Journals - Wick (Oct-Dec 2025)

From October-December 2025 I lived in Wick on placement, at the top of Scotland – 5 hours north of Glasgow! Living with no friends or car, in the approaching dark, with only hard work and exercise to permit my existence, I became a kind of glass-jar of thoughts and emotions. Absolutely nothing happened, and yet it was one of the most important periods of my life. Journals edited slightly for sense making for others, but mostly as they were written! 

19/10/25 – My family visiting in Orkney 

 

Oh I wish I could write only about the – 

 

I hope that each good experience, each clearing, leaves a residue, a good soil. That you are still able to be opened by it when it is gone. Let my soft animal be lifted when I do not know it! It feels like any future claustrophobia and tension has been proofed by these few days in beauty, walking over the Brough of Birsay holding hands with Hanna, running through the yellow sky.

 

Well: these memories must protect and open me now.

We are on holiday in Orkney and after the huge day has folded, my family sits in the cosy rented house. The ecstatic wind and freedom of the day still run through me, but on entering to the kitchen my skin tightens. I understand a second later what I have seen that has alerted me: the empty bottle of whiskey that my father has started and finished.  

 

There he is, becoming paranoid, cruel, heavy-lidded, I want him far away. I am scared. I don’t remember this fear of my father when I was a child but I am building it now. Does the alcohol reveal or hide him? Does it matter? 

 

My mum asks him not to drink it, all, and he responds stupidly, a gored bull turning – does she ask now because of the rare presence of witnesses? Or is her extended humiliation by my dad one of their unavoidable rituals? I must watch this, but the loop is boring, agonising. It cannot be them. It cannot be ever. Does he know what is happening, is he able to? Will we always be unsafe when the evening comes? He shouts that we are trying to control him, that we aren’t thankful for anything he ever does, he is surrounded by nagging women; he shouts into the dead space of the room. Eventually you can say nothing in response. Thus I say nothing. I have learnt again my firmest lesson that it is best to be silent and withdraw, just to hold it inside you. 

 

I cannot rest here. 

 

Crystalline or veiled days, landscapes like rare fabrics, and all of Orkney settling as a background to complete companionship with my sister. It will do. Like trauma compresses beyond the happening moment, joy too continues to blow widely, a silk parachute. 

 

24/10/25 – first week working in Caithness General 

 

What a strange week. Standing on my own judged and being barely known, a little. A tree! A stranger. The wind says something again and again outside my window as I write, coming from America, Denmark. Every day I have had to consciously be strong and new. To speak. I have felt immense freedom in the work and exercise, but also fear, especially today. What would happen if I fell sick? The unlovely and barren Caithness landscape, rough people up here, but everyone in the hospital is kind. Ashamed – alive – putting in cannulas one after the other, finally understanding the mechanism of the needles and tubes with the minimum of pain. Freedom – freedom from other people? Am I really so selfish and predictable? Or just trying to enjoy rare solitude? These purposeful days and weeks and hours relying on my own resources, charm, knowledge, with no guarantees. I am excited to try again. Night time coming back. Have been so tired, sleeping 11 hours, my lower back letting me know how it supports my smallest movements. 

 

25/10/2025 The first week continues 

 

Lucy said I should write it all down – certainly a unique experience! I feel unique. Spoke to my friends today and realised I was lonely, or had many things to say or relate which I did not realise. How funny and easy to speak to these people I love ! When trying to communicate to the other medical students today I realised how hard it was to speak honestly, felt the human barrier very keenly. At the top of the world on the Thurso beach and the wind blew us sideways, birds tried to find puzzles through the stiff air, something being ground down. Orkney – which funnily I am starting to think again of as a haven – slides quickly into vision. It is always exciting to watch the sea, here it is always violent, have to actually break some internal wall to just experience it. 

‘My body is a temple – am I worshipping too hard?’ 

 

31/10/2025 – the bus to the ferry to Orkney to walk for the weekend 

 

(Reading Wuthering Heights) 

 

What an unlovely place! And also proof that time and air can reveal loveliness about anywhere, these past weeks have shown my own depths of phloem strength, green swaying life!

