Nightwalker
Cal Flyn
Insomnia brings with it a few benefits. Long hours awaiting the approach of sleep offer plenty of time for reading, for example. It can be a useful time to review the day just past, and plan the days ahead. But, sometimes, hours drag on, and there’s nothing for it but to give up and get up. And now, since moving to Orkney, I go out.
I’m very fortunate in that I have rarely felt constrained by being a woman. But moving somewhere I feel safe to go walking alone at night has been a revelation. It offers very different pleasures to rambling in the day. Night is, as Thoreau once wrote, “a very different season.”