coffee off the clock is a weekly column full of musings on life since i left my 9-5, and building a life around writing. join me for a coffee every week and follow my journey!

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a tired suitcase on its back. piles of washing on the stairs. seeds strewn across the floor. dried flowers in stagnant water. nettles climbing the garden fence. a week in another country feels like a day. then you come home and it feels like a year.

i go back to my business: sorting dates out for writing workshops, meeting with parents, arranging time with friends, tending the garden, cleaning bee’s cage, catching up on washings and the many youtube videos i’ve missed (that’s obviously my favourite part hehe). i’m doing all the same things yet somehow, as a different person. and i know it. it’s the elephant in the room that i’ve not been speaking aloud because i haven’t yet been able to find the words.

after a very sunny week in fuerteventura, majd and i went back to our brunches, this week at roasters in paisley, on a verrrry sunny thursday. i got the berries, meringue & honey pancakes (with an iced hazelnut latte, i’m maybe not all that different after all) & majd got the tacos.

i needed that week away from writing, although i did carve out some time on the journey to jot down some fragmented musings. but i just felt super compelled to immerse myself in the adventure instead, so that life felt less conceptual and more like the dance i’ve always been talking about in this column. and i think that’s the theme i’ve really been tracing: moving from dreaming about my life, to realising it.

friday, 19 june 2026: notes from the flight

reader, i write to you from somewhere a little different. from the extra leg room and window seat on an aeroplane. how lucky am i ?! the clouds below me are like rounded hills of snow. i’ve not been this high in a long time. don’t read between the lines with that one. but my eye moves to the poor little bluebottle that’s wedged upside down between the panes of the window. he doesn’t know it, but he’s got the best flight deal of all. although, i’m sure he’d rather be alive to see it.

the seatbelt sign’s just gone off and everyone’s darted for the toilet, queues forming down the front. flight attendants are flustered, pushing past the people with their trolleys as an aroma of coffee fills the air. to the woman beside me who’s reading this over my shoulder, pink is your colour… and i think you should share your vodka & coke zero.

we’re heading to fuerteventura, reader. the alchemist keeps slipping on the fabric of my leggings on my lap. it’s like it’s saying: “it’s time. read me!” and i’ve not been able to bring myself to do it yet. i’ve been too distracted by the queues, the violent smell of an overwhelmingly citrusy aftershave majd sprayed on me in duty free, and of course, when you’re so many feet up in the air, life’s big questions. for a moment, i was thinking how insane it is that humans are able to fly. what would icarus think? what icarus would now think is what daedalus then knew. it requires the right conditions.

i think the time when i feel real fear when im flying is above open water. squished between two vast unknowns: ocean and air. i’ve been watching too much green dot aviation on youtube lately. and i force myself to pay attention to the safety demonstrations at the beginning because my superstitious nature taunts me: “if you don’t, well that’s the flight you would’ve needed it the most.” sod’s law & all that.

i was somewhere along the dirt track to cofete beach on the south of fuerteventura, on an overcast, sticky day when i realised that i’m drawn to an arid landscape. the same happened in gran canaria. i can’t take my eyes off of it. the dust. the rocks. the volcanic black mountains. the little glimpses of life that appear in the form of mountain goats or a scurrying lizard. and it helped that i was in the middle of reading the alchemist, set mostly in the desert.

the vastness of open planes always signifies to me that we’re in the realm of possibility and it’s a shame that sometimes i forget that about my own life. i forget to get excited about the little glimpses of life in between an otherwise vast, arid expanse. there, on the way to cofete beach, possibility invited excitement. here, in the soft, continuous rhythm of my life, possibility invited disruption. disruption to the way things are.

since a child, i’ve described this sensation i get whenever i return home from being away. i call it ‘travel amnesia’. i forget who i was & what i was doing before i left. it stays with me for a few days, feeling like i’m operating entirely out of muscle memory while a part of me remains somewhere else. then, i return. before i left, i was 6,000 words into my novel. when i returned, i wanted to keep it neatly in that dreamscape. but life won’t let me.

majd and i were walking by the pool one day on our way back from breakfast with tiny stained mugs filled with scorching, watery coffees (admittedly one of the worst parts of an all inclusive). i noticed all the german women relaxing on their loungers with books in hand and wondered if the books they were reading were in english or german. some were, some weren’t.

i said to majd as we were waiting for the elevator: “i would really like my book to be in people’s hands when they’re on holiday.” and it felt really confessional to say that. i haven’t given voice to my desires in a long time. because the last time i desired, i desired with no ground to stand on. i swung into an inflated and egoic state. but i’m not her anymore, i remind myself.

in fact, i have become so grounded in these two years of healing that my dreams have remained safely tucked into my pillow and when possibility creeps in, i’m the first to shut it out. all of that changed when i returned home.

after a bombscare in edinburgh, majd and i didn’t return home from fuerteventura until around 4/5am last saturday morning. i spent the next few days trying to recover from the strange amnesia, continuing with my muscle memory through all the things that needed to be done. but while away, i’d bought a ticket with the rest of my writing group for that following monday, to see graeme armstrong, author of the young team and raveheart, in conversation with len penny at erskine arts.

tired and fighting the holiday blues, i dragged myself. everything in me wanted to avoid it. and the reason i wanted to avoid was the same reason i’ve avoided everything else. he was evidence that the dream i have can come true. that my desires are not silly or impossible. he was the realisation & the embodiment of an ancient dream i’ve had in me. the 12 year old who wrote a book on wattpad that was read by 87,000 people knew it. so many people dream of writing a book. much less write the book.

i was bleeding in a hall and i was tired of it all. but i was waiting on a better day. lost in a dream over the colourful scheme. that’s it – slow down by gerry rafferty is the song i’ve been playing on repeat this week. it just has this lightness to it that i’ve been craving amongst the grief of sacrificing a dream for full, devotional participation in my own reality.

thursday, 4 june 2026: on grieving the dream

i’m grieving the dream today. because the dream can no longer remain a dream. it must be realised. how painful. i have to become an actual person – not the one i’ve dreamt up in my head. i have to write an actual book – the one that’s long been in my heart. and i suffer because i would not allow it. what is the cost of realisation? the dissolution of the dream. you must abandon all expectations. all attachments to the outcome. and all bad habits. and become a woman of the world again. belonging, solely, to the experience, ailsa.

that’s what i wrote in my diary in the solemn few days later. that was the elephant in the room that i couldn’t express. it’s what reading the alchemist taught me on holiday and driving through the vast arid desert. that all of us have an unlived potential inside of us, and we know it best of all when we know very little at all: when we are children.

and over time, it gets tucked away in our pillows. it shows in the things we avoid, criticise and mock in other people. but one day, it presses a little too hard against the surface and you crack. you quit your job. you start a business. you fall in love. and you know that there’s no other way forward than to realise your dream or live with the pressure that presses a little too close to the surface.

until next week reader, may all your coffees be better than those at an all inclusive ☕️☀️.

– ailsa x