Moving house is distracting. I’m not writing at the moment, which is more or less all right because the next project is still in the research phase, but I’m not reading as much or as attentively as usual either. It’s not that I need absolute peace and hours of seclusion to read and write; any writer who also has a serious job and a family is used to having to make time and to prioritize a creative practice over other, apparently more urgent, activities. I am more than capable of writing instead of cooking, or attending school sports day, or sending Christmas cards. I am not worried by overdue filing or the insistent demands of bureaucracy, and find it often more efficient to let work e-mails build up for a day or two and then answer them all at once when I’ve finished some research or writing.

But there’s something about relocation that’s taking over my mind. I can’t stop myself checking property websites more than once a day, in case the perfect house comes up, and then when it doesn’t, checking for neighbouring towns where we’ve already decided we don’t want to be as well, just in case a house so spectacular as to overcome our objections to the location has appeared since I last looked. When I’m trying to read, I find myself staring at the wall thinking, well, if we put the sofa in that room, where would the children sit to read while I’m cooking? Would my yarn collection start to smell of onions if it lived in an open-plan kitchen/living room? Could we be happy with a very small garden if it faced south and we had lots of indoor plants? I doubt any of it matters all that much; if our family’s happiness really depends on the dimensions of the lawn, we have problems unlikely to be solved by real estate. But I do know, from experience, that domestic architecture makes a huge difference to family life and that some houses make it hard to share or divide everyone’s time and space.

There’s something rather novelistic about all this, the need to call into being parallel lives in different places, to imagine the family future taking shape within new walls, and that’s one of my excuses: relocation is so much like writing a novel that I can’t do both at once. I’ve said to several estate agents that it’s no wonder people tend to behave badly, irrationally, when all of their money and their homes are at stake. I’m sure we could be happy – or unhappy – in most of the houses we’ve considered, and I know we’re lucky to have a choice. My attention, my compulsive attention, to the matter of relocation, is partly a superstitious offering of my creative energies to a time of disruption. If I stop writing, maybe the new house won’t have rising damp, won’t be dazzled nightly by the floodlights on a playing field behind the garden, won’t turn out to have a barking dog next door or – please God deliver us – a midnight television enthusiast on the other side of the party wall. If I stop writing, maybe we’ll find a house where the children’s teenage years will go smoothly, where new friends will become old friends and sickness will pass us by. Writing can be a form of prayer, but sometimes not writing is also a kind of supplication, an offering to other gods.

I have recently taught myself a new way of knitting, the version I saw in Iceland where the yarn is always in the left hand. It’s much faster and more comfortable for me than the English way, and so I’ve been knitting a lot and feeling rather pleased with myself about it. I enjoy the colours and textures of yarn, the satisfaction of material growth which seems such a contrast to the invisible, intangible development of a novel-in-progress. I find endless writing-as-knitting metaphors, but the truth is that knitting is easier. There it is, on the needles, an inch bigger than it was half an hour ago.

I tend to feel defensive about knitting. I’ve been re-reading several nineteenth-century feminist writers over the last few months, many of whom regard handicrafts as a way of diverting women’s energies away from education, politics and professional achievement towards time-consuming and wholly unnecessary trivia. I keep remembering the scene in Sense and Sensibility where Lucy discloses the depth of her foolishness by spending all day contentedly adorning a paper box. The more Victorian history I read, the more I think the industrial revolution was in the end a Good Thing, at least for everyone except the male elite, and the more suspicious I become about the fetishizing of the ‘hand-made’ (labour-intensive – usually women’s labour -, expensive, exclusive). But I do like a nice hand-spun alpaca or silk in a subtle vegetable dye, and if I can buy it direct from the artisan, so much better… My knitting is hypocritical.

The other reason knitting makes me defensive is the time it takes. I have the time. I am not neglecting my work or my children in order to knit. But every time a woman who doesn’t knit – always, so far, a woman – sees me knitting, she says, ‘I’d never have the time to do anything like that’ or ‘I’d love to do something like that but I’m just too busy.’ Then I feel guilty. I’m not busy enough, plainly. I must be frivolous, unproductive, or perhaps neglecting all the crucial things with which serious people are so busy. I write, I protest to myself. I do my job, with energy and enthusiasm (a lot of the time when I’m knitting I’m thinking about writing or teaching). The perfect mother would doubtless devote more time and energy to her children than I do, but I accepted a while ago that the perfect mother will always be hanging around at the back of my mind and meanwhile the children seem to be all right. When I’m around, I talk to them at least as much as they want me to. I take them to places I think we might all like. I cook for them, help with homework, see that they get plenty of exercise and vegetables and clean clothes and table manners and all the other things parents supply. I even talk to my husband most days. So while I’m quite willing to believe that other people are more important and busier than I am – surgeons, perhaps, Sarah Lund – it’s not quite clear to me what else I ought to be doing. (Apart from housework. I am too busy for that. And keeping proper accounts with receipts and washing the car and taking anything to the dry-cleaner, ever.)

