I've been nostalging. Retrospecting. Revisiting.It was a sunny day and I went for a prowl around the place that drew me to Scotland for better or for worse (sometimes I'm not sure how that worked out!)

This is a select few of the first places we lived in, the children and I. From the bottom up: A tiny block of a house, one room wide, next to the pub and just overlooking the bay, with thick thick stone walls that in a Force 8 from the north-west shook. When that sort of gale blew we could hardly get the door open so hard would it charge down the little lane between the buildings. Once upon a time it had been a grocery store. It was also the house in which Chloe saw a ghost. That was in 1983

Then when we finally moved up here we put down anchor in a grotty caravan (what WAS I thinking of?) that has recently been pulled away and burned - should have happened long ago. I think the children have some happy memories of the van because it was a novelty and for the first time in their lives they were free to roam. We also lived for a while in the now pink chalet next to that caravan, but that came later.

Then there was the house in Fyrish Road around which is a hedge so high and thick I couldn't get a photo of it. No hedge in our day. It was bleak and exposed to the weather, didn't have double glazing or, as now, a sunroom. We looked out onto the sand dunes - as seen through the old gateway (a remnant of much older building).

I couldn't find the fisherman's cot that brought on Costa's one and only real bout of asthma in Scotland. The smoke from a neighbour's chimney beat down into the bedroom windows. When we were living there it was almost the last cottage before the sand dunes (again) but land got sold off and other brash new intruders, pretending to be fisherman's cots, got built and it got prettified so - it has vanished. Might be any one of these I snapped, but isn't.

Then we disappeared up into the hills briefly, came back down to sea-level quickly but not to this village. We spent a couple of years (long time!) in a large rambling crumbling house in the middle of fields perfect for grazing the pony. Finally, to Costa's joy, we returned to the village by the sea and lived in what had been in the early C19 a smokehouse, then it became a post office at which time it was was badly converted into two houses with virtually no sound-proofing. Chloe and G lived in one half, the rest of us in the other. The views from the back bedrooms were brilliant. They looked right out over the bay and into the sunsets.

Finally, at the top of them all, a picture of the skies that brought me here.

In all we have lived in 11 places as a family and I've lived in two on my own. No wonder I have gathered little moss - that is to say, no money or substance!