Utopian cliff-top dispatches from a windblown coastal cottage, conjuring a magical landscape of light and sky and water, and the wild creatures that share it.
Being the first to see the sun each day invests this place with a primitive spirit of optimism
This little book may bore you to tears or send you into a hypnotic trance with its unavoidable soundtrack of crashing waves. The 'characters' may be wild animals or birds and the 'plot' may be a sandstorm or a shipwreck, but all of it is true and real.
Life here is brightened and disrupted by nature and the outdoors, but it is not the neatly visited outdoors of rucksacks and rambling and the nature-spotter's notebook. This is the lived-in outdoors of the everyday, of the firewood forager, the improviser, the poet-adventurer.
This is essentially a book of solace and escape: from modernity, from urban life, from the tyranny of office walls and hours, and even from the mass of humanity itself. I wish you could come and stay in this bright landscape of land and sea and sky, but you can always visit the Easternmost House vicariously instead, cleverly avoiding the untidy inconveniences and creature discomforts inherent in a life lived so closely connected to the natural world. There is no better place than this.