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.

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.

Day 209: You didn't know I had it in me

What happens when you stop drinking is that you stop drinking. The immediate consequences - memory blanks, embarrassment, wasted money - stop but you don't change into a new person. I'd partly hoped that I would.

At times I think that all I'm doing is not doing something - that I am doing nothing. At my core is an absence, I am defined by a lack. But if there isn't anything there why does it hurt so much?

It has been hard but not quite in the way I imagined. I am not having to pull myself away from off licence doors: it is more the devilish thoughts that flicker; that my life is over and I'll never have fun again, that if I'm not going to amount to anything I might as well drink.

I've been applying for jobs and have had a couple of interviews but am still on the dole. Unfortunately, what is probably the biggest achievement in my life looks like a gap in my CV.

As a present for reaching six months sober, my brother gave me a voucher with which I bought a new hat. I wore the hat on the day of my Grandad's funeral, holding my four-month-old nephew who has never seen me drunk.