BREATHING SPACE

by Brackets Digital

This week I finished my third play.

It's an odd moment when a play is finished: a moment of unnerving calm (is it really finished? or is a major rewrite lurking around the corner?) followed by the anxious wait for those significant people to read it and comment.  And at the same time, the itch to start something new starts all over again ...

Into this strange little space has dropped a welcome diversion.  Later today I take off to my home country of Scotland.  First a flight to Glasgow, then tomorrow another flight to the Isle of Islay, followed by a little ferry to the Isle of Jura (where the whisky comes from).  It's a place I used to frequent as a child and I haven't been back for about three decades.  There's one road, one shop, one pub, about 150 people and an awful lot of deer.  And quite coincidentally the place I always used to stay in has now been converted to a writers' retreat, visited by the likes of Alexander McCall Smith and Will Self.

It's the island where George Orwell wrote 1984; it's also where the KLF burned a million pounds, so there's a destructive legacy as well as a creative one.  Whether I will create anything while there remains to be seen.  What I find myself craving is the sound of the waves, which I am suddenly vividly remembering listening to from my bed as a child.

There's no TV, no internet and no mobile reception in the lodge, which is quite a frightening prospect for the social media addict I have become.  Somehow, however, I hope to bring you next week's blog post from a distant isle, with the sea crashing in my ears.

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