The sun is shining heroically through ice-blue sky, clouds rampaging across the vast dome of our existence. Hail stones lie in the bare earth furrows of our garden. Curlew probe the soil of our fields and call longingly into the freezing wind. The red cliffs of our neighbouring island rise out of a restless sea. From my kitchen window I look north to the surging coils of surf crashing and rolling over The Riv – a long spit of skerries which form the most northerly point of this island. At regular intervals the cloud swirls low over the house and we are pelted with hail and horizontally driven sleet. It is Christmas Eve and God but this is a wild and beautiful place to be.

And yet I am crying. A few nights ago a friend and fellow islander died inexplicably in her sleep. She was my age (we joked, only last weekend, about being respectively the right and wrong side of 40) with sons aged five and eight. I was, and remain, shocked to the core at this tragedy. Where is the sense in it?

Once again the compassion and resourcefulness of this small community amazed me. Her boys were immediately taken to a friend’s home and stayed there while their father made his horrendous journey from his ship off the coast of Nigeria all the way home to Orkney. The decision was made to go ahead with the Community Christmas Tree party for the children – they all needed the reassurance of some semblance of normality. But the dance the next evening was cancelled – we were hardly in the mood for a knees-up. The morning plane scheduled to fly to the island to our north diverted its journey especially to drop off a friend of her husband to the airfield here. My heart goes out to her family at this awful time.

My only comfort is that my abiding image of this good person is of her laughing and singing and thoroughly enjoying an excellent school Christmas concert two evenings before her death. And I do mean excellent. The performance arts form a central theme of life here and huge effort goes into teaching children music, dance and singing. In Edinburgh I found it impossible to organise music lessons for my children without incurring an overdraft. Here they were offered free music lessons (instruments provided) as soon as we arrived and are already part of the Fiddle Club (albeit scratching away at the back). 

The older children, with a good few years of tuition under their belts, are astonishingly accomplished whether singing, acting or playing an instrument. The Fiddle Club Concert (another great evening out) was a highly polished performance of everything from Bach to The Beetles.  I noticed an intriguing lack of self-consciousness among the children – even the teenagers – who all seemed delighted to leap on stage and do their damnedest at full volume.

Now it is 1am on Christmas morning and, despite my heavy heart, time for me to perform my Father (or should that be Mother) Christmas duties. As Dale’s fourth tooth has just fallen out I will have to be a fairy too. The multi-faceted demands on our lives continue regardless of tragedy.