The light does such magical things on this hillside that, as I walk the steep narrow lanes between fields, I can’t take my eyes off a distant, golden-topped mountain range.

At night the sky is so clear I wander into the garden and stare at the northern star, bright and low. I saw in the local paper that we got the northern lights the other evening: streaks of blue and green over the harbour. Everything seems such a riot of colour and flavour here.

I look around me and despite the views, I also see the funeral cars going up and down the lanes

The food tastes precisely of itself, to steal a phrase from Nancy Mitford. I’m peeling potatoes so dirty my hands are covered in mud by the time they reach the pan of tap water that comes from a ‘holy well’.

People walk past my gate with bottles and fill them from puddles beside the road coming from the spring that feeds our borehole.

The builder boyfriend reckons he has never felt better since drinking this spring water. A neighbouring farmer joked with him that the rising death rate locally, over the past few years, may have something to do with the water.

I’m sure he was being grimly sarcastic. If anything, the inhabitants of this rugged Irish landscape ought to be the healthiest people on the planet. It seems to me there are too many funerals here, like everywhere else.

I suppose I tried to escape that sort of thinking by moving to a peninsula that could be described as the ends of the Earth, or one end of the Earth.

But I do know that wherever you go, you take yourself with you. I look around me and despite the panoramic views of golden mountains, I also see the funeral cars going up and down the lanes.

When my computer man told me the big wake I got stuck behind in my car on my way to the supermarket was a man in his fifties I thought dark thoughts, but he said the untimely demise just showed you had to live for the day. What is wrong with me that I don’t think like that?

I didn’t think like that in London or Surrey and I don’t here.

No matter where I am, my mind is always trying to put disparate pieces together. I can’t seem to get from questioning to acceptance. My brain doesn’t have an off switch.

I found a box of books in a back room when we began clearing. I had noticed it when I viewed the house. Right on top was a volume of Emily Dickinson’s letters and poems, and it was part of the reason I got such a good feeling that I came down a staircase showered in loose plaster and out onto the cracked paving of an overgrown garden to tell a bewildered-looking estate agent that I wanted to buy the place.

I so wanted that mouldy old box of books still to be here when we arrived, and it was. The family said they couldn’t clear the contents so we inherited the lot. The builder b came down the back stairs with it in his arms the other day, and I sat down with it in the smarter of our two drawing rooms, which has an ornate sofa we jokingly refer to as Saddam’s settee.

I have a big coffee table covered in rescue books, salvaged from wherever I have found them abandoned. I once emptied almost an entire second-hand bookshop into my car when it was closing down, and have everything including Mills & Boon because I can’t bear to see any book thrown away. I opened Emily to a random page:

‘These are the days when birds come back…’ She wrote that during the American Civil War. I suppose it’s about the endurance of nature, how life carries on even when it seems that everything is falling away.

Upstairs, the BB was banging out stud walls to fit a bathroom and after a while he called me up there to explain the capping of pipes.

‘All I can hear is white noise,’ I wanted to tell him as he launched into jargon. But I know he needs to talk to someone about what he is doing.

We are quite alone here, and aside from the odd man who comes in a lorry to bring a skip, or fill the oil tank, he doesn’t have anyone but me to talk to. I’m conscious that this could become a problem. So I listen patiently while he talks plumbing and heating. And then I tell him he’s wonderful, because he is.

He has the rambling old place warm, dry and functioning after only a few weeks. This house, he says, needed us. I can see how it needed him. I think it’s fairer to say I needed it.