Everything around me is history here. Below my apartment is a 220-year-old pub whose regular customers sometimes sing drunken songs, but I don’t usually mind. The singing is as much a part of the town as are the old buildings and cobblestone streets. None of it helps ground you much in reality, really.
I am well aware there is something peculiarly timeless in the landscapes and coasts of Scotland, and everyone who has laid eyes on this country can feel that this ethereal quality has permeated everything. But here on the peninsula, with the coasts littered with fishing towns, pretty harbors, and low cottages, it’s almost as if the Age of Sail never ended.
It is a daily tradition of mine to leave the apartment, cross the harbor, and pass by the Old Roundhouse. I’d walk the beach alley, each day in contemplation of a different painting of waves, sea-line, and sky. While the scenery is rarely boring, there is one thing that remains always the same: the lighthouses. Lighthouses are structures of wonder and have enough philosophical charge for me to build an entire novel around them. It’s always delightful to hear their eerie fog calls on cold, rainy days.
Scottish people have a specific word for this miserable, wind-filled, misty weather: dreich. And you slowly learn to appreciate dreich weather. When I first came to Scotland, I wasn’t very fond of soaking, and changing shoes and socks all the time. But now I don’t mind that too.
I go out for a walk in any weather. It’s the closest I would ever feel to what the lives of mariners crossing the dreaded North Sea were, casting lines and folding sails in those stormy waters and under those sullen skies.
Inspiration did not just find me in this place; it ran up to me and begged me to write a story.