Confessions of a freelancer

Times

19 hours ago

It's a beautiful night as we park the cars at the estate cottage and make our way to the river. I've never been to this swimming spot before but my friends say it's one of the best. To get there we meander down a lime avenue, the kind of thing for which Perthshire is famous. The leaves are so bright when seen from below, it's as if the air has been stained green.
As we walk horses pass with their riders. A bird of prey wheels overhead. We take turns to catch up on our news before reaching the riverbank. It's 5.30pm, a time all three of us used to be chained to our desks.
Listen, we're still chained, although for one of us the desk is a potter's wheel. It's just that we make our own timetables now. We're self-employed and in our mid-thirties, with all the stresses and joy that brings. We work late and we work early, through lunch and on the road. So we can shut laptops and down clay at 4.45pm to drive here.
Down then, off the path through shallow woodland, where I spot a cep and chop it loose for my breakfast tomorrow. The undergrowth opens to reveal the Tay, pitch-black water and stony beach under a big mackerel sky. We lay out our towels and open the crisps as we talk about our old city jobs. My friends are more international than me. Their past lives were in London, Paris and Stockholm. I only have Edinburgh and Glasgow to add to the list.
We were different people then. There's no way I could have imagined this. The brown butter light bouncing off the curving hedgerows on the way to Dunkeld, one of my favourite drives in the world. Past kale fields and a bluebell wood, ginger cattle scratching their backs on wire fences. Yes, I cower at the vans going 70mph on the single-track roads. But then I get to the river and forgive everything.
The water is the warmest it has been this year. Our bravest friend goes first and dunks her head like always. I hang back, wincing as I navigate the slimy pebbles. Suddenly we're all under, at eye level with the stony beach.
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The surface is a fairyland of skeeters. They're illuminated by the sun edging down beneath the horizon. You've gone so far, my friends call to me, as the current pulls me downstream without my noticing. I swim sideways, trying to break the loop.
We worked hard to get here and we work harder to stay here, through the maze of HMRC self-assessments, the precarity of the gig economy and unpredictable incomes in creative fields. We don't know what we're doing most days, we agree, and yet we keep going. It's partly because we left the city that we can.
One of my friends is restoring a handsome old hotel. The other is about to host her first solo show. They're the ones going far, never mind me in the current. We like to talk about the past and the future, recalling who we've been and urging each other to be ambitious about who we might be.
Who we are now involves water. It's just what happens out here. There are no galleries open late, no concentration of bars and restaurants where we can drink till the wee hours. And so we swim, and we sauna, and we go to the village disco at the legion where we rave under strobe lights with £3 pints. We take turns at making dinner. We drink wine — lots of wine — and we stay over, because it's the country and you have to drive everywhere.
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Kim reminds us of another evening a while back when we went to a pool near us and I wept in the hot tub. That year I wasn't getting anywhere fast, the kind of frustration that boils over just before something great happens. It all worked out. I got my book deal and spent 15 months travelling the world. I've hardly been home to see these girls, hardly done the picnics and hikes we've been used to.
We take it in turns to drop off the radar when small children are sick or hormones threaten to tip us over the edge. Freelance work doesn't always guarantee attendance. One person is usually missing, standing downwind of the reality of living. Last summer one of the gang moved to Copenhagen to chase her dream job.
Later, in the WhatsApp chat, we post the river pictures and she sends a heart from 1,200 miles away. Somehow we're all swimming, all going far on this ever-gold night. @palebackwriter
Kristie de Garis's debut memoir, Drystone: A Life Rebuilt, is many things. A drystone waller, photographer and writer based in Perthshire, she tells the truth of rural Scotland through worlds spun from a creative mind (Birlinn £14.99). Buy from timesbookshop.co.uk or call 020 3176 2935. Free UK standard P&P on online orders over £25. Discount for Times+ members.