Day 310: Blow me far away to the northern lights

A friend's photo, taken last night

When first I left home for Edinburgh, my friend gave me a compass. I used to wear it round my neck at parties (I was that girl I'm afraid) and, when people asked about it, would tell them it was so I could find my way home. Wherever I was, north was always home. (I don't have the compass anymore. How lost are you when you can't even find your compass?)

This morning I woke furious. I'd had a dream about being in a nightclub but feeling awkward and hating it because I wasn't drinking. I spent a decade in clubs and gigs and late night bars and - at least for the first few years - was carried along madly: the shoulders and bass and vodka. I haven't been out after midnight for the last ten months and don't know if I will again. Sometimes I feel like I'm over. I can't imagine how to dance sober.

Geomagnetic activity was high last night and we drove out of town looking for the Northern Lights. It was too cloudy here for a good display but we watched the eerie glow behind the clouds. Later, I followed pictures of the Aurora being posted on twitter, while reading about solar cycles and coronal mass ejections and the spacecraft monitoring the sun's potentially dangerous activity.

Despite growing up here, I've never taken the time to look for or watch the Northern Lights before - or Merry Dancers as they are called locally. I only remember my parents trying to get me to come out side on a winter night and wanting to stay in and watch Super Ted. There are more solar storms forecast and tonight I will go out - maybe even after midnight - again to try and see some colours for myself. I've swapped disco lights for celestial lights and maybe it's not going to be so bad.

Day 308: In your electronic arms

These stones are heavy and ancient, modern technology seems flimsy. In my bag I have a laptop and a turnip. I start to think in decades and centuries rather than days and months. This wall has stood for 150 years, how long will my part remain? In the fading light the farm is timeless and two huge horses appear like time travellers out of the mist. When I was a kid, there were bones of working horses down by the shore, left where they were shot by farmers forced to replace them by tractors. Now, like in this poem by Edwin Muir, they have returned.

Just as these islands seem impossible when I'm in London, these days friends online talking about Japanese restaurants and pop up bars and the tube at rush hour seem preposterous. My fingernails are dirty and this wind-tangled hair reminds me of how I was growing up, chasing the dogs under gates.

Day 307: We'll live it up, I promise

Ten months.

I've been thinking about a woman I met in the treatment centre. She had come from a residential rehab - where she had been living with her baby son - and had been off heroin for nine months but was honest about the way she felt: "I'm not comfortable in my skin", "I still want to take drugs". I liked the way she didn't just say what they wanted to hear. She talked shamelessly about her "sugar daddy" and her "baby father", said the groups were boring, fidgeting, complaining and struggling to complete the work.

She was moving house, from a B&B into a local authority halfway house, and I offered to help her carry some bags but - unsurprisingly - she didn't turn up at the agreed time and place. After that weekend she didn't come back to the centre and I'm almost certain that she's back to her old life working as a prostitute, using heroin and that her son has been taken away from her.

I think for some people it's gone too far, all the help in the world isn't going to make them go straight and the trappings of a normal life will always be frustrating. I guess I've been thinking about her because - although superficially I seem much more adjusted to sobriety - I know how she felt: trapped, dissatisfied. But on the other hand, I know she will not be happy now, out there. So I've got to try and find a way to make it work.

Day 306: Pack a lunch and get up really early

Yesterday's entry was melodramatic. I'm a bit brighter today and have been reading about all the abandoned islands around here and thinking about how to get out to them.

I also found people talking about Infinite Jest and it's taken me back to that bench by the canal where I read a lot of it last spring.

Day 305: We scream in cathedrals

I went on a special tour to the top of the Cathedral, built in Viking Times in red sandstone and still the highest point in town. It made me remember the summer before I left home, taking magic mushrooms with friends and wandering through the graveyard. A memory of my mouth around one of the pillars. I was trying to eat - or to kiss - the cathedral. I had big ambitions.

Always wanting more. The easy answer, the promise of ease after a few beers, a bottle of red will give me great ideas. It became a delusion of transformation or freedom, I never ever got there, by the end I would be crying or in seizures where my wrists and jaw clenched while I foamed at the mouth. The promise that never delivered. I'm trusting that, like grief or heartbreak, this desire will fade. Because although I take the praise when people say 'well done' I am fraudulent because I still want to drink and at times think it's impossible that I won't again. Yet I don't, day after day.

A nihilistic part of me, when I hear that someone has 'drunk themselves to death', finds the idea attractive. They did it to themselves. Free. And I plot, if I get to a year sober and still haven't got work, still feel like this, then I might take a job in a warehouse, move into a bedsit, cut myself off and give in. It would feel so good to give in.

But I purposefully put barriers in my way. Even writing this down is a way to get rid of it. Last night I went to a meeting, only the second one I've been to on the island: older men, one with an accent so strong I could barely understand him, another who knew my parents. I left smiling at hearing these chaps talking about their feeling and experiences - something rare and special.

I am learning that I can still be cheeky/fliratious/brave without booze, but do it while being in control. If I master this I could be unstoppable - but I still stifled by bruised confidence and anxiety. I guess these things take a while.

Tonight I'm back in the caravan and the weather has turned wild again. The whole place is shaking and the wind and hail crashing against the windows, like being at sea.

Day 301: Stones

In the storms last month, conditions - including hurricane force northerly winds and water-logged earth - were such that sections of dry stone dyke made of huge grey slabs, which had stood through the gales for 150 years, collapsed all over the farm. I'm back here after yet another trip to London for yet another job interview so am going to make myself useful - stay in the caravan at night and build walls in the lengthening daylight.
After 54 days when it rained each day, with only eight hours of sunshine in the whole of December, the last two days on the islands have been magic: beautiful sunsets reflected on calm water. I walked up to the farm from the beach. Each time I return it gets me. Although the people that live in the farmhouse are no longer my family, I'm increasingly aware of what a special place I come from.

I have a hunch that the parts of the brain used when dry stone dyking are the same parts connected with creativity. It's no breeze block mindlessness, oh no (although repairing a broken down section is easier than building from nothing): you have to constantly visualise and discriminate. Selecting and estimating the odd shaped stones for shape and size, forming a unique jigsaw to last.

And I try to ignore the cheesy part of me that want to devise a practical wall-based philosophy. How you have to break it down before you can build it up; how you have to work with the stones you've got; how you can't spend too long worrying if you're making the perfect wall, you just have to get on with placing words. I mean stones.