Witness Notes 1

Wick, Caithness, Scotland. December 2019

(After you have read these introductory paragraphs once, you can skip to the new/old content here. If you are listening, then the time stamp is around the two minute 45 second mark.)

Introduction

The word settled, to me, carries connotations I am keen to avoid. I have never felt settled or, perhaps, I cannot recall a time I felt settled. I do not feel settled now, writing this, and I’ve lived in the same house for three and a half years.

Without even discussing the obvious issues of colonisation, I just don’t feel like I could, or should, settle; better to keep my constituent parts shook up, agitated perhaps, rather than separating and stagnant.

Instead, I feel as though I have been travelling for years, maybe because I have not lived in my ‘home’¹ nation of Scotland for eight and a half years, perhaps because I know I won’t stay here forever, or maybe because I carry that concept of home in a way which differs from many?

More precisely, I still think of myself as a slow traveller, globally feral.

Recently, I have been revisiting places through the photographs and words I recorded when my feet crossed their soil. This is a way of reminding myself of where I have been, not just in space and time, but in mind, too. It is a wonderful thing, to come out of a low and rediscover myself through words I crafted, through the lens of a camera, when memory has wandered in the fog for too long. Thank you, past me.

When I first started sharing letters with the world in this fashion, six or more years ago, I usually began them with a vignette of where I was, a sort-of travel diary, mixed with nature observation, locking in the setting for the reader, before I spoke of other things—and, by so doing, ensuring that place fed into the whole. It was a useful device, for reader and myself both but, as these letters were sent to so few readers, and now languish archived behind a paywall, I thought it a shame not to share these snippets again.

As such, I am going to share a short series of these sketches, accompanied by a photograph from that time, sent to you in date order, beginning with the second oldest.²

I shall include the above paragraphs in each of the letters in this series, but I shall also include a link at the very start, so you can skip ahead once you are familiar with the above words. If you are listening and similarly want to skip, then the timestamp you want to navigate to will be in the same place.

Taken without these paragraphs, each is a short read, and I hope you enjoy them.

Wick, Caithness, Scotland. December 2019

Here, in the town at the end of the world³, where the railway and road run out of room and the sea has a beginning, the light is always magically special. This is the land of skies and seas, of wind and weather. The clouds here are a language of their own, telling stories as old as the very air itself. At this time of year, the sun barely manages to pull herself above the long line of the horizon—she is tired and needs her sleep after seemingly-endless bright summer parties when she provides enough daylight to read outside all the night through.

Skeins of geese and swirls of starlings are flung into the air, decorations of constant movement, reminders that not all sleeps in the winter. Occasional hen harriers, merlin, and short-eared owls fly low, using the land as cover, the river to guide their passage. The waters of the sea themselves are a blue so subtle as to be almost silver, or perhaps grey, then they are azure for but a moment, before another wave carries them along a spectrum of cold, colours of perfect pastel clarity.

This icy winter sea is, like all waters, a mystery—cloaked and ready to change at no notice at all. The storms in this corner of the world can be legendary, ripping away an entire beach and depositing it elsewhere, wrecking ships year in, year out, bringing secrets from the deep and hiding others in their place. It is good to be back in the north, good to be reminded all life is in flux, change is constant and change is good. We merely ride the wind, we do not control the steed.

Finally

If you can afford to, there are currently two direct ways to support my work here. The first is to take out a paid subscription and, as it is the midwinter (or midsummer) season and to celebrate six years of sharing this letter, I’m offering 20% off both monthly and annual subscription plans. If you subscribe at that price, it will lock in for the rest of your subscription, for as long as you remain a subscriber. I shall be raising my subscription fees slightly in the new year, so taking advantage of this might make sense. The offer ends mid-January, 2026.

The second way to support me here is to use my Kofi button/link to send a tip of any amount.

If you enjoyed this letter and wish to share it with others, please do so! I love it when someone shares my work.

I also love it when you comment on a piece—really, really love it. During 2025, I have not been as good at responding to comments as quickly as I would like but, seeing as my word of the year for 2026 is almost certainly going to be ‘communication’, I like to think that will soon change.

Finally, many thanks for reading. I truly appreciate each and every one of you who does.

1. And ‘home’ is another of those words. A subject I have been writing around for decades now, one I keep threatening to try and pin down in a long essay, but an essay which has now escaped the confines of a compact base and rambled out into something wilder, more feral. One day I’ll share that with you.

2. The following two paragraphs are actually the eldest in this format, but I shared one of them recently, so decided not to send them again—then decided to add them here in the footnotes anyway, a literary device which never fails to make me happy as a reader, those little footnote bonuses which add a whole other level of detail to certain books. The following was from November 2019, Suthep, Chiang Mai, Thailand.

At this time of year, in this place, the mountain exhales at night. Her breath is cool and descends to the city below, bringing with it the scent of the deep, dark places she hides, of lush flowers and constant decay, accompanied by a whisper of secrets and charms. The nights end still in darkness, when the monks in the temple begin their chants and ring their bell or strike their gong, setting off a daily cascade of soi dogs, each howling their welcome to the day, barking their devotion. The sun rises some hours later, tropical-swift, giving only slightly less daylight than in the middle of summer, framed by the harsh calls of myna birds and the roar of the waking airport.

I shall miss this and I shall not. For I keep these moments close, a part of me as much as any other. Soon I shall say goodbye to Chiang Mai and the little house on the edge of the jungle; soon I shall head to a new adventure and gather up fresh scents and vignettes, populate mind and memory, snippets of lived-experience drifting into my fiction unnoticed, colouring the drab with the paint of what makes us human.

3. The Town At The End Of The World is a working title for a novel I first drafted a long time ago. It has much that is good, that I could perhaps still work with, but it would need a major overhaul to be read by anyone else. I do like the story, however, that of a sort-of romance between a lost young man and a woman, dead for over 175 years. Explaining, as it does, the idea of what a ghost actually is (in my own fictional ecosystem, at least), it is a story which still haunts the hairs on the back of my neck from time to time.