Some stages of life are truly busier than others. Somehow when our first child was born, it took me and Anthony 24 hours a day to feed, clean and change him and we didn’t have time to eat or shower. (I can’t remember why. When the second one came along, I could do those things and look after a four-year-old and the house all on my own and it was often dull but rarely challenging.) Of course there are people who really are too busy to knit, people doing intensive caring or working in jobs that require bursts of absolute devotion. But mostly, I think, we all find time for the things we want to do most. I haven’t always knitted but I have always read fiction, every day of my life since I was six – including taking Finals and giving birth and getting married as well as international relocations with small children. I don’t turn on the computer every day. I don’t own a television. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter. I don’t play or watch any kind of sport. I very rarely listen to music. Most of my friends are far away and I have little social life in Cornwall. I wouldn’t say I don’t have time for any of these things. There are the same hours in my days as in the days of people who go running, practice yoga, keep themselves educated about current affairs, learn new languages and file their paperwork as it comes in. I could make time, I just don’t want to. I’d rather knit.

We’ll be leaving Cornwall next year. I’ve accepted a new job, as Reader in Creative Writing at Warwick, starting in September. I’m so pleased with the job that I want to hug myself every time I think of it. The Writing, Nature and Place MA in Cornwall has been shut down, and at Warwick I’ll be part of a team of writers running an innovative and substantial undergraduate and postgraduate programme in a new building designed for the purpose – a very rare treat for academics in the Arts – and all sorts of good things will be possible. We’re planning a module tracing a river from source to sea, some writing about abandoned buildings, and maybe even a bit of knitting…

It will all be good, but it does mean leaving Falmouth. Not immediately. I’ll commute weekly for the first year until the children are at better points in their school careers for another move. (The seven-hour commute is going to be just fine. All the trains will run on time. I’ll never miss a connection, never have to stand for several hours, and there will be no lengthy delays caused by such unpredictable events as falling leaves or the wrong kind of rain. I’ll get lots of work done in peace and quiet on Virgin Trains. La la la. I have my fingers in my ears and I can’t hear a word on this subject.) Sometimes, walking the coast alone in the evening light, or picnicking with my family while watching seals from a cliff-top, the move seems like such a tragedy that I seriously wonder if I can commute three hundred miles in the long term. There is, after all, rumoured to be a member of my new department who commutes from Provence (though that would take rather less time than from West Cornwall, and probably cost no more. Perhaps we should move to Provence.) I’ve lived by the sea, one sea or another, for eight years now, and it seems a terrible thing to turn inland. As one of my colleagues said when I told him I planned to leave, I like edges. I do like edges, walking along them and writing about them.

But visiting Warwickshire these last few months, I have also seen advantages in the middle. There are the obvious ones: being one hour and not six from my friends in Oxford and London, being able to go to parties and plays and museums without needing to spend, and justify, several days and hundreds of pounds in the process, being able to go abroad in one day rather than three. I knew about those all along, and they were never reason enough to leave Falmouth. But I wonder now about hills and rivers, the comfort of a landscape densely inhabited for thousands of years. There aren’t many really old buildings in Cornwall, not in the way that there were in Oxford and Canterbury. It’s hard to see the outlines and ghosts of life before the Industrial Revolution, difficult to sense earlier footsteps under my feet. Every journey starts by going east for at least a hundred miles before there’s any decision to make. I’ve never felt peripheral here in the way that some of my colleagues do, have almost always been sure that wherever I am is the centre of my world. But I like the idea of having the whole compass of directions around me, the north of England where I grew up and still, in some fundamental way, feel most at home, the flatlands and big skies of the Fens, Wales where my godmother lives, and London and Heathrow and the way to the big world lying in a circle around me. As we face another move, I’m thinking a lot about belonging and dislocation and landscape. I wonder what it will be like to feel England all around us, to be encompassed by land, and I can imagine that it might, actually, be rather pleasant.

