Why does my heart sing on an island beach, when a mainland one is just as good?

In his new book The Island in Imagination and Experience,

published last week by Scottish imprint Saraband, incurable islomane Barry Smith wraps things up with a chapter entitled “An Island Mentality” – a piece of writing that raises all kinds of interesting questions about why we sometimes think of islands in completely irrational ways, and what these modes of thought say about us as a species. After a cautious introduction in which he warns of all the various pitfalls of trying to read too much into our relationships with islands – either the islands we inhabit, or the islands we choose to return to again and again – Smith goes on to probe these relationships via an impressively wide range of literary sources. (He’s written a doctoral thesis about islands, which perhaps explains how he’s managed to read every islandrelated book in the library.)

First we get Goethe’s claim that there is an unconscious association between the island of geographical reality and the island of the inner self: “he who has never seen himself surrounded on all sides by the sea can never possess an idea of the world, and of his relation to it”. Then we get John Fowles’ allied thought, that “smaller islands... walkable in a day... relate to the human body closer than any other geographical conformation on land [and have] a marked individuality ... which we should like to think corresponds with our own.” The old adage “no man is an island,” Smith suggests, would perhaps remain just as accurate if the “no” were changed to “every”.

Could all of the above explain, at least in part, why islands – and small islands in particular – have such a strong hold on our imaginations? Is it simply because they are the landmