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Lynne Truss

Halki, Greek island

Sunday August 15, 2004
In the film Swimming Pool (2003), Charlotte Rampling plays an English crime writer who goes off to the south of France to work on a book. It is a good film for many reasons, but the scene I liked best was the writer's wordless and businesslike arrival at the house. Yes, she briskly checked out the view: trees, lawn, pool. Yes, she noted that there was a kitchen. But basically, from the moment she arrived, she cased the joint like a professional burglar, and I knew exactly why she was doing it.
Narrowing her eyes, she selected an upstairs room, cleared a table of ornaments and dragged it to the window, sought and found an electric socket, drew a spaghetti of electric cables (with continental adapters) out of her hand luggage, placed her laptop on the table and opened it, stood back to admire the effect - and then, finally, exhaled for the first time.

Watching her do this, I had mixed feelings. Part of me was quite taken aback: here was my arrival-at-holiday-home routine vividly enacted on screen - and, I have to say, it looked a bit peculiar and unpleasant. At the same time, I was simply relieved: good result with that electric socket, Charlotte! Both of us knew, you see, that things don't always work out that easily.

Writing away from home is something I've done for about 10 years. When I worked as a television critic in the 1990s, I found that I couldn't write fiction at home, so I had the bright idea of renting a small place in Brighton for the purpose. It worked. For my second novel, I would decamp for a month at a time to the Isle of Wight with a carload of books and equipment. For my third novel, it was Dublin, which was less successful. I rented a flat near to Dublin Castle which seemed quite OK until I realised that, all day and all night, I could hear, very distinctly, an automatic garage door opening and closing. Du-du-du-du-du-du-du-du it went (up); then du-du-du-du-du-d u-du-du it went (down). Sometimes it would be halfway down (du-du-du-du-du), then reverse gears and go up again (du-du-du-du-du).

As you can see, I became sensitised to this up-and-down activity, which I first assumed must be the knocking of pipes. I even phoned the owners to ask about the frightful du-du-du-du-du noise - but they disingenuously professed not to know what noise I was referring to. By the end of two weeks (I had booked for four), I was yelling at the unseen garage-users: 'Why can't you all come in and go out at the same time, you bastards?' At the end of three weeks, I went home.

But my garage-door days are over, because I have found my ideal place, a Greek island in the Dodecanese. A bit obvious? Well, not to me. I was never a Greek-island kind of girl before and, in fact, my beloved Halki remains the only Greek island I know. A painting holiday first took me there in 2002 and I was struck immediately by two things: that it was the kind of place a woman could go by herself; and that it was laughably cheap and jolly compared with Dublin.

I now spend up to 10 weeks a year in Halki, regard myself as a semi-resident, have many Halki-loving (and also Halki-dwelling) friends and get quite defensive when people refer to my visits as 'holiday'. The point is, I am very productive on my Greek island, perhaps because there are no media distractions. It's astonishing but true: during one four-week trip 18 months ago, I wrote two-and-a-half 30-minute radio drama scripts, plus a short story, a book review and an essay about the history of television. And I still came home with a tan.

Halki is a 75-minute ferry-ride west from the nearest point on Rhodes - just too far to prevent day trippers from cluttering up the place. It has a harbour with tavernas, bars and small supermarkets, behind which a U-shaped town is ranged. Nice church; tall campanile; picturesque fishing boats on turquoise water; town hall clock permanently showing 25 past one; cocks crowing; cats sleeping; cerise bougainvillaea; bright stars at night. Pretty much your idea of a Greek island, really.

It is not always dead quiet because of intermittent building work, but what I prize about Halki is that it has nothing to offer the sensation-seeker. There are no nightclubs, for a start; and the one small hotel stands empty for most of the year (it's run by the council), so all the tourists are in self-catering accommodation, mixed in with the Greeks. There is nowhere to hire a car or bike - and nowhere much to drive to, in any case.

The one road on the island leads to a monastery, past an old ruined town with an old ruined castle above it. The only thrill is the earth-trembling arrival and departure of the large Athens-Rhodes ferries. Nearly all my snaps of Halki show the arrival or departure of the 'big boat', because I get so excited about it. My friends at home have stopped asking to look at them.

