Author diaries

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31 December 2004 Entry: "New Year's Eve in Craster"

I'm spending New Year's Eve on my own. Probably for the first time in my life.
Very strange. I'm staying in a friend's cottage in Craster to write, appropriately as our poem of the month for January is an extract from Dunstanburgh by Katrina Porteous, (who my spell check wanted to call Quatrain Protease, a great name for a character, perhaps) which I see every time I step outside the front door down to the harbour, which is two steps away. The weather is wonderful, clear blue sky, brisk for walking, and not too cold for sitting and writing.
I'm working on Wall, the piece that won me joint 1st prize for the Bishop Auckland Crossover Novel competition.
It's bliss here. The bedroom I sleep in is also my workroom. It faces southeast and every morning the sun rises like a glowing giant balloon out of the North Sea; it's one of those rare moments when you can just about see it move in relation to the horizon.
It goes down in a sky like raked hot coals at the back of Craster, behind the crags that divide it off from inland Northumberland. My first visit to the one and only village shop to buy milk, I asked 'Where can you get a mobile phone signal here ?'
She thought about it a bit, then said 'Up top, out of the village. We're a bit cut off here.'
The cottage is cosy, with a lovely wood burning stove that smells wonderful, it hisses and crackles, I keep opening up the door to see what it's doing and to feed it logs, and fiddle with the dampers. Much more entertaining than tv. As I came back from a walk along the cliffs to Earl Grey's Bathing House, the smell of the village threw me right back to my early childhood in London, when everyone had wood or coal fires,
All I do is sleep, dream, think, breathe about my writing until my brain says stop. Then I go for a walk. I almost feel resentful when people I pass say 'Hello', they break the spell I'm in. But the walks help if ideas won't come sitting staring at blank paper. I go for a walk and my mind goes for a walk too, and before you know it, ideas are popping into my brain.
I've noticed the yellow gorse is flowering - is this peculiar to Craster or is it global warming ? I thought gorse flowered around Easter. Listening to the news about the terrible devastation caused by the Tsunami in the Indian Ocean, I pass the low lying cottages along the coast here, and wonder whether higher seas would wipe out these little communities too, if the polar caps continue to melt. We think we're so safe and secure in our northern island, yet we shouldn't be complacent.
I have mixed moments of delight and doubt about my writing too, but one thing I have learnt is that I can keep at it, given the opportunity. And I'm determined to make more of those in 2005. Happy New Year to all our readers, as they say.