I don’t much like summer. I can’t get the clothes right. You’re not supposed to have hot puddings. Chocolate melts. There’s no shade on the coast path so it’s too hot if you cover up and too bright if you don’t. Going to London becomes an endurance test rather than a revival. Much as I delight in my children’s company, I also need to read and write and the school holidays don’t allow for that. Since I left school, I’ve always looked forward to September, the academic New Year when the duvet is friendly again and real life begins once more. So for now, I can forgive the rain. I’m still wearing my Icelandic knitwear around the house and embracing the Cornish mini-dress and wellies look outside (too hot for waterproof trousers, too wet for jeans or a long skirt). It’s still socially acceptable to stay inside and read and there’s still space for me and Tobias to build sand-aeroplanes on the beach during Max’s surfing lessons. I don’t mind getting wet, and the children learnt in Iceland that weather is no reason to change your plans.

The other problem with summer is that everyone is expected to have fun, which is the kind of command that makes me snarl even when there isn’t a jaw-droppingly awful government getting more awful by the hour, a global recession and people pretending that the Olympics is going to make things better. I don’t object to fun in principle, at least as long as it doesn’t make a noise or involve rules, but I refuse to do it on command. Give me a rainswept beach with a satisfactorily bracing head-wind, a stolen afternoon at the cinema with a box of chocolates I don’t have to share, my children’s company in an old-fashioned museum of local history. I do not want to dance, or watch people kicking or hitting balls or trying to do something unnecessary faster than someone else. I’d far rather be wearing a jumper and a cagoule by the sea than have sand on my skin. (Though I do, of course, enjoy the summer ban on dogs on the beach.)

I have tried, this year. We thought the children should at least see how these things work. I took Tobias to watch the Olympic flame come through Falmouth, forty-five minutes late and preceded, inexplicably, by a fleet of what we first took to be bin lorries but which turned out to be floats advertising soft drinks, mobile phones and fast food, equipped with flashing lights and gyrating women. As a friend remarked, it all seemed most incongruous in Falmouth where some hand-made vintage bunting and burly men singing shanties are the usual forms of celebration. A policeman fell very slowly off his motorbike and everyone cheered; there were more police there than anyone thought Cornwall possessed and so it would have been the perfect day for a crime-spree in West Penwith. For the Jubilee, we joined friends at a village fete where people were paying a pound each to wang wellies and throw wet sponges at men in the stocks. There was snail racing and cream teas. I found it preferable to the Olympic torch, but still incomprehensible. An American friend told me that in twenty years here, she’d never felt so foreign as she did that weekend. Neither had I.

I’m scared of dogs. I have been since I can remember. People always ask if I was attacked as a child and sometimes, since discovering that saying yes makes the questioner more likely to keep dogs away from me, I wince and mutter something about an Alsatian at the playground. But the truth is that if there’d ever been an Alsatian at the playground, I’d have been on the other side of the park before it even saw me. My instincts around dogs make me think that humans aren’t as far from the world of mammoths and sabre-tooth tigers as we sometimes imagine. I can spot one from two fields away, and, given enough room for manoeuvre, can lurk behind trees and walls, maintaining distance and using wind-direction so it never notices me. It’s when you stop, I find, that they attack, or at least bark and growl, so I keep moving, angling away until I can clamber over a wall or, if need be, up a tree, until it’s gone away. My fear makes country walks difficult, which is a shame because I walk to stay sane and would love to be able to use the coast paths and green lanes without feeling like a deer trying to get past the lions.

The problem, of course, isn’t really dogs, but dog owners. Some do keep their animals on leads, or, bless them, put them on leads when approaching other people. Some are actually in control of their dogs, to the extent that the dog will come when the owner calls and stay by the owner until I’ve gone past (keep breathing, I mutter to myself, hands down, keep moving, because yes, I do know that dogs sense fear and react aggressively, so that your dog’s aggression is in some way my fault). But at least half the dog-owners round here have dogs running loose and let them approach people walking with young children, even if those people are pleading with them to keep the dog away. I wish, said my older son, we had a pet tiger.

