I am surrounded by sex; it's tupping time in the hills, and every field and fell around me is full of randy sheep.

The local crop is hillbred crossbred lambs, which are sold each autumn to lowland farmers for fattening. The ewes are hardy blackfaced mountain sheep - swaledales I think, and they have the look of goodtime girls slightly past their best - narrow sweet sootyblack faces, framed by curly horns like hoop earrings, shaggy white coats, and black stockings. They are up for a good time after a summer as single mums, herding together to eat and natter, buck and fight.

The tups are nowhere near as pretty or as bright. Dumb bone-headed roman-nosed Leicester lummoxes, in short sheepskin jackets. All they need are little porkpie hats at an angle to complete the look.

Two rams to a field, and they never stop doing what rams do. I've been out at midnight, in 3 degrees of frost, the air cracking with moonlit ice, and have found them stretching their huge snouts into the air to sniff out the ladies.

I've been travelling, checking up on home, catching up with family, friends, flatmates and the foremost points of interest in current British Culture (i.e., the Tate Crack and recent episodes of Heroes), and pretty much lost my regular connection to the WWW.

I did however work, and I am very close to completing a step-outline of the script. I'm 30 days behind schedule, and trying not to let that worry me - the structure of the last act took much more sorting out than I had anticipated. I hope the northern breezes blowing through my skull have sharpened the brain rather than addled it, (they do make my fingers a little stiff in the morning, so spelling can be a little eccentric) and that I have a suitable structure to start hanging a film on.

I've come back to the cottage to find that winter has descended from the fell. It was blowing in when I left, stripping the last leaves from the sessile oaks, and tossing the crows about the sky.

Now we have had the whole range of winter weather - including snow, which I missed by 90 mins. My train pulled into Hexham station just as the last traces melted away, leaving only salt.

The colours have all changed - all the yellow is leached out of the grass, leaving that wonderful blue-grey they call "wintergreen", and has fled upwards to the fell where the bracken is the colour of ginger biscuits or a new welcome mat.

It's still wriggling with life - two days ago I saw a weasel, bright red, leaping from the water trough to the old tank and back into the rushes. Adders have been seen (not alas by me) sunning themselves on the walls. My missing frogs turned up in the scrub around the burn, big and fat and old and wary.

Last night was full moon and frost - I could see from one side of the valley to the other, and all of it sparkling.

But inside I am warm enough, and dry enough. I have cracked to the extent that I am lighting two portable LPG heaters - one in the bedroom for 15 minutes before I slip under the quilt, one downstairs first thing in the morning, and on very cold nights after 9pm.

And I have water, blessed running water, thanks to a swift decision by my landlord. The contractor brought a mini digger up to the fell, and for two days this week two men worked in the pouring rain to capture the original spring (using a box, pea- shingle and masses of the sticky impervious bright yellow native clay), dig in a new settling tank 100 yards above me, and run a new pipe down.

seconds after the connected the new pipe to the original, water gushed at at least one bar pressure from the old brass kitchen tap, bringing with it all the peat that had clogged the older one solid. After two minutes of high velocity black mud I had clear water. No more wading through the mud to collect from a stream.

I'm looking out now for a replacement for the 19th C sink, which disappeared some time ago - a shallow stoneware slopstone, wide and shallow enough to stand pans and jugs, wash and prep veg, gut fish etc.

Now that I know that there are weasels in the wild wood, and that I am constant enough to stick out the cold weather, I finally feel more like tough wise old Badger, and less like eccentric fly-by-night enthusiast Mr Toad.

Ahem... Nervously clears throat.

I'm back online.

Border Reivers

I have always felt at home - in the sharp, biting challenge of 'rightness' rather than comfort - in border lands. I grew up in the space between England and Wales, never quite sure if we belonged to the bleak beauty of the black mountains or the enfolded green and red and gold of Hereford and Worcester.

One year I spent Christmas in a house which literally straddled that border, in the village of Clyro. It seemed appropriate, given that I entertained both my parents that year, one on Christmas day, one on Boxing day, as at the time it seemed easier to bring down a wall in Berlin as to imagine them sharing the same space and time.

My ancestors' graves are scattered on either side of that border, both sides partaking equally of Welsh and English DNA. Coal merchants, magistrates, china dealers, farm labourers, army officers, parlour maids, professors, factory hands.

In the years since I have discovered other landscapes that invoke the tooth of recognition - of rightness, home, and only now do I realise that they are all border lands, liminal places; seashores and coastlines and the meeting places of language and cultures.

Some borders are more extreme - the limits of human life themselves; I have slept best in a hammock below the waterline of a ship, the dark Atlantic ocean running inches from the tip of my nose. I have perched in the mast, swinging between the great dome of air and the vast disc of sea.

It's there in the stories I try to write - the meeting of Ethiopia and Europe through the medium of approximate translation, the exchange of culture on a pacific island in 1789, between the islanders who swim, and the men of the sea who drown.

And even now I am writing this in the new border my family have settled in - among the Border Reivers of Northumberland, where boundary disputes still rumble between families with 800 years of cross-border raiding history.