By the time I’d picked up the hire car there was a blizzard, snowflakes as big as feathers floating against the windscreen. I hadn’t met anyone I knew on the plane or in the airport and that felt odd. In the old days, when I’d come to Shetland after a holiday or a few days away, there was always somebody who recognized me – a school friend or a neighbour of my parents. It was weird to drift in like a stranger, to collect my bag from the belt without a wave from a member of staff. I suppose that in ten years I’d changed. Who would recognize me now? I should have felt glad. The last thing I wanted was for my old life to catch up with me. That was why I’d kept away for so long. But it was strange all the same.

When I arrived at Scalloway, the street by the harbour was white and my little hire car slid towards the wall as I pulled in to park. The skid scared me, although no damage was done, and I found that I was shaking as I climbed out. It was quite dark now and the small town was quiet. All I could hear was the suck of the tide and the splash of water where the wind caught it. The key to the Bod was still in the envelope in which it had arrived at my Edinburgh flat. I stood, shivering in the snow, to pull it out of my bag.

Someone walked down the street towards me. A tall man dressed in a long black coat, which looked out of place here, where everyone wears anoraks or parkas. I watched him appear through the blizzard, bareheaded and apparently oblivious to the snow. Easy, loping strides. The snowflakes looked very white where they rested on his dark, untidy hair. I waited anxiously, afraid of a confrontation, scared that the old hostilities would be ignited, reinvented over time. But he seemed preoccupied by his own thoughts. He gave a distracted wave – the least that politeness dictated in Shetland – and a mumbled greeting: ‘Terrible weather for so early in the year!’

Then he walked on.

Something about his frown was familiar, but he was a Shetlander, so it’s possible that I knew him from my earlier life. He was no threat, and that was all that mattered. If I was going to be here for a month, I’d need to keep my paranoia at bay.

The Bod was warm inside. Someone had been in to switch on the heating and there was a pile of peat, in case I wanted to light the stove. Once it had been a boathouse and it stood on stilts right over the water. Small and wood-lined, there was one room, a combined study and kitchen downstairs, with a small shower room attached. The bed was in a loft reached by a narrow ladder. I had been to the Bod once before, to celebrate the publication of a collection of poetry. I had been eighteen and it had seemed a rather grown-up thing to do, to attend a launch party. I’d written it up for an arts magazine, a new venture set up by John Sinclair. He’d known then that he wouldn’t stick at teaching for the rest of his career. We’d all crammed into the small space, sipping warm wine. The poet in residence then had been a small woman from the Ukraine. Old enough to be my grandmother, she’d drunk a bottle of wine all to herself and still stayed coherent. I never thought then that I’d be invited to stay in the place, that I’d be the soothmoother brought in to enrich the cultural life of the islands. I’d planned my life in quite a different way.