I am in the car heading for Lerwick, 37 miles from my home, and a vicious southwesterly, gusting to force nine according to the radio, is buffeting and battering through the Toyota's insulation, thrumming underneath the northern soul CD's thump, layering the windscreen with unwipeable rain and an emulsion of peat and salt.

Every morning this week I have made this trip, and back again at night, head pulsing with VDU fatigue, tired to my bones, but weirdly at peace nevertheless. I have been going to work. Next week I will do the same thing. And the week after that. It is called having a proper job.

For the first time in nearly a decade, I have abandoned the life of the lone-gun hack for the communal environment of an office. There was no financial need to do so. There were columns, features, radio and television work and books, and a great deal of my time could be spent at home. There was time to feed the hens, the pigs, the sheep; watch daytime telly. Go for long walks. Fish.

Now, as a reporter with the Shetland Times, I spend my days in courts and council meetings, walking the harbour front of this busy North Atlantic crossroads and gossiping with the other editorial staff. Gossip is the drug I missed, along with the human contact and sense of involvement in something other than self-selling which comes in good work. Not just a job. Work.

This is what every teleworker sacrifices for the scenic setting and the ability to make pale, urban, corporate prisoners jealous. Work and working with other workers have returned to me rewards that are not about money. Nor the masturbatory achievements of the confessional novelist or solipsistic columnist. It is about real work.

I get angry when some chauffeur-driven politician treads smilingly through the new mud of a factory development to announce the creation of 200, or 300, or 1,000 jobs. What kind of jobs, exactly? Most of the time these are unsecured, short-term, part-time, soul-sucking shifts in brutally lit, hi-tech factories. Like battery hens, the desperate, the vulnerable and the poor have their energy clinically sucked from them; their abilities, far from being nurtured, ruthlessly applied to clean but meaningless tasks.

That is a job taken in order to survive. I am aware of the incredible luxury I have, the choice of whether to do this job at the Shetland Times or not. But for me life has always been about work. I do not work in order to stop, to gain enough cash for a life of leisure. An absence of work for me is a negation of life itself.

And it is also a question of community. Working alone, as I have done for many years, has been occasionally counterpointed by periods of intense teamwork, with television crews, radio production offices, even those strange and eccentric beings, photographers. But a future spent secreted away behind a computer screen - housebound - was on the cards until I decided to start the long run into the islands' capital, day in, day out.

It's a rhythm. And, strange as it may seem, I like it. Each week the story of this small group of islands is, at least partially, told in 40-odd pages.

From the recent plane crash through endless arguments by lawyers that their clients had consumed a great deal of drink and have little recollection of the events in question, we know that what we report will be read by every literate resident of Shetland. That what we do matters, where we live. That if it's not right, we're responsible and someone is likely to chin us in the street.

It's work, and hard work, too, with all the hassles that can involve, up to and including the hazards of press-day foul-ups and emotional outbursts from everyone involved; working with workers. Who knows, maybe I'll last until Christmas before I get fed up with it.