We’d keep it on a lead in town, we thought. If people stepped into the road to avoid Tigger, we’d say oh, she won’t hurt you, she’s very friendly. We’d let her crap on the pavement and pretend we hadn’t noticed, and leave pools of tiger-pee trickling down the walls of other people’s houses, as if Cornwall were just a tigers’ toilet. She’d sniff at pushchairs, leaving trails of slime across the foot-muffs, and we’d say oh yes, Tigger loves babies. She’d bound up to toddlers and lick their heads from above, maybe growling a little, and we’d say don’t look so worried, she won’t hurt you. And once we got out of town, along the coast path round Pendennis Head, we’d let her off the lead, because tigers need to run about somewhere, burn off some energy. We’d know she doesn’t bite, so we’d let her get quite a long way ahead, out of our sight, and we’d trail the lead so that anyone coming up behind us knew we had an uncontrolled tiger that was likely to appear from behind a bush at any moment. Maybe sometimes there’d be a bit of roaring coming from the trees ahead, and we might, if we were feeling very public-spirited that day, interrupt our conversation to shout ‘be quiet, Tigger, you silly old thing.’ She’d run up to dogs, of course, because that’s what tigers do, and we’d smile at her friendly enthusiasm. She might snap a bit, or take the odd swipe, because she’s a bit bouncy, our tiger, but she’s an old softy really. If she did happen to take a little nip, it must be because the dog was provoking her somehow, maybe trembling or running away so she thinks it’s a game. Tigers do pick up on fear, you know. If your dog would stop being so hysterical, she wouldn’t act like that. No, Tigger, put it down now. Now! Tigger! Oh dear, she never will do what she’s told, silly girl. Tigger, drop it!

It’s that stage in the autumn term where it seems equally impossible that we will ever reach the end and that we can keep going. Both children are tired and prone to colds, the adults are unable to get to bed in time to be functional in the morning and I’ve started keeping separate to-do lists because if I see the whole lot in one place I will have to confront the idiocy of my over-commitment and start telling people I can’t do things. The positive side of this situation is that I’ve stopped working at weekends. I don’t know if this mechanism is self-destructive or perversely functional, but now it’s clear even to me that I can’t possibly do everything I’m supposed to do when I’m supposed to do it, I’m not trying all that hard.

I spent this afternoon making mincemeat with my five-year-old. (For non-British readers, this kind of ‘mincemeat’ is a fruit concoction for Christmas pies that hasn’t contained minced meat for several centuries.) I’d always had making your own mincemeat in the same category as making your own jam, a step too far in the romanticizing of a form of domestic labour that lends itself particularly well to mass-production. But supermarket pastry is nasty, and the handmade pies in the artisanal bakery are good value for good quality but expensive when you’re feeding hungry children. When I read the label on a jar of mincemeat, it struck me that the mark-up on apples, raisins and spices is as remarkable as on bought hummus. I came home and set the five-year-old to work chopping apples while I made pastry, just as if I didn’t have four books to read, a pile of essays to mark and a lecture to write for Tuesday morning.

We’ve resumed last winter’s habit of going out for the day on Sunday, now I’ve given up trying to be ready for Monday morning. In summer, the children have more weekend activities – sailing, surfing – and the roads and beaches are so busy it often seems pleasanter to stay at home. I like Cornwall best in winter, I think; the oblique light on the sea, the way the stars seem brighter and the sky blacker than elsewhere in England, even the changing rhythms of the rain. Last week we walked from Perranuthoe to Marazion, along the edges of Mount’s Bay with St Michael’s Mount levitating on the sea in front of us. When we returned to Perranuthoe, we had lunch outside in the sun, too hot to keep our coats on. (It’s probably a good thing I didn’t send a photo to friends in Iceland as I was briefly tempted to do.) The week before that, we heard seals singing from the sand under the cliffs west of Portreath.

So I don’t really care that I’ll be writing next week’s lecture in the early hours of the day I give it. Maybe I won’t write it at all. I’ve extemporized before and it’s been rather good, actually.

I’ve been thinking about nature writing and wild places for a lot of my career, but this year’s teaching has focused my mind in new ways. I teach a course called ‘Literature and Environment’ to undergraduates as well as running the MA in Writing, Nature and Place, and in both contexts I’ve found myself discovering again quite how much I dislike the idea of ‘wilderness’, of special places set aside for the special people who think they deserve more space than the rest of us. Many of the books by writers the MA students have started to call ‘the wilderness boys’ are just men exciting themselves about being higher up or further away than anyone else. The founding fathers of the wilderness boys are the Romantic poets and nineteenth century travels writers about whom I wrote my doctoral thesis, and my love of their writing has been wrangling with my politics for a long time, one of those writerly tensions that holds up my intellectual world.

