Yesterday evening I met with my friend and colleague Richard Pelletier. We came together with the small group of four writers we’re currently supporting as they progress with personal writing projects. The meeting was online, not least because Richard lives on Whidbey Island, off the coast of Seattle. 

A fine writer, Richard is also a gifted photographer who takes stunning, often black-and-white, shots of the Whidbey Island land- and seascapes. I’ve been there and I understand why he is moved to do so. With its rugged coastline and heavily wooded interior, it’s a place of great natural beauty. His connection to the place where he lives is palpable in these pictures, and it makes me think about my own connection to my surroundings here in Highland Perthshire.

Today it’s a typical early winter’s day. There’s snow on the hills, the sky is brilliantly blue with low sunlight catching the last of the autumn colours, and there’s a biting wind. After weeks of unseasonably mild, damp weather, this cold turn feels strangely exhilarating.

Like Richard I’m lucky to live in the midst of great natural beauty. Some of Scotland’s most celebrated countryside is on my doorstep, and there’s more close at hand. Last week I drove two-and-a-half hours to the west coast for a meeting, a journey through a landscape of high hills, rivers and lochs that I haven’t made for some time, and my heart was in my mouth the whole way.

Most days I leave the house in the morning to work in one of two cafés in our village. Yesterday morning I was in the closer of the two, 150 yards from home, which until very recently was also the Post Office. That has now closed and the café has expanded. It’s a friendly place, where village old-timers and other regulars mix with passing tourists and, once a week, the group of whip-thin, lycra-clad cyclists of a certain age for whom the café is a welcome refuelling point on their seventy-five-mile circuit from Dundee.

Over the last few days the place has been vibrating with excitement in the aftermath of Scotland’s World Cup football qualification. To be there in the warmth on a freezing day like yesterday, in an atmosphere so infused with banter and bonhomie, is to experience a powerful sense of community. Leaving aside the football miracle, it makes me wonder if, and to what extent, mood and disposition are affected by where we live. Could living in a beautiful place make one better disposed to connect with one’s fellows? 

The Scots are a people not renowned for effusion. The best you might normally hope for is a muttered ‘nae bad’, while for someone who has done something particularly outstanding, the standard put-down is ‘Aye, weel, ah kent his faither.’ But for the last forty-eight hours the airwaves have been ringing with praise for the Scottish team and their manager, as our nigh-on-thirty-year World Cup drought comes to an end. 

It may be catching. In the café yesterday morning I was talking to a neighbour who was apologising for not having had time to read my recent blog posts. I told him there was no need to apologise. ‘But I do,’ he said. ‘I need to read your blog. It’s life-affirming.’ I gulped and mumbled something self-deprecating, as we do. 

Later on, I was playing the piano in the pub at the regular session with musician friends. At the bar all evening, apparently enjoying the music, was a lone customer. As I was leaving he came up to me and hesitantly told me that he was a part-time resident of the village and a regular follower of the blog. He said that his wife, whose family had had to flee their country many years ago for political reasons, had been moved by my recent post about the Canadian Indian residential  schools, with its themes of dispossession and loss of heritage.

I was touched, and pleased, and told Sarah about it when I got home. As I was going to sleep I remembered a writing workshop I’d run many years ago in a prison. In a somewhat apathetic group of about a dozen prisoners there was one who immediately caught my attention. He was heavily tattooed and menacing-looking, but he had a magnetic energy about him, and for that hour he was attentive and eager and wanted to learn everything from me he could. I was later told that he had been a Glasgow gangland hitman.

For the finale I invited everyone to write a poem. His was about the prison governor. It was irreverent and funny and I congratulated him. As I did so I sensed a sudden vulnerability in him and it occurred to me that he might never have been praised for anything before in his life. As if in confirmation, rather than dropping to the floor, his gaze softened into a broad, childlike smile. In that moment it seemed like one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.