My only concern about Halki is the way I can exist in this fabulous environment, sitting at my laptop, and not be inspired to write about it. Is it a terrible indictment? Because the thing is, when I'm in Halki, I don't write about Greek islands; I write ghost stories set in Cambridge or radio comedies set in the London hat business of the 1920s. Last year at about this time, I was mapping out a classic serial set in Highgate during the Second World War and sitting on my terrace making notes about the way Hampstead Heath was quarried in 1940 for sandbags.

I wonder: is it good to be the kind of person who can sit at a window filled with the colours of the Aegean but still write a monologue set in the lingerie department of a big shop in Oxford Street? What does that say about the human brain? Oh well, ask Jonathan Miller; I don't know.

Sometimes, of course, one fantasises about living in the sun permanently. Many writers have done it. All you need, apparently, is an old Panama hat, a Remington typewriter, a faithful companion-cum-servant who is willing to shop for exotic loaves and the ability to order strong drinks in the local lingo. I suspect, however, that my gender may be against the fulfilment of this Graham Greene idyll; besides, on Halki, I'd go nuts within a year.

As it is, I must always make respite trips to the more cosmopolitan Rhodes during my stays in Halki so that I can - well, mainly so that I can buy a newspaper. Have you noticed how big things always happen when you're out of the country? I was in Halki when David Kelly died. My mum told me on the phone and I had no idea what to make of it. 'Why? How? But this is big !' I said, fruitlessly. I was in Halki, also, when I heard about the Madrid bombings and DBC Pierre winning the Booker prize. However, I was, for once, in the right place at the right time when Greece survived the first round of Euro 2004, so that was a definite consolation.

I yearn for Halki and my chin always wobbles when I leave. I think the best aspect of it, for me, is the healthy indoors/outdoors ratio that the life there imposes. At home, I might work all day indoors and then stay indoors again in the evening. In Halki, this simply can't happen. I work indoors until one, then pack a beach bag and go for a swim, a sunbed snooze and an omelette at Nick's Taverna (possibly my favourite spot on earth). I come back again at about four, have a shower and another restorative lie-down, do a bit more work till about 7.30pm, then coat myself in mosquito repellent, put on a nice strappy frock and go out for dinner with my Halki mates. Sometimes I'm in, you see, but equally, sometimes I'm out. Oh, the glory of limited choice!

And meanwhile, I do ask myself: would I rather be in the Aegean writing about Oxford Street or in Oxford Street writing about the Aegean? Well, just so long as that electric socket is in a convenient position, there is actually no contest.

Jonathan Coe

Landmark Trust Properties Around Britain

Sunday August 15, 2004
The Observer

It's hard for me to remember now, but there used to be a time when I could write just about anywhere. Libraries, pubs, cafés - the more public the better, it seemed. For the two years it took me to write my longest and most ambitious book, What a Carve Up!,my wife and I were living in a bedsit in south-west London. In the evenings, she would watch television while I sat at the table writing with headphones on, shutting out the noise with a cheapo Sony Walkman. How on earth did I manage it? I now ask myself.
I suppose expectations simply change. I made a bit of money and we moved to a two-bedroom flat and I got used to the privacy of writing in the second bedroom. Then our first daughter came along and booted me out, so I rented a stark, impersonal office a few minutes' walk away. It was a good place to fill out tax returns and play Freecell on my computer, but apart from that, I found that I couldn't write a word there.

A novelist friend of mine, Nicholas Royle, was in a similar predicament and we decided to go away together for a writing week. That was when I really started to become spoiled. Neither of us being inclined to slum it, we stayed at Warden Abbey, a curious Cistercian remnant in Bedfordshire managed by the Landmark Trust. Working in a vast (by London standards) upstairs room, with a palpable, almost numinous sense of lived history inscribed into the very fabric of the building, I found that words, sentences and even chapters were pouring out of me. Having been struggling costively with it for more than two years, I must have written about 50 pages of The Rotters' Club that week.

