Islands of the Mind

Will Self's foot blog from Shetland has nice touches, such as:

I like islands – and I suspect most novelists do – because they’re discrete and legible, just like stories.

I happened to read this on the same day as stumbling again on Kathleen Jamie's Findings from the Monach Islands:

[The sound recordist] could tell a bird by a mark, a piped note, an attitude in the air. When I marvelled at this, he said identifying a bird was similar to making a poem or a finished piece of work from the kind of notes I stopped to make in my book, crouched down out of the wind.