Here I am, in a refurbished freight container, gazing towards the western horizon, the sky cooling to a darkness that matches the slopes of Stronchullin, the mountain above Ardentinny. Lights glow to the north, on another hillside, this one hollowed out and home to Britain's nuclear arsenal. It's winter, shortly after 4pm, and I am alone.
Usually these sojourns involve renting a cottage on Scotland's black-edged coast or a hotel room in some far-flung spot. A freight container is a novelty, bordering on tasteless given the association with illegal immigrants, yet this one is perfectly tasteful. I am at Cove Park, an artist's retreat on the Cowal Peninsula, about an hour north of Glasgow.
The containers - which the Cove Parkies call 'cubes' - have been adapted by a design firm from London and are surprisingly luxurious. Round windows have been cut in the steel walls and space is given over to a bathroom and small kitchen. The container's doors have been propped open and sliding glass windows have taken their place, beyond which a balcony extends over a frozen pond, ducks flighting into it, skidding and spinning as they touch down.
I have spent the morning working at this window, before cooking lunch and taking a walk in the last of the light. While I was crossing a field in search of a high point on the map, a man in full camouflage emerged from bracken, reeds and grasses made pale by frost, a rifle in his hand. I apologised for disturbing his hunt. 'No problem,' he replied, pointing towards the tree line. 'It's a grand place for the foxes.'
The melancholy is self-indulgent, as is holidaying alone. Being here is supposed to be about work, completing a piece of writing, but part of it, part of the pleasure, is the journey through the uncluttered mind. My sister once borrowed a house in Lisbon so fancy that it came with a cook, and as she sat alone at the large table, the woman asked, 'Don't you have any friends?' She ran for the telephone. Pride doesn't allow me to consider my disappearing acts as holidays, although some of those close to me call them that; I prefer to say they're 'trips'.
Many of us like to travel alone, aware of the requirement that we open up to strangers and stranger experiences, but this is different. I pay up for a week, perhaps two (my longest trip was 13 months) and settle in, immediately feeling like a ghost in the unfamiliar surroundings.
I arrive at Cove Park on a Friday and on the first night a theatre director is holed up with a French writer in one of the 'pods'. Shipped from Taransay, the pods are the flashiest accommodation at Cove. Originally built for the BBC's millennium project, Castaway, they have since been made luxurious with underfloor heating and rolltop baths.
Last night, I gazed enviously at the lights. Novelists are notorious for feeling a yearning towards theatre because of the collaboration it involves. This morning the director left, having dropped the keys to the entire site into my hands. With the staff on their weekend break, the solitude closes in.
Like many before me, I went first to the desert in search of solitude. I was trying to become a journalist and wrote my first big feature, on meeting Hunter S Thompson, in a motel in Page, Arizona. The room had a view that was cracked in the middle distance by the beginning of the Grand Canyon. In the evenings, I would eat in a place called Ken's Old West, chatting to the honky-tonk angels and listening to the house band play bad covers of Billy Ray Cyrus.
The instinct was taken to its extreme in a cottage in Achnasheen, perhaps the most godforsaken village in the Scottish Highlands. Here I sat for over a year, passing through a long winter that saw me convinced I was being followed by a crippled sheep. Every day, when I looked out the window, it would be gazing back. Then it would hobble away.
In such conditions, paranoia and obsession are like tumours in the mind. I spent two weeks on Tiree, a Hebridean island with effervescent winter light, obsessing over a monstrous tree trunk that had washed up in the bitter February winds. Chopping up the sea-soaked log for firewood meant days with a blunted axe, each blow splattering me with the viscera of the fat sea worms feasting inside.
To keep control, I find a reason to be in such a place. My sister's error was to have no answer to the cook. She should have said she was there to write something, a diary, perhaps, or an opera, it doesn't matter. She could have said she wanted to finish a particularly complex knitting pattern or read the entire works of Proust. That is what the mornings are for. Afternoons are for walking.
I also cook. I use local produce and take trouble over sourcing it. In Tiree this involved walking out on to the sands at low tide and beating the newly revealed flats with a spade before raking for cockles. In the Highlands, I played Dick Turpin to the prawn lorry that travelled the single-track road each day on the way to market.
The purpose is not to meet new people but to spend time introspectively. For all its many benefits, this has always proved the best reminder of why I like the company of others. Meanwhile, I catch up on reading and the music I have bought during bouts of work-avoidance at home. I grow socially unacceptable and grow socially unacceptable facial hair, not least because these trips tend to take place in winter, when rates are low. Cove Park is perfectly suited to all this.
The last of the light is gone outside the windows, and I leave my cube and climb the path that cuts up the hillside, the ingredients for a glutinous stew swinging in a bag beside my knee. An icy moon is shifting the night shadows around me and a tickle of fear lies between my shoulderblades.
Essentials
Cove Park (01436 850123; www.covepark.org) runs a residency programme for artists from May to October. The rest of the year, the accommodation is available for private hire. Self-catering accommodation is offered in two-bedroom pods, with underfloor heating and balconies, or in cubes, which are in stylishly converted freight containers, with either a single or double bed, kitchen/sitting area and shower room. The cost is £50 per room per night in the pods and £30 in the cubes. The centre is in Peaton Hill, Cove, Argyll and Bute.