After that, writing in Landmark Trust properties became something of an obsession. Further chunks of The Rotters' Club were written in Lynch Lodge (actually John Dryden's front porch, moved lock, stock and barrel to the outskirts of Peterborough), and the final section of Like A Fiery Elephant,my biography of BS Johnson, took shape in the Bath House, an 18th-century octagon tucked away in woodland outside Stratford-upon-Avon, where deer wandered past the window and I relished the likelihood of being snowed in with my research files, my computer and a bottle of whisky.

Best of all was Peter's Tower, a miniature, mock-Italian tower perched bizarrely but delightfully above a shingle beach in Lympstone, near Exeter. Not only did it come cheap (£150 for five midweek days, if my memory is correct), but it had what I finally realised was the prerequisite of successful writing - a view.

That might like seem like an obvious remark. But it took me a long time to work out exactly what kind of view I needed. Peter's Tower had a placid view of beach and water, and that was perfect because the view I needed was essentially the same as the kind of music I like to listen to when writing: minimalist composers such as Steve Reich or drum'n'bass artists like LTJ Bukem. The point about this music is that it seems uneventful - so it doesn't distract you - but when you pause for breath between sentences, there's just enough going on to stimulate the brain a little, to rejig the synapses and push you forward.

The view of that changeless estuary from Peter's Tower did just the same and I remember that as being another miraculous writing week, not just in terms of words put down on paper, but in the way that the whole previously opaque landscape of the novel suddenly disclosed itself to me.

Much of The Closed Circle,my sequel to The Rotters' Club,was written in the East Banqueting House in Chipping Campden, Woodsford Castle and Wolfeton Gatehouse, both just outside Dorchester. And after I'd stayed at the last of these, the owners - the splendidly named Captain and Mrs Thimbleby - offered me a short lease on Wolfeton Lodge, a little cottage at the end of their front drive.

And it was here, over an intense, not to say exhausting period of 10 weeks (with weekends back in London to remain on nodding terms with my long-suffering family) that I wrote the vast majority of the novel. By way of paying off some of my accumulated debt to the Landmark Trust, then, there is a small homage to its work in The Closed Circle : towards the end of the novel, a crucial plot detail clicks into place when someone discovers a revelatory passage written in the visitors' log book at one of its Dorset properties.

The moral of this story, if any? Simply that you must find the best place to write that your circumstances and finances will allow - but always remember that, if the writing really has to come, it will come anywhere. This article, after all, has been tapped out while on holiday in Ireland, in a cottage above Ballinskelligs Bay. There is only one table here and it has already been thoroughly colonised by my daughters for their own more urgent literary activities. So I managed as best as I could and wrote it on the back seat of our hire car, with my computer perched on the foldaway drinks tray. It was quiet, private and surprisingly comfortable. And the view - most important of all - has been fantastic.

Henning Mankell

Faro Island, The Baltic

Sunday August 15, 2004
The Observer

I have always been on the move like a Scandinavian nomad in an unknown tribe, doing serious writing wherever I happened to be. When I was very young, I remember once living clandestinely in an empty apartment in Stockholm. There were no lamps in the flat. The only light I could find was when I opened the oven. Fine by me. I used the oven as a table, put my typewriter there and had all the light I needed.
Everything is possible. I still remember in 1992, writing The White Lioness in Maputo, east Africa. I lived in a small room where I was surrounded by other small rooms, and - I counted them - seven radios, playing loudly, but tuned into different music stations. It happened that I, maybe once a week, lost my temper and asked them if they at least not could choose one programme to listen to. Everyone was very understanding; they turned off the radios completely for 15 minutes and then it started all over again.

I loved my neighbours. And I wrote the novel. So I think I can write almost anywhere. I can never excuse myself for failing in my work by blaming the room, wherever or whatever it may be.

But perhaps this is not completely true. There is an exception to this rule. There is a sacred spot somewhere in the world. I spend time in this sacred spot and I must admit that I sometimes long to go there. On the other hand, I am always  to lose my independence. I can not fall in love too much with that little house.

North of the island of Gotland, this very rare and magic island in the Baltic, some 35 minutes' flying time from Stockholm, there is another island, even smaller. Its name is Fårö - meaning Sheep Island, and it is separated from Gotland by a firth where there is a ferry. This island has a magical landscape - it could be Ireland, the Hebrides or even the bush in north-eastern South Africa. All by itself on the eastern rocky beach is a small wooden cabin. It was originally built in the 1930s by a man who used to hunt during the winter season. Today, I can occasionally use it to live and work in. The cabin is situated some 30 metres from the sea. When the wind is strong, the salty waves almost reach the windows.

