It feels, looking at how my life has gone, as though very little of it was lived in the places people expected it to be. I chat to friends sometimes, and they share memories of milestones, which actually mean very little to me. I seem, all too often, to have lived my life in what I call the "between" places - neither one place nor another, somehow scribbling their stories between the lines on which the regular services run.

Perhaps that's why I like border places so much: beaches, coastlines, river banks...I think they're actually very human places to live. They might not get the press coverage, but when we send our spirits in to frisk the treasures there...they sparkle, like midnight herons on a moonlit estuary...like stars, in the kind of bottomless cosmic sky you don't need a starship to explore.