To begin with, the gothic – appropriately for today!

Pollution in all directions. The dying arsenic poisoned wood, Dounraey Nuclear Power Station a temple, ground too boggy to grow crops, and the herring gone from the sea because our greed ate them up. Literal impenetrable fogs, white confusing maritime walls, roll over, through. An air strangely unpurified despite the remoteness. Maybe because Caithness is so flat and treeless. My first impression years ago out of the car window was that we were on Mars. 

 

Now I know a little more. I see what beauty is not on land but in the subtle iridescent sky. In weaves, unknown layers merge and peel with colour all throughout the day. Massive sunrise – bullet wound! – which immediately sets in motion a sunset, from one place, all at once, a feeling. 

 

I will see this time with a good lens because of my self sufficiency. I cannot relate anything of my experiences to those around me, which is how I have relied upon making my life real for so long, through speaking. And so when colours go through, emotions deep or new, I just have to watch, like bird watching, like walking.

Yesterday in the gym I suddenly was desperate to speak to this girl I’ve barely met, searching for topics in common to talk about; again, outside of the hard and reliable scaffold of work – exercise – eat, I understood I was lonely. Will my heart rest on the long wet walk tomorrow?

 

02/11/2025 – Walking on Hoy – the Cuilags 

 

Well my heart did not rest on the gruelling walk yesterday! Oh god, I was so wet and cold! Nevertheless while the hours of it ran together, threaded with disbelief that the weather was so bad and I was so unprepared, pride and determination got me through. The immense sea cliffs with their hypnotic power, and I could see from my lonely perch a white smudge of ferry making the journey I myself had made the day before. But I looked and I was all alone, like seeing a naked body. All my emotions were ragged edged and new, cold and wild and laughing, Oh Cathy surprised that she became a woman and was dragged from all this! 

 

For an hour or two up on the Cuilags themselves, I also was within a raincloud. So when I pulled out my wet paper map and tried to find my landmarks, I had instead to use my compass – go west, go west! The bog was shivering elastic copper red moss, bouncing you back on a step, treacherously sucking you in. Two colours, the white and the orange, made the whole world. My teeth chattered when I stopped to find again west; like something else kept pulling me north, I continued to veer off course, hoping that the grey edge was the path again. A profound disorientation unlike anything I knew before. Like purgatory !

 

After the long day walking, slithering, clambering with fists of moss, finally running through the rusty valley because I knew I would get chilled if I stopped, I found the hostel of which I was the only inhabitant. The automatic lights would turn on and off announcing my presence as I padded through. I spent the evening completely at rest. It was dark and I was tired and the building was warm. How simple.  

 

Calling Iman and trying already to make the difficult day into a story, I said well, at least I got to see how much I could endure and she laughed and said ‘No one doubted that!’. 

If this time has done anything it has endoggened me even further, and if I cannot find joy in love I will find it in tired muscles. 

 

Today, I woke early to see the sunrise, unbelievable diffused rapturous thing, rested again, and after the tiny ferry with myself and an old couple with a guitar, walked another long windy walk along the Stromness coast, always keeping the ominous black Cuilags I had climbed the day before in my vision; now clear, now veiled with rain, now shadowy. Again in an example of my drive to connect pushing up under the concrete of my ‘self-sufficiency’, uncharacteristically I spoke for a long time with the lady in the single open café. We went together later to the single open pub. I had tried to visit this pub on the night I arrived but was terrified by the vision of myself as an outsider; now on this Sunday afternoon, the fire was lit and clearly travellers from all the islands had joined to sing and play folk together. The central room was full, and a Danish visitor played haltingly on her cello, the couple from the ferry dueted – one woman with an amazing voice. I became emotional thinking about how long people have met on a Sunday to make these same rituals! 

Something here about the natural rhythms of effort and rest, not worrying about the space in between or working when you don’t have to. 

 

‘They’ve gone through and through me, like wine through water, and altered the colour of my mind.’ 

