Breathing is supposed to keep you calm, but also it keeps you alive and so you are not calm, because you are alive and being alive is never calm.

As every languageless, stateless, selfless nation has one last, twisted image of its worst and best, we have the ceilidh. Here we pretend we are Highland, pretend we have mysteries in our work, pretend we have work. We forget our record of atrocities wherever we have been made masters and become comfortable servants again. Our present and our past creep in to change each other and we feel angry and sad and Scottish. Perhaps we feel free.

Writers’ trousers are famously unpredictable in many ways, but I haven’t met another author whose trousers simply disintegrated en route to a reading. There I was, young and nervous and not wearing a frock due to poor body image issues, stuck on a late afternoon train, leafing through my notes in a preparatory way and yet also feeling, somehow, chilly.

The right wrist, because I’m right-handed – so that must be the one that’s done most wrong. Although, now that I think, my sins have mostly been ambidextrous.

Being me is a job – is labour so time-consuming and expensive that I have to have a second job just to support it. So that I can drink, I have to get drink and that isn’t something people give away and then there’s drink that I need because I have drunk and the other drink I have to keep around because, sooner or later, I will drink it. That’s a full-time occupation: that’s like being a miner, or a nurse.

I am delicate and the world is impossibly wrong, is unthinkable and I am not forewarned, forearmed, equipped. I cannot manage. If there was something useful I could do, I would – but there isn’t. So I drink.

I like cautious people. They are like me. Not that I like me.

Surgery is just stabbing in a courteous environment.

Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back. Remember writing doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.

A good roast of sun, it slows you, lets you relax–and out here if there’s anything wrong, you can see it coming with bags of time to do what’s next. This is the place and the weather for peace, for the cultivation of a friendly mind.