I lean against a post as a sudden wave of nausea and weakness tells me I'm pregnant again. For the seventh time. Old wives will tell you that feeding your own child is a sure guarantee against further pregnancy for as long as you keep it up. It seems to work for every other woman on this Godforsaken Scottish island, but not me. (I assume it's a Scottish island, it could just as well be Irish. All I know is everyone speaks Gaelic, which took me forever to learn. My husband had to teach me so the first phrases I learned to understand loosely translate as 'Come here, wench' and 'Go and make breakfast').

Of course, I'm different in other ways. All my children are still alive, I never get sick I don't look a day older or a pound heavier than when I first came to the island. I know that was approximately seven years ago but my kind don't age like mortals do. Exactly what year it is I have no idea. No one on the island is literate apart from the priest and no one would understand our modern idea of a calendar. The year follows the festivals and harvests. My husband tells me Jamie is King, which if I remember my history right means that could be any one of six kings spread over at least three hundred years.

It doesn't matter to me. Whoever is king my lot is the same, spinning, weaving, cooking, cleaning, raising six children, gathering kelp and shellfish, gossiping with the other wives and every night, in the darkness, being passionately ravished, half ecstatic as my Kenneth devotes such fierce, lengthy efforts to the greatest pleasure any poor crofters can find in this time and place, half thinking of what the harvest will be and wondering how many more children I can cope with before my head explodes!

It would be no use talking to Kenneth about it. It's not that he would be unsympathetic but he literally wouldn't understand. Children are not only a joy in themselves, in a time where there are few others, leisure or comfort or career or entertainment, to be had, they are also the only prop or guarantee of old age. Explaining to anyone, male or female in these times, why you might not want more children would be like, oh, I don't know, explaining to 21st century people why you think the innocent should be executed or no one should be allowed to live indoors on pain of flogging. It would be as illogical to my fellow islanders as that!

I did try once. Everyone was very patient and gentle with my nonsense. They expect the faery folk to be strange and no one holds it against me. I',m pretty sure that was the night I got knocked up for the fourth time though, which shows how much Kenneth failed to take it on board.

Oh,yes, the faery folk. You see, I am, I suppose, a selkie, also called silkie or roane. In Scottish, Irish and Scandinavian legends of the sort I used to study back when I was a comfortable academic living in 21st century America, selkies are seals who come ashore to shed their skins whereupon they become beautiful maidens, fair beyond the lot of mortals, who dance on the strand for a night before returning to the water.

Eight years ago - or centuries in the future- when I was Professor Ronald Chapman I was on a research trip to the Hebrides – what's that? Yes, I was a man, though sometimes I find it hard to believe. Try being a wife in a rigidly gender role divided society and bearing and raising six children then see how masculine you feel at the end of it.

The trip was to gather oral traditions, to chart the change and development of old folk beliefs in modern society. It was purely by chance that I went for a walk on the deserted beaches of that tiny island one evening and saw the seal maidens dance. It was then that I took a selkie's skin from where it was hidden, behind rocks, far from the firelight and slipped it on.

Then I knew the magic of the sea. As a seal I explored reefs and coves and the hidden grottoes of the ocean. As a faery seal I saw things no words can describe. The electric feel of the brine around me was pure ecstasy. I don't know how many months or years I roamed the seas before a curious urge drew me to go ashore to dance, on an island which I later found wasn't even in my own time. It turns out the realm of faerie touches the human world at different points in time as well as space. None of the legends warned me of that!

When I shed my skin, the human form I returned to was not the one I had left. I was female, beautiful – and so distracted I didn't even notice a poor fisherman slipping through the darkness to take my skin.

I really should have thought of this. In all the legends I'd studied, if a human could take a selkie's skin she was his, for as long as it was kept from her – my own curiosity had led me to take a different route on that night I was in the fisherman's position but my husband to be had other ideas. He was mad with desire for me and only waited until he had taken me to his two room hut to demonstrate it. So what was I doing, you ask?

Whatever he wanted. The possession of my skin doesn't just stop me going back to the water. It makes him the centre of my Universe. I think it has the same effect on him in reverse. So is what we have true love? Magic? Obsession? A bit of all three I think. Next morning a hasty baptism (I'm now Kirsty, if you were wondering) followed by a hasty wedding bound us together for life.

Of course there is one get-out. All the legends I've studied end the same way. The selkie bride finds her skin, no matter how well concealed and returns to the sea, leaving her bereft husband and children to carry on as best they can.
I sometimes see the neighbours look at us, in worry and pity, as they await the inevitable and try to work out if years of bliss are worth a lifetime of sorrow.

They can look all they want. What no one knows is that I found the skin years ago and turned it into mittens for my children. I'm going nowhere!