I spent a week on Aran at the beginning of May, leading an MA field trip. I’ve spent time on Scottish islands before, but it was my first time on the west coast of Ireland. In some ways, the landscape was deeply familiar: gorse, cliffs, pale beaches with bright water, wild flowers thronging the paths – very much like Cornwall at this time of year, as well it might be, being more or less a continuation of Europe’s western edge. But behind the flowers and hedges were mountains muffled by cloud, and a kind of emptiness that you don’t get anywhere in England. Wilderness, I suppose. We climbed halfway up one of them. The wind sweeping the curve of a mountain, the sea seen across miles of land, a sprinkle of white dots like beads from a broken necklace that must be houses along a road, and myself and my companions high above it all, hearing nothing but wind and birds, peering round the earth’s curve. I oppose the idea of wilderness, of the superior position, but my feelings for the real thing are more complicated. I too can get high on altitude, on solitude, on being far away.

I wasn’t, of course, in solitude on Aran. I was responsible for risk assessment and health and safety, and lived in fear of someone falling off the cliffs that mark the final boundary between Europe and the Atlantic. All around the clifftop Celtic forts, I found settling places for the nervous and chivvied the brave away from the edge, instructing the group – competent adults all, and some with far more experience of these things than I have – to keep at least two metres from the drop and approach, if they must, on hands and knees. Trained by parenthood, I set a good example, stayed back, resisted the urge to look down. I lasted all of two days before my fascination got the better of me and I decided that the students were a sensible bunch of people and went and lay with my head over the abyss, watching the waves exploding a hundred metres below my flattened body. I began to find places to sit more or less over the void, where, in an on-shore wind and as long as I kept still, I could watch the final seconds of waves from America without feeling that I was being more than titillatingly irresponsible. I thought then that I don’t know why it’s so deeply gratifying to watch the sea smashing itself against the land, or why there’s such pleasure in holding myself out over a fatal drop. But of course I do know why. It’s the damn Sublime again, Burke and Wordsworth going round in my blood like iron years after I recognized them for the (gifted) male chauvinist pigs that they are.

We’re planning to go back to Iceland this summer.

I’m very happy to be in Cornwall. I enjoy my new job and the new house. Every time I walk to the shops, past the moored boats and the Georgian terrace, I have a moment’s smugness about living in Falmouth. Before we moved, lots of friends and colleagues reminded me quite how far it is from west Cornwall to London, and predicted that however much I liked the cliff walks and the light on the sea, it wouldn’t make up for being six hours from the British Library. I was right and they were wrong; the British Library is always full before you can get there from Canterbury in the morning, much less Cornwall, so it’s effectively closed to anyone who doesn’t live in London anyway. I find the idea that living a certain distance from London is a form of hardship rather odd – growing up in Manchester, London was mostly for airports, and I rarely bothered to go from Oxford. I’ve had two London trips since we moved to Falmouth, and both were delightful in a way that London can be only when being there is an occasional treat. I bought the sort of clothes you don’t find in Cornwall, spent an afternoon at the V and A and caught up with friends, but my daily life – my work, my family, weekends on the coast path – are here now. And I look forward to the five-hour train journey: a pile of books, a picnic box from the Pea Souk and a sea view, all counting as ‘work’ – what more could a busy parent want?

But still, Iceland calls. I’ve been back every day in my mind, remembering how we watched the snow-line on Esja, Reykjavik’s mountain, like a barometer, and how I checked the northern horizon for aurora every night before bed, and how much the cream buns on Shrove Tuesday mattered when winter was going on forever and we seemed to have been living on beans and skyr for weeks. I wonder how people are doing, not the friends with whom we’ve stayed in touch but the students I saw every week for six months, the children’s teachers and class-mates, the people I interviewed for Leave of Absence. I don’t think I noticed the equinox a couple of days ago – we don’t need the lights on at supper now and the sun (and the seagulls) are up hours before the alarm goes off in the morning – but I remember how important it seemed last year. There were still weeks to go before anything like summer, such as leaving the house without gloves and a hat or seeing anyone else on a bicycle, but the year had turned. We were on the way up. I can see that it’s perverse to miss the cold and dark, and maybe an easy self-indulgence when the camellia in the garden has been blossoming since Boxing Day and it’s already warm enough to picnic on the beach. It isn’t exactly the cold and dark that I miss, but the idea of winter, the way we knew every day that we were moving towards the light. Or towards the dark; the Arctic winter is a kind of death, but I respected the sense of mortality I had in Iceland. We are all, after all, moving daily into the dark (or light, if you prefer – it doesn’t make much difference), and it felt right to live in that knowledge, as if the Arctic circle were a kind of post-Christian memento mori.