High anxiety causes heart palpitations that frighten me as I lie in bed at night. Sleep doesn’t come easily (but to be fair, it never has). I’m waiting for my fifth, and final, annual breast clinic check at hospital. My attitude is a little devil may care in the build up to these appointments – I can’t seem to help it. I burn through days on a million mile an hour program of distraction, but all that achieves is exhaustion, tearfulness and emotional chaos (mixed in with an unhelpful dose of self-loathing for not being in control). I have lots…

Agitated is how I feel when I can’t get out onto the hills. I find it unbearable therefore I am unbearable and a bit of a nightmare to live with for most of January and February (though my partner Paul may argue I’m a pain most of the year round). I swear the skin on the tips of my forefinger and thumb have virtually worn away from the constant swiping as I check and re-check forecast updates. One storm system after the other has swept in over Scotland from the Atlantic. Conditions on the mountains have been fairly grim, and…

In 1997, at the age of 24, Sarah Jane Douglas lost her mother to breast cancer. Alone and adrift in the world, she very nearly gave up hope, but she’d made a promise to her mother that she would keep going no matter what. So she turned to the beautiful, dangerous, forbidding mountains of her native Scotland. Her book Just Another Mountain was shortlisted for the Edward Stanford Travel Writing Award last year, and it was a Waterstones Book of the Month.  ‘Which is your favourite mountain?’ is a question I’m frequently asked, but there are so many of outstanding…