start but I'm not sure what to use it for. Back home, at the end of a rough year, in the winds that shaped me and where the sea salt left me raw. I've spent nights in the caravan at the farm, an exposed location on the Atlantic coast. In the storms the whole place shakes and the windows rattle but I'm safe in the glow of my laptop.

I've been trying to remember my last drink. It must have been the dregs of someone else's, picked up at the end of the night in a room above a pub in south London, as I stumbled around desperately. Then I got in a taxi I couldn't afford and when it got near my house, ran and hid from the driver in the walkways of a Bethnal Green estate, heart pounding. I don't do shameful, uncivillised, thrilling things like that anymore.