I was lucky to have a summer holiday abroad every year as a kid (Tenerife, Mallorca, Lanzarote) and I still get giddy with excitement about the idea of that 5am drive, knowing we’d be en route to somewhere with a pool and neon t-shirts. I now go on holiday every summer to Spain with my kid plus auntie, five cousins and all their kids (so 13 of us in total), and it is a joy I look forward to all winter. Every one of those is a favourite and I won’t choose between them.

Outside of the annual family reunion is a stand-out trip to Shetland this year with my boyfriend to see the most northerly lighthouse in the UK: Muckle Flugga. He’d just finished writing a beautiful novel about a lighthouse keeper and his son, the last pair of keepers who were based upon this most treacherous piece of rock. We ventured by train, ferry and car to reach the end of Scotland to gaze upon it. Aside from meeting one of the ex-lighthouse keepers and getting attacked by bonxies (birds) on the clifftop, the highlight of this trip was being led by him onto St Ninian’s beach, a tombola where the sea greets the sand on both sides. I’d never seen or even known that this sort of landscape existed. Laying down on the sand, watching the sea greet us on both sides, I couldn’t help feeling like I was on a different planet.

Hollie McNish with Michael Pedersen, Òran Mór, Glasgow, Sunday 19 October; Portobello Town Hall, Edinburgh, Thursday 23 October.