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thick grey fog that oozed soft droplets on to our coats and faces, and made it impossible to see more than a hundred metres in any direction. But the air was mild and sweet, full of herby moorland flavours.
    I trudged up a long gentle rise covered in tufted yellow grass towards a tor at the top, a mad sculpture of massive grey boulders piled on one another in contiguous columns like a collapsed abacus. Kathy, a placid blonde woman, one of Pete’s group of friends, was walking with me, chatting. Suddenly, she said, apropos of nothing, “So what do you think of Pete?”
    “Well …” I said, rather taken aback, “he seems a bit lugubrious—but nice, definitely nice.”
    Kathy smiled and went on, “He’s taken rather a sh—”and then abruptly broke off and began talking about the weather. But I wasn’t listening, because I had heard the words she didn’t say, as clearly as if she’d shouted them into my ear—“shine to you, he’s taken rather a shine to you”—and an explosion had gone off in my head.
    The others were already at the top and there were only a few metres of yellow grass in which to compose myself before I was there too. Weird glittering fragments were still flying round my skull, as though a lens through which I’d seen the world had disintegrated beneath a laser’s beam. Why waste time on Frankenstein’s monster, I asked myself, who is clearly arrogant, unpleasant and unobtainable, when there is this other chap who you actually like talking to, and who looks not uninteresting—in fact, who resembles a craggy blond vampire, complete with deadpan humour and slightly pointy teeth.
    It was unfortunate that I had realised this just as the holiday was about to end.
    I scrambled up an angled slab of rock and stood gingerly upright on top of the tor, staring at the panoramic non-view. A faint patchwork of browns, purples and greens lay under the fog, like a filthy old quilt in an attic, covered in cobwebs and dust. I was alone on an island in a sinister grey sea that floated upwards all around me to merge with the sky. Uncertainly, I shifted my feet on my narrow perch, suddenly aware that it was slippery, and that I was not sure how to descend. I noticed Pete standing on the ground beside my boulder, looking upwards, a blond head against the grey. “Wouldyou like a hand down?” he asked gravely, stretching out an arm. I placed my hand in his, and jumped.
    N OW, HAVING GOT together, split up and got together again, we have been reunited for two years, and have made it past the violent terns on to the highest part of this low-slung, treeless island. “We’re lucky they weren’t Arctic skuas,” says Pete.
    “Why, what do they do?” I ask.
    “Oh, they’re very fierce. They pursue you well away from their nesting sites, and then they sku-a you.”
    To this sort of thing, a groan is the only possible response.
    The slatted walkway meets another going across at right angles, and in one of the corners made by the joining of the paths, there is what appears at first to be a heap of earth and stones. Struck by some oddity of texture, I look again—and realise that the muddy heap has two brown eyes and a long brown beak, and that it is actually a female eider duck, its feathers comfortably fluffed out, perfectly camouflaged against the ground. “One can see why it would make a good duvet,” I say, as we stand on the walkway admiring it. The duck sits on, presumably hatching something, pillowy and unperturbed.
    On the rest of our walk, we see puffins popping in and out of puffin burrows scraped into the flat featureless turf, an unexpectedly prosaic setting for such an arty-looking bird. We stand at the top of an inlet, its sheer sides drenched in guano, and inhale the mixedstench of salt, shit and fish as we look down on colonies of kittiwakes and auks. The latter look like corporate types attending a formal event, with their smart black plumage, white shirt fronts and tendency to stand about in