In this cabin, there is a kind of emptiness that is strange, rather impossible to explain. When I enter, I have a feeling that someone has just left, even though the house may have been abandoned for months. I am not talking about 'ghosts'; it is more the feeling that this cabin is breathing. But what is really magical about this cabin is that the mostly fictional characters I write about seem to like the cabin as much as I do. In just a couple of days, they fill the room with their voices. They share my bed, my food and they walk with me on the beach.

It took me some years to realise that this cabin is good when I have something really difficult to write. The house is a masterly servant. So I am happy that this cabin exists. And that I occasionally can use it. Among all the various rooms where I write, this little cabin is the centre that does not move, that is always there.

By the way, the owner of the cabin is Ingmar Bergman, who happens to be my father-in-law. As far as I know, he has never done any writing there.

As Byatt

Cevennes, France

Sunday August 15, 2004
The Observer

What I need to write well is a combination of heat, light and solitude. My first experience of southern heat and light was when I was au pair to a French family in a vineyard on the hot plain near Nîmes. We now spend our summers in a tiny house in the Cévennes, not far from Nîmes, but in very different country. There is ridge after ridge of craggy mountain hillside, all densely wooded with oaks and chestnuts up to the bare stony mountaintops, where the flocks of sheep spend the summers.
The mountains were eaten bare by the sheep before the 18th century and the trees are the work of one imaginative man called Fabre, who replanted huge areas of mountainside. I like it here because the sheep and the uplands remind me of the Yorkshire moors, the magical landscape of my childhood holidays. But this is on a grander scale and it is mostly very hot and bright.

Our house is on the edge of a village. We have two bedrooms and a living room - the house is the converted carriage shed of the house opposite. When we came, it was infested up to its upper balcony with a dense jungle of brambles, nightshade and bryony. It had been empty for 11 years. We cleared the land with machetes and, after much soul-searching, cut down a 100-year-old mulberry and built a pool and a terrace in front of our door.

The terrace looks down on to our own patch of rough hillside, going down steeply to a river which moves fast and has been known to rise five metres. I sit on the terrace and write, in a kind of bowl of bright blue light, staring at the edges of the mountains, which are never the same for half an hour - sometimes vague and misty, sometimes bright green and gold trees, and at night a black silhouette against the stars, the crest of a line of conifers, the knife-edge of a ridge like a lizard's back.

I've become a creature of routine, here in the sun. I get up early, walk to buy the bread, in the grey morning, take a walk round the hillside for an hour, climbing up under trees, passing a collection of goats and geese, saying good morning to the same six or seven people. You can think writing out on foot, the rhythm is good for thinking. Then I sit at a metal table in the weather, and write furiously - longhand - until I need to stop for lunch. I have a large number of stones and a monstrous fossil which I carry out ceremoniously to hold the papers down.

The weather here is extreme whatever it is doing. If it is hot and still, you can see the heat shimmer. But there are sudden tempests of wind, which rattle in from nowhere, and pages fly up and over the edge of the terrace and whirl away in the river. I get more patient as I get older. Bad weather here is unworkable in. The storms bang in one's head, and all electric things - computer, telephone, television - have to be turned off.

We had a summer hailstorm so violent once that huge pieces of ice came down an air vent and mashed up the Collected Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam which I'd borrowed from the London Library. There is nothing to do in bad weather but endure. I sit on my bed and read Terry Pratchett and watch the trees bend and hurl themselves about.

In the afternoons, I sleep, and then I swim, and then I read, and then I walk down to the local auberge and eat dinner in a courtyard under great trees (cedars, palms, a lime.) In our early days here, we used to shop for delicious food in the local market and make meals to eat by candlelight. Now I've got it down to essentials - I've not got so long left to write books in - and I never cook. Salad and sheep's cheese and melon for lunch. Delicious mussels and omelette aux cèpes and poulet aux ecrevisses cooked by a good friend in the evening - and I can go on working over dinner. I carry a bag of books down with me and read German with a dictionary before the food arrives and then useful research books with the meal. I have my own bottle and drink a glass or two with my dinner.