 

11/11/2025 Surgery placement 

 

Surgery this week, physically so sore and tense, pulling isometrically and adjusting the sensitive plastic nose of the endoscope, between the hours of soreness and boredom I thought wow it is so beautiful and alive and mysterious inside the abdomen, moving things, glistening, glowy, blood and bile, the omentum moves suspiciously when it feels you coming, what the body can experience and quietly overcome! 

 

18/11/2025 A weekend with my friends 

 

The long awaited weekend with my boys where I was full of stress for large parts of it – they grumble to me about eachother – F unable to mesh, catatonically depressed on top of fundamentally being a bit lazy. I felt – as usual – a little ashamed: delighted and loved to be the cause of bringing people together, but unable to accept that it may not go right and, furthermore, the second thought, that any issues were not all my fault. B stressed and difficult driving up and I wondered what on earth I have done. But we managed the sea sauna in Castletown, a pink sky, travelling all this way to the top of the world. Fell in love, or is it lust, with B, as I often do on a trip together, sat in the hot tub and had pressure filled thoughts about them fucking me. Maybe because I’m on my period. Haha! Love and lust are true and wonderful things, even momentarily, but the tension of the relationship for the past 6 months has also been true. Any path must lie with better honesty and a willingness to fight. 

Or letting go control. Instead of what I do now, which is to apologise obliquely for pulling away. I do not use my words but instead become almost simpering, my legs open, devoted. There is the fawn strategy of my mother! Apologising continuously, secretly, catholically, for my unexpressed ‘bad thoughts’, for what shadows I have felt and not done. 

 

It is lovely ! I have so much to give, did I ever doubt this? Dark and cold, daylight running, my weakness and fatigue running through, something past all that quick time, forged. 

 

21/11/2025 The slump period begins, as Christian called it. 

 

Run down! A pathetic cold. Slushy half-hearted weather this week, ice sheeting in the evenings, black and pink mornings where I can get away with just my jacket. And for God’s sake, I have thrush! My hyper flora pussy which resists all evil? It’s a sign. Ran 11k in the cold today wrapped up and enjoying my new toys of a thermal and headphones. Just trying to find any way to relax. Some intimate balance of intensity, caring and working and being involved in your life, versus simply allowing your own existence… the starlings today raising and screaming in geometric clouds along the river. I wondered if they had friends in the flock, how they knew where to go, tasting the space, a brain working all together. 

 

28/11/2025 

 

It is correct to say I feel tense, pulled and unhappy this week. Not inescapably, but it takes real effort to free myself from its rubbery surface. Running still, fast. Trying to do yoga in the evenings which simply teaches me that I am tired. Had a little time today before making the huge journey south, and I washed, exfoliated, wore the deep rose lipstick. Strange how feeling beautiful, or at least made new, shifts the rest of my experiences onto a different track. Emily – a retired GP – picked me up yesterday for dinner again. Talking to me about planning for the future with her husband, that they had both done online personality tests to better understand each other. She speaks very fast and is very kind, she says ‘Hello gorgeous!’ when I step in to the car. 

Her and her friend both retired and spending whole days chatting and making Christmas decorations at her house. Both looking great. We have dinner and they are silly, cracking wine bottles and eating cheese. In my own family are rare models of older people who are enjoying their lives so I am moved to say I can’t wait to be retired. But this ex doctor and nurse stiffen up and tell me instead how they long for their jobs and their purpose.

I feel almost like a woman, or that I could approach it one day, looking at these fun ladies. Then they ask me how I met my man. Who me? Not a complete lie I suppose, but I don’t hasten to correct or clarify. So I become a sensible young lady with a successful architect boyfriend. It is so strange to think I can slip in and out of being marked in this way, similar to being mixed race. 

 

I made several mistakes in rapid succession when I got on shift yesterday and was tired from the moment I began. Felt myself become numb and just brush it off, thinking that’s fine but I cannot allow this feeling ! Next year you cannot become numb to anything!

 

If I ran more it would be OK. If I could be more attentive to others! To my own life! Disgust when I stumble for even a second. 

 

Walking back and seeing the one particular bush that the birds love, I always see them shouting from it.