The folk musician who hates to be praised, Chris Wood, tells a story on his album The Lark Descending about the twisted path of love between a young man and woman who work in a fish and chip shop. I went to see Chris play last night, a typical self-deprecating performance in which he muttered "bollocks" and "fuck" throughout the set when he forgot his chords, but suffused with the warmth and humour that his assumed grumpiness does not really manage to cover. At half time I bought him a pint and told him a story I heard on the ferry from Shetland.

I was standing at the ferry bar when a red-faced little man, also standing at the bar, asked me if I had lost a ring. I couldn't make out his thick Shetland accent all that well, but he plonked his pint down on the bar, sloshing his beer up over the sides, and reached into his pocket of his coat. He pulled out a little wooden box and with a beaming face opened it up to sighs of delight around the bar. Inside was a tiny gold band with a large single diamond sitting proudly on top of the ring. Inside the lid of the old satin-lined box was the name and address of the jewelers, an address in New York City.

This man said he'd been clearing up rubbish on the beach at Yell, one of the northern islands of Shetland. He'd picked up 26 black bin bags of rubbish- mostly driftwood and plastic brought in by the spring tides. Sifting through one pile of rubbish he found this ring and he'd kept it, wondering how to find its owner.

We each had an idea about how the ring came to be on the beach at Yell. I thought of Chris' song, 'One in a Million' in which the young man in the chippy saves up to buy a ring for the chip shop owner's daughter. After two years of saving, he presents her with the ring and asks her to marry him. In a fit of stupidity, believing it to be a plastic ring that he won in an arcade, the girl tosses the ring into the sea, declaring that all she wants is to win the lottery and be shot of the town.

They go back to frying fish. One day she slits a fish open and the ring falls out, at which point she sees it's real diamond and sapphire. She offers him his ring back and he tells her to keep it, sell it and leave the town. But she puts it on her finger and says she'd rather stay with him.

It doesn't really explain why our diamond ring is still in its box but it's a good story anyhow, and just reminded me of how often a Chris Wood song has popped into my life and given me possible answers to things that had been baffling me.

A little way into my trip to Shetland I realised that my body had been through a battering over the last weeks: the extreme work in Senegal, chasing around after the coup in Bissau, fighting off the dogs on St Louis beach, and then the stress of the volcano and not being able to get home. I suddenly found myself in a remote place with not much chance of getting any rest, feeling low and out of touch with myself and with noone around me who knew me enough to recognise that I was in one of my post-Africa dips. On top of this, extreme tooth ache rattled my head all weekend long and the fiddles that played like a swarm of hornets throughout the nights rang through my ears painfully.

But as happens, some people I hardly knew took care of me. It doesn't take much to let someone know they see what's going on and that they feel sorry for your situation. The offer of a short walk along the shore from someone I had always been a bit shy of was a reaching out that broke through my loneliness and made me realise that probably everyone feels a bit out of place, just that some people are better at hiding it than others.