I've got the solitude right too. No house parties, no visitors. We do have another small house at the other end of the village where the family can stay and cook and play table tennis and go for walks and come up the river to swim in the pool. My main problem is people feeling sorry for me when neither my husband nor my family are here. They come in and invite me to social gatherings, and I stare wildly at them with my head full of uninterruptable strings of words I must remember, and ideas I must keep hold of, and stammer that I like being alone, I need to be alone. But they don't quite believe me. They think I must be sad when I am fiercely happier than I have ever been.

Simon Armitage

St Ives, England

Sunday August 15, 2004
The Observer

My first visit to St Ives started badly. It was like Bethlehem at census time. My wife, Sue, was pregnant and there was no room at the inn. Camping was out of the question - my days of public showering and meals that tasted of Calor gas were over - and the trip was as good as cancelled when the phone rang and we were offered a fisherman's cottage in the suspiciously named Love Lane.
It was a take-it-or-leave-it offer, the last available place in town, apparently, so we took it. Holiday lets in St Ives are hardly scarce, even in August, but this was August 1999, and with nearly everybody else the country we'd decided to go to the south-west to experience a few minutes of darkness. Not your run-of-the-mill kind of darkness, but a total solar eclipse. I'd written a play about the event a few years earlier (imaginatively entitled Eclipse ), all based on guesswork and it was time to see if I'd got it right.

After sitting behind a cortege of caravans that stretched from Birmingham to Truro, we dropped down the hill from Carbis Bay towards St Ives and followed signs for the harbour. I'd pulled a map off the internet and memorised a route that would lead us to the front door of our love nest. What I hadn't realised was that the streets of St Ives's 'downalong' area, such as the Digey and Bunkers Hill, are little more than cobbled passageways better suited to pack mules than they are to wide-bodied VWs. I ended up parking about two miles away, and by the time I'd lugged the cases through the labyrinth of alleyways and switchbacks, I was spitting feathers and coughing blood. Like Glastonbury in the rain, by now I was wishing I'd stayed at home and watched it on telly.

That was five years ago, almost exactly, and I've been back to St Ives on at least 20 occasions. My grumpiness didn't last long. Love Lane is now firmly established in our family mythology (a sort of Nativity scene, but without the donkey), although the trap-door entrance to the bathroom proved even less suitable for a child than it was for a mother-to-be. We've since found a better hideaway on the other side of town.

The trips to Cornwall have become an important part of my working practice. I'm not one for gazing out to sea and going all dewy-eyed over the beauty of nature, but I have experienced a growing connection between creativity and relaxation. There has to be time in the year, usually the summer, when I can daydream and write, and by writing I don't mean prose.

I don't take a laptop with me. St Ives, for me, means notebooks and pens, which means hand-carving each letter, which means thoughts being turned into words at a slower, more considered pace, which means poems. I don't always finish them in situ, and they're rarely about St Ives itself, but I can now point to at least a dozen poems that have their beginnings in Cornwall.

St Ives is a bay, an isthmus and a headland. On a small-scale map, it appears to face north, but its peculiar geography means that it's possible to stay in the sun all day and find somewhere out of the wind. There are four main beaches, which have developed a fascinating taxonomy. One, Porthmeor, faces west: it's favoured by surfers and body-boarders and in afternoons in high season you have to step over the ponytails to get to shoreline.

That waterfront is also home to the Tate, whose presence has reinforced St Ives's reputation as an artistic community once and for all. Being a seaside town, the grot and the tack sit side by side with serious paintings (the closer to the sea the gallery, the worse the art - that's my rule of thumb), but the variation is all part of the attraction. The same goes for the people: for every bevy of men in suede slip-ons and black polo-necks who've helicoptered in from Cork Street for the day, there's a gang of dickheads hanging around the slot machines causing a little bit of friction.

And without friction there is no art. I like to think I'm alert to that friction, responding to it, feeding off it, becoming part of the artistic life of the town, perhaps. But mostly I'm off-duty, a half-shaven husband and T-shirted dad flying a kite on Porthminster Beach.

