When I was very small, we lived on the shores of Loch Laxford, in a house called Trefoil. It sat near Scourie, in Sutherland – a ragged place hidden between water and rock, where the wind came in off the loch like an animal.
We had barely any television. The signal crackled like sea foam, dissolving into nothing. So we turned outward. To the hills. To the bracken. To ourselves.
I have a twin sister, Kirsty – nine minutes younger. Catherine came next, and Jamie, our older brother, led most of our wild schemes. We ran like creatures across the heather, dressed in wool jumpers, boots too big, and snowsuits that turned stiff with frost. We played in all weathers, as if the land was ours to conjure.
Our mum fed us tofu she made from scratch – a sacred food, we believed, until we discovered sugar at the neighbour’s house. Wilma. She was enormous and wonderful, driving a tiny Suzuki car like it was a ship. Her husband, George, was drunk most days and so thin that my mum could lift him like a child and place him gently back outside when needed.
Once, he tried to get his sheepdog to round up a plastic basin washed up on the shore. He thought it was a sheep. We watched from the hill, laughing till we fell over.
Robert McCall was our postman and also a fisherman. Sometimes he’d leave an octopus on our doorstep, as if it were a letter. We’d sprint down the slope to his shed by the loch, stealing bamboo canes and floating them out to sea like offerings. No one ever asked for them back.
Inside the house, the weather changed. My dad, once a drummer, would crank up Led Zeppelin on speakers taller than we were. He drummed on biscuit tins like they were snares, knees bouncing, denim splitting under the beat. His jeans wore holes from the music – not fashion, just rhythm.
I remember the sound filling the room like water. Big, feral. Alive. My brother loved it so much he used to crawl into the speakers, trying to live where the noise came from. He’d sit there, quiet in the womb of it, while my dad kept time with the walls.
That was music, then – not gentle, not background. It was air. It was parenting. It was percussion for our play. The house shook with it, and so did we. It wasn’t chaos – it was initiation.
This is where my making began.
In the freedom. In the nothing-on-TV-ness. In the salt and the mud and the mischief. In the strange tenderness of George and the postman and Wilma and the wind. In biscuit tins and Led Zeppelin. In denim and seaweed. In silence and thunder.
These were my first materials.
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