We used to live at the head of the loch in a big house with walls two feet thick. My room had a sloping ceiling with a deep window sill where I used to sit and watch the snow, waiting for Father Christmas. Once, my sister and I opened our stockings at 4 in the morning and then wrapped them all up again so that we wouldn't get into trouble for opening them before morning. I don't remember it being that cold but I do remember having electric heaters, so I don't think we had central heating back then. They were the happiest memories of my childhood, that feeling of driving over the cattle grid knowing that granny and poppa were waiting for us in the house, and Dolly, their springer spaniel, would come out with her soft brown ears and wag her tail. Getting there meant weeks of freedom, doing roly-polies on the lawn, exploring the trees and moss in the wood behind the house, swimming in the river, riding the ponies.

Yesterday I went to the house for the first time in the ten years since we sold it. The family welcomed me in and gave me a tour of the house. They've done nothing to it since we left, except changed the kitchen a little bit, so all the old furniture's still there, though where there was once a grand piano is now a ping-pong table, which I think we would have preferred. The banisters we used to slide down seemed tiny and the stairs where my brother got us to jump down (I think my sister broke a bone) would have been easily manageable now. The Aga, where I learnt to cook, seemed so small to me now and the big kitchen table where Grandpa would lift me up to sit on while he cooked, was just an ordinary height table. Everything seemed smaller, just a normal house really.

"We've been very lucky," said the current owner as we sat in the warm kitchen and drank tea and ate flapjacks. "We've had ten happy years here."

The house is full of children, dogs, welly boots and dripping wax jackets. The sheds are brimming with bicycles, tools, kayaks and quadbikes for the farm. Everyone seems really happy, the house full of life. As I left I gave a heavy stamp down the sloping hall floor which runs the whole length of the long, narrow house. It still made the same hollow noise as it did when we were kids and we would race eachother down that hall, invariably annoying some adult who was snoozing infront of the fire.