When I was ten years old, my family left a cold, damp prefab in West Fife and moved to Corby, Northamptonshire, where my father quickly found work at what was then the Stewarts & Lloyds steelworks.

'The Asylum Dance' was written after I'd moved back to Scotland and was a response to moving to my old home area of Fife.

One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a book about my father.'

I used to sing with my father's jazz band and then when I was ten years old a musician friend of his suggested that I try out for the first west coast production of Annie.

The son of a Fife mining town sledder of coal-bings, bottle-forager, and picture-house troglodyte, I was decidedly urban and knew little about native fauna, other than the handful of birds I saw on trips to the beach or Sunday walks.

Snow isn't just pretty. It also cleanses our world and our senses, not just of the soot and grime of a Fife mining town but also of a kind of weary familiarity, a taken-for-granted quality to which our eyes are all too susceptible.