When I was working as a psychologist I seemed to specialise in mid-life crises. Other people’s, that is. Though maybe I attracted them because I’d already had a couple of my own! – I always did believe in getting the hard stuff over with early... Or maybe we should use the word ‘transition’ instead of crisis – it sounds so much gentler, and better conveys the reality that what’s going is a movement – albeit often a painful one – from one state of being to another. Anyway: as a result of my own periods of transition – the first was one in my mid-thirties, when I left a very safe and comfortable job and packed up my house and then-husband and went to live in the middle of an Irish bog – I began to believe that mid-life crises actually were a perfectly natural phenomenon – sort of like going grey or developing wrinkles – a natural part of growing up and growing older. I began to ‘treat’ my clients by trying to persuade them that these mid-life crises were actually opportunities rather than disasters. Opportunities for change. Yes, they can be very dark times, but any good myth tells you that you need to take a journey into the Underworld before you can emerge victorious with the treasure that will transform your life.

It was as a result of my second ‘crisis’ or ‘transition’ that I decided to learn to fly. At the time I was living in America and had just split up from my husband of 11 years. I was temporarily back in a corporate consultancy role and had no idea what I was going to do with myself longer term. What I needed more than anything was to do something dramatic – even something excessive – something that would make me really challenge myself. So ... I was sitting on a commercial flight one day in early 1999, in a twin-propeller aircraft somewhere in the vicinity of Pittsburgh, I think. I was travelling with a work colleague. Although I’d flown for years as a necessary part of my work I had always been a nervous flyer. And the smaller the aircraft, the worse the fear got. On this particular day we were suffering typical North-Eastern US stormy winter weather – rain, turbulence, wind – and I’d read way too many stories of propellers icing up in rainy winter weather and getting too heavy to turn and the engines stalling and ... never a happy ending to those tales. I was clutching onto the seat arms and visibly uncomfortable. Anyway – my colleague blithely suggested that in his opinion, the best way to overcome a fear of flying would be to learn to fly. He’d done that years ago, and it had been great fun.

I don’t think I was especially polite. I remember saying something along the lines of it being the most ridiculous idea I’d ever heard ... and I put it out of my mind and didn’t think about it any more. People like me didn't learn to fly – that was for much braver, more intrepid souls. It was completely inconceivable. But then, later that year, John F Kennedy Junior died in a small aircraft accident near Martha’s Vineyard. And the subject of flying dominated everyone's conversation for weeks. People were talking about the dangers of flying small planes, the difficulty of learning to fly ... and all of a sudden, it was irresistible to me. At the time I was living quite close to a small airfield, and one day I woke up to the sound of a small aircraft flying overhead – and with the very clear idea that I was going to learn to fly. I plucked up the courage to stop by on the way home from work and book myself a flying lesson.

Anyone who’s read The Long Delirious Burning Blue will recognise the story I would tell you about that first lesson. I was so petrified that the instructor (a very sweet young guy, just out of his teens – scarily young – called CJ) had to help me out of the aircraft. He was completely perplexed; his father had been a pilot and he'd been around aircraft for as long as he could remember. He had absolutely no understanding of why this crazy British woman could be sweating buckets. I was petrified from the moment I got in the plane to the moment I got out. And I (eventually) stepped out of that plane and I was so delighted and relieved to be back on the ground ... and the only thing I wanted to know was when I could have another lesson. And so began a period of total obsession – I lived and breathed flying – it was all I cared about – until finally, 8 months or so later, I got my pilot’s license (and yes – my examiner was an ex-Marine ...)

I still find it perplexing to think about why I took such incredible pleasure from doing something that terrified me so much, but clearly there’s something incredibly rewarding about facing up to your worst fears – especially when you do it through choice, not necessity – and sometimes it seemed that every moment I was flying or thinking about flying I could feel myself growing, changing, moving on. Shedding skin.

And ultimately it had a profound effect on my life, and shortly afterwards I left America and returned to Scotland, where my father’s family is from and where I’d wanted to live for a very long time. I decided I wanted to write, and that I wanted to write about learning to fly. And The Long Delirious Burning Blue is the book that resulted. Not everything that happens to Cat (the main character in the novel) as she is learning to fly happened to me. I hated stalls, just as she does, but never contemplated giving up flying at any stage in the whole mad process. And sadly, I never did get to learn to spin. But I did fly in the New Mexico desert with turbulence so great that my head was banging against the ceiling as I was bouncing up and down in my seat and trying to fly the plane at the same time... and the poem High Flight by John Gillespie Magee (where the title, The Long Delirious Burning Blue, comes from) hung on a wall by my desk for years.

I don’t fly since I returned to the UK – it is way too expensive over here, and also ... it was something that was so heavily associated with the wide open and relatively free skies in America and my life at that time. But my husband (who until recently was an RAF Tornado pilot) took me flying about 18 months ago over the area where we live now, in a small Cessna. That gave me a perfect view of this very different Scottish scenery, so that I could more authentically write the prologue and epilogue to the novel, when Cat is flying with her mother over the north-west Highland mountains where Laura now lives.