Like a painted ship on a painted sea. That line keeps hopping in my mind, like bunnies skipping in the moonlight. I have to borrow someone else’s words because mine fail me, my lexicon suddenly weak in the knees in front of a beauty that takes itself for granted, there, without signifier. Try to play scrabble with nature here and you will lose, every time, because your adversary will leave you speechless, wordless, with just a handful of surprised consonants.

A few minutes ago, a sheet of rain walked on water and then was gone, hardly wrinkling the mirrored sea, like breaking news that wasn’t news at all. A nursery of bush babies mock-panic and launch dry sticks at the rain, chasing it away. Then they look at me, inquisitive as open-mouthed question marks. The baby (a baby bush baby) exclaims something and the rest chorus in with happy chatter. They’re probably laughing at me, but I don’t feel playground-bullied. They’re like a Greek chorus, dressed in 1920s black and smart white, displaced from a tragedy to a comedy – not because it is funny, but because it makes you smile.

The tide is pulling out, in slower motion, against the soundtrack of air popping on the exposed seabed, like a thousand little children hide-and-seeking under the sand, blowing soap bubbles. The little fish gasp, too slow, left stranded, easy prey for the thrusting beaks of the seagulls, and the little wooden spears of local children. Their voices make a clapping sound. Then they see me and wave. Why would they ever leave here, I ask. Why has he come here, they probably ask.

I know why I have come here: to define the here.

“It will rain tomorrow,” I tell Phil (short for Philbert, a colonial seashell left stranded when the great gin and tonic tide pulled out of deepest Africa). He nods and smiles.

“See here,” I insist, showing him the weather app on my phone, last updated a two-hour boat ride from here.

The you-are-here on your app is not actually here. Here is elsewhere

“That’s the weather from two hours away,” he says. “There’s no weather station on the island. And there’s no internet here. The ‘you-are-here’ on your app is not actually here. Here is elsewhere.” And yet the ‘here’ is familiar: it was here that I was banished from, centuries ago.

I know why I have come here: to define the now.

On the island, there are no formal markers of time. Life starts when the sun rises. Children play in the morning, dark bobbins on a catwalk-bright sea. Then they just disappear, as if a school bell, somewhere, echoed them away.

The women shop on Tuesday. Every Tuesday. Not because some e-mail shot attracted them to the promise of 50 or 70 per cent off, but because they have always shopped on Tuesdays. Like their mother before them. And their grandmother.

Time is only clocked by sound. Like when a bird spins a nest of scolding shrieks around her naughty, hungry family. Or a chicken clucks to the other side of the path, not because it is starring in a joke, but because a cock is doodling do very loudly indeed. And the palms rustle and shake their shock of fronds, like happy 1970s hippies.

Life droops its eyes and goes to sleep when the sun sets, a voodoo-violent, red-orange-green that shrieks in the sky, while little insects trumpet and shrill big, bob-de-whoo-wap backing vocals.

I know why I have come here: to define myself. Yet, stripped of the costumes of my normal life, I do not know who I am. My profile is stuck in a Wi-Fi signal, a two-hour dhow ride away. Everything is unfamiliar here, and I’m a stranger. Plants remain without a name. The crabs carry no caption. Slithering things in the undergrowth act out a drama without subtitles. Two hours away from here, I will find missed calls and notifications of overdue payments and appointments. Two hours from here, news is breaking and expiring. But here, today is like yesterday and probably, most probably, like tomorrow. Here is now.

There’s a snake in my path. It is long and black. Looks crooked and villainously smooth-tongued, like its original ancestor. If I could google its behaviour, I would know if it’s poisonous or hissing but harmless. But there’s no google here. No dictionary or thesaurus. No Attenborough documentary. Five seconds, or five minutes later, the snake wraps its way up a branch and sways there, playing hangman with no words. With no meaning. But full of meaning.