Sea Change

I can go weeks without leaving my valley town and when I do I’m on a high. My best mood is travelling north alone. North and to the sea. To the Isle of Tiree for the Sea Change film festival.

Each time I get to an airport, I have forgotten how airports work. I remember destinations but not the transit. Leaving Glasgow, above lochs and windfarms, the tiny plane enters a cloud, temporarily unreachable, and I think of all the altitudes this film has taken me. When we emerge, we’re in a different realm - above the inner Hebridean islands: Mull and Iona then descending over the rocky shores and white sand beaches of Tiree. Island of lapwings. Island of excellent chips. Always with that fresh wind, that ocean light.

At the film festival I work with a group of isles teens. One girl writes about how a local beauty spot is boring because it has no reception. I sign books and meet a Tiree lass who is writing her undergraduate dissertation on my work. I discover there are no rabbits on the island, only hares. I learn the Gaelic for seaweed: feamainn. Over two days I watch six films and a programme of shorts. I cry on a stranger, a new friend, after one film stirred me deeply, telling her the big things. I apologise even though we both know this is what we’re here for.

I stay at the end of a track on the west of the island, a passive house, off grid. All of us in the house have moments when we can’t remember things, pat dumbly for our phones, disabled without wi-fi. Here I am in a small island community and within that the community of female filmmakers. I become calmer focussing locally.

I’ve been reading George Mackay Brown. He rarely left Stromness. He was scathing of Orcadians with opinions about Vietnam. But he probably wasn’t wearing clothes made in Bangladesh and using devices made in China. We are part of a global system and have a duty to be informed. But I can have a break: Three nights with no internet. Three days without looking at the news. Three mornings swimming in the sea. I pick seaweed - bladder wrack, egg wrack and spiral wrack - and leave it in the bathroom in a bin bag for when I get back, adrenalised, from the film screening. I answered questions after the movie adaptation of my book, of my life. It’s never not wild. Someone asked, as they always do, what my parents think. Later my nervy edges soften in the seaweed bath.

I leave on the ferry, passing back into landlocked life. Someone asked how I manage living so far from the sea and my answer was unsure. Falafel in Glasgow. Hot chocolate and Private Eye on the train. I realise that it’s the autumn equinox which means I have been sober for fourteen and a half years and in that time have made myself this writer's life and I’m still figuring out how it is to be inhabited.