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.