For some, the famous St Ives light can't compare with the bright lights of the city, and I know at least two families who've relocated to Cornwall only to high-tail it back up country after a couple of years. But after a six-hour drive, usually arriving at midnight, the lights that catch my eyes are the two red ones above the wooden buffers at the end of St Ives railway station. I can't go any further away from home in Britain without getting my feet wet; those glowing red lamps signify the end of the line and the beginning, hopefully, of a few poems.

Nicci Gerrard

Varmland, Sweden

Sunday August 15, 2004
The Observer

I used to go south for the summer: France, Spain, Italy, Greece. Heat, warm blue seas, tavernas, olive oil and red wine, abrupt sunrises and sunsets, flamboyant people. Then I met Sean, and for the first time I went north - to Sweden and, specifically, to an area in Sweden called Varmland, full of pine forests and lakes. Sean's mother is Swedish and she and her three sisters own land around one of these myriad lakes.
Every summer, they and all the generations of their sprawling families come to spend time here, in scattered wooden houses. For the past 15 years, I have come as well. We have even built our own red-painted wooden house looking out on to the water.

The days are long: in midsummer, there is scarcely any darkness in this part of Sweden, and even in July and August the deepest part of night is tinged with day. By four in the morning, the sun pours in through the windows; evenings stretch out, full of bats, long, soft shadows and miraculous thick light. There are hares in the meadow, swallows in the eaves, elk and deer in the forests, beavers in the lake, hawk and heron and crane over it, lynx on the prowl, wolves over the horizon, bears a bit further north, where Sweden gets really deserted and wild. Much of our time is spent foraging for food and then cooking it. I can spend hours looking for chanterelles (apricot-coloured and fluted in shape) and stout, meaty ceps, or picking wild strawberries and blueberries. The children and Sean fish for bony perch and for pike with sharp teeth. There are cloudberries on the marsh.

After the harshness of winter (-25, dark for 20 hours, beautiful in the snow and ice, but in November or March grey, wet, and bleached of all colour), the summer here is like a green and golden rebirth which is celebrated with many rituals - the crayfish party, the mini-concerts, the BBQs, the picnic by the slippery rocks, the football matches, the night-time saunas and swims in the lake. Sometimes it rains for days and then the landscape is cool and dripping-grey and we sit by the fire and look out of the window, eat cinnamon buns, read books and squabble over card games.

Sometimes the wind rips waves across the lake which looks murky and inhospitable; sometimes there are violent storms that turn the sky purple and frazzle computer cables and toasters. But really, every year feels much the same as the last was and the next will be (though the children grow taller and the adults grow older, hair turns grey) and this is part of the pleasure.

I don't really like to stop writing on holiday and although I've never really been attracted to the idea of a writer's retreat (the idea of sitting in silence, attended on and waiting for ideas, strikes me as an ideal condition for a writer's block; I've always been opposed to the idea that the pram in the hall is the enemy of promise) but in a way, this place in Sweden has been my messy, child-cluttered, alcohol-fuelled, noisy and rumbustious version of a retreat. Certainly many of our novels have begun here.

In the summer of 1995, Sean and I had just written our first Nicci French novel together, in absolute secret, in corners of the days. It felt almost illicit. We had dropped it - the way a cat drops a mouse at the feet of its appalled owner - on the doorstep of our surprised agent, and come to Varmland. We felt very far from London and the book and put it out of our mind.

One afternoon, we were in a meadow with a group of relatives and Sean's uncle came towards us holding a mobile. It was our agent. She liked the book. Although we didn't know it at the time, it was to be the beginning of a writing partnership, and it felt - or at least, in retrospect, it feels - fitting that we had the first intimations of this when we were in Sweden together, like an echo felt from a distant world.

Since then, we've almost always written in Sweden, or certainly had long planning discussions, while trudging through the woods with an eye open for mushrooms. The first part of our sixth book, Land of the Living,was entirely written here, in a concentrated burst. It's a discrete section of the novel, in which a young woman wakes to find herself in absolute darkness, gagged, hooded, with no memory of how she came to be there or even, at first, who she is. Bit by bit, traces of memory seeps back. To be away from England - alarm clocks, phone calls, packed lunches, violin practice, homework, housework, bed times, arrangements, everything; to be in a place where the most important decision to be made every day was what to eat in the evening - meant that we could immerse ourselves in the writing.

