For the next five days Tilda works in her studio, wearing many layers of thermals and woolens, her hands clumsy in their fingerless mittens, as the countryside around her freezes. She is able, at last, to fall into that near-meditative state that artists yearn for, where each sketch, each worked slab of clay, each finished piece, seems to move closer to the ideal. Closer to the fervently imagined perfection that skitters on the peripheral vision of her mind’s eye. Over and over, she sketches the intricate and ancient Celtic patterns. She starts with dogs, and then birds and then hares silently slip their way into her designs. She builds huge, bulbous pots from coils of clay, each one unique and beautiful in its basic, rustic shape. Onto these she builds her knot-work in thin strips, adding, blending, working, until the pattern stands in relief from its base while still seeming to merge with it. To grow from it. Gradually, over days, the studio fills with these generous shapes and their detailed, symbolic decoration.

Such exciting progress cannot be interrupted by mundanities like food and rest, so that all accepted rhythms to her day are slowly shed. She no longer bothers to fashion something from the dwindling store cupboard into a meal, but snacks and browses on whatever comes easily to hand, remembering to find something for her long-suffering dog when she does so. She does not go to her bed, but naps in the chair in her studio, or curled in a sleeping bag on the hearth with Thistle. She does not bathe, nor brush her hair, and even her running is abandoned. The act of creation is everything now, and she will not step out of it for a moment. For such a blissful state is an elusive and flighty thing, and could be gone in an instant. So it is with something approaching panic that Tilda eventually realizes she can go no further. Her own lack of planning, her refusal to face up to and deal with what has been happening to her, and the effects these changes have had on the way she lives, these things now force her to stop. For the next step is to test her dreamed-of glazes and fire her pots. And still she has no power for the kiln.