Jonathan: Nine years ago today, about this time of the evening, D and I were driving south along the M74 looking out for a place to pull up for the night in our motorhome. That morning we’d boarded the ferry from Lochmaddy in North Uist, heading back home to Shropshire. It was my 45th birthday and I felt keenly that I was at a turning point in my life. The day before, the last day on our tour of the Outer Hebrides, we’d discovered that the old walled garden with a modern house in it we’d spotted a day or two before was to be put up for sale. We’d always had a fancy for a walled garden, and indeed we’d lived in one before, in Bavaria in the mid 1990s. Our time there was the result of personal will; but this felt different – something outside of us, bigger than us, drawing us forward. Either we stepped back from the riptide of  fate – and made our own way in life under our own steam as before; or we just waded in and let the current take us where it would.  I remember now the extraordinary feeling I’d had that day, standing in the walled garden, with the sweet scent of grass warmed by the summer sun, and not a sound but the gentle lapping of waves on the beach across the road, the drowzy flies amongst the Veronica flowers, and the sound of a dog barking across the water in Barra – it was really that still!. It was if the walled garden and us had each been waiting for that moment, and time itself had paused awhile, wating to see which way it would go.  Six months later we’d moved in; and since that day, in storm or stillness, anxiety or delight, plenty or dearth, there’s never been a day anything less than profoundly enriching.