I am writing this from Sweden now. We have recently finished our latest novel and are in the planning stages of the next. We have the germ of an idea. And tonight is the crayfish party. We will suck on fishy tails and drink clear liquid till our heads swim.

Max Hastings

River Helmsdale, Scotland

Sunday August 15, 2004
The Observer

Last week, I was on holiday, so I got up at five every morning. By six, I was standing kneedeep in an enchanted Scottish river, plying a fly across the eddies in search of a salmon. So often in the high hills, by noon in July the sun is glaring down on the water, driving fish to the bottom. An eager fisher should be at his business as early in the morning as the river rules allow and get dinner finished in indecent haste, to return to the water at dusk. I am an eager fisher.
I have fished the Helmsdale, in remotest Sutherland, on and off for 25 years. When I was younger, I sometimes grew impatient when I did not catch salmon. Today, the mere rhythm of casting a fly over the dark water and watching it swirl across the flow gives me an aesthetic pleasure almost as great as those of the surrounding hills, and of the silence broken only by the sound of the rushing torrent and the plaintive cries of sheep.

Ignorant people say that they are too impatient to fish. I cast maybe 10 hours for every fish I hook, and I am lucky enough to visit some of the best rivers in Britain. Yet such is the mystical power of the quarry, invisible beneath the peaty flow, that I watch almost mesmerised each time my fly drifts by, constantly tensed for the moment when a fish gives that heavy tug. I am always poised to raise the rod point, tighten the line and prepare to fight a salmon up and down the pool.

Stupid people ask: 'What do you think about when you're fishing?' The only answer for a proper fisherman is: fish. To cast well, to be ready to exploit that sudden, magic opportunity, concentration is indispensable. The moment one starts wool-gathering or pondering whether Tony Blair is any longer capable of shame, a fish will have come and gone before one engages with it. Each season brings its own dramas and memories. One evening this year, after a long and disappointing day, I was alone, casting down a precipitous succession of falls which are among the most exciting and dangerous parts the river. A fish took and leapt over rocky escarpment with me scrambling in pursuit. The salmon tore line off the reel as it raced through another pool, then ran over another fall. Fearful must lose it now, I sprang past a boulder, missed my footing and hung with one arm flailing over the torrent - the other clutching the rod - until by some miracle I regained balance. Thoroughly frightened, I landed the fish few minutes later, gazed in awe at its beauty for a few seconds as I always do, then slipped it back into the river. Nowadays, fishers in Britain keep only a small proportion of the salmon we catch, because they are so scarce.

Next day, I hooked a biggish fish in startlingly pretty pool beside the singletrack road which runs up the strath. tore up and down the river with me leaping behind, while on the bank even that remote corner of this island, an audience gathered. 'He'll be 12lbs anyway,' said the local lobster dealer, offering to net it for me. 'Can I take a photograph?' asked a tourist who worked for BBC in Aberdeen. 'Is it a monster?' cried a cheerful passing fisherman from the next beat through his car window.

'They're all wonderful monsters me,' I cried back. Our friendly lobster dealer indeed netted that one after furious struggle. I remembered another little excitement, last season. After a heavy spate, fish were moving eagerly upriver. We had thin pickings thus far. After lunch, I was fishing with my wife when the rod bent. 'Are you snagged on another rock?' she asked sympathetically. 'No, it's a fish!' I said, in my usual fever of exultation. We netted it and killed it for the pot. When we finished covering the stretch, I gathered rod and net and asked Penny carry the fish.

It lay on a steep bank, glittering blue and silver in the sun. She picked it up. It slipped, slid smoothly down the grassy slope - and back into the peaty river. In a frenzy, I plunged in pursuit, yet could see nothing. You might suppose, as I did, that dead fish float. They don't. They sink. I scrabbled in that water for five minutes, but never glimpse of that salmon did we see again. My wife was distraught. She said: 'How long will it take for you to forgive me?' said: 'You are looking at a man who last week put petrol into a diesel car.' We all had a good sob and embrace. It was one of those really serious marital moments. In fishing circles, it was widely held that if a relationship could survive a catastrophe of that kind, could stand anything.

Anyway, this year Penny has caught lots of fish herself and I netted my son's first salmon, so we all went home ecstasy. I was exhausted and badly need of a rest, but we can catch up on sleep at home. Only in the wildest corners of Britain can one bask in the unique combination of beauty, tranquillity and excitement that salmon fishing offers.

My father brought me up to believe that the only activities which can properly be called sports are those in which one participates oneself, fishing foremost among them. Pastimes such as football, which people watch, are mere games. Do I sound obsessive? Of course I am and, like Norman Lamont, je ne regrette rien.

Maggie O'Farrell

Kincraig, Invernesshire

Sunday August 15, 2004
The Observer

The three books I've written have all been worked on in very disparate locations: a borrowed desk in an unheated flat, my parents' dining-room, on my lap in a damp bedsit, various trains, a shed in Yorkshire, a bench overlooking an Italian forest, an alarming bus ride in Bolivia. The one place they have in common is a kitchen table in Invernesshire.
It is a squarish, pine table, somewhat rickety and smelling slightly of all the dinners that have been eaten at it. With each book, I've found it easier to concentrate if I've moved the table to a different place in the room. For my first book, it was next to the fire but that corner seemed too crowded with those characters when I came back to work on the second, so I had to move it near the doorway. For the third, I turned it round and sat by the window.

The table is in a small, wooden house on the banks of Loch Insh, in the village of Kincraig. Behind the house, the East Coast line rattles on north to Inverness; in front of it, the Spey begins to pull itself together from the depths of the loch, re-forming as a river. If you swim out from the bank below the house, stepping carefully over the sharp stones into the brackish water, you can feel the drag of the river, its urgency to get back to itself. The water is icy, cold enough to compress your lungs, but you get used to it.

What's overwhelming about this place is the hugeness of the sky and the absolute quiet. I've never found silence like it anywhere else in the world: it's a spellbound, almost animate hush. When a city-bound boyfriend came up north to meet me there once, he found it too much. He couldn't sleep, he said, because of the nothingness of the night. The unbroken dark (no noise, no streetlights and, on a cloudy night, no moon or stars) was too much for him: 'I can't tell if my eyes are open or closed,' he panicked, during one of his sleepless nights.

I've been going there for almost 20 years, initially with my family on summer holidays. In those days, we stayed in a stone villa, a hundred yards or so from the place I rent now. It is, possibly, the most perfect house in the world: on an incline beside a bridge, it overlooks the loch and the valley, with a sweep of garden down to the water.

My parents are of the generation that finds it acceptable, not to say requisite, to talk to whomever they choose. We were staying somewhere else in the area - I forget where - when we drove past this perfect house. My parents turned round and drove past it again, and then again, much to the horror of their embarrassment- sensitive daughters in the backseat. My mother then got out, opened the gate, walked up the path, knocked on the door and asked the rather startled person who answered if we could come and stay there. Amazingly, they said yes.

Its remoteness is part of its attraction. It's a devil of a place to get to without a car. You have to catch the train to Aviemore or Kingussie then track down a taxi-driver willing to take you the extra distance, or hitchhike and hope for the best. There's a tiny post office that will sell you milk, bread and other staples and newspapers, of course, but I never buy them when I'm there as it goes against the grain of a retreat. And once you are there, it's not that easy to leave. Local bus timetables tend to be erratic and indecipherable, so the only way to get yourself anywhere is to walk or cycle. Mobile phone signals flicker and vanish, days pass, night comes, the loch goes on filling and emptying.

I think I always knew I would write about it. It would be impossible to be so enmeshed with a place for it not to make an appearance in your fiction. When I began my third novel, about two people who exit their lives for a place so remote that no one can find them, I knew it would have to be set in Kincraig.

I found, though, that I had to write those scenes while I wasn't there, that those parts of the book were the only things I've been unable to write there. You need to be elsewhere in order to recreate a place, you need distance for imagination. The last thing you want is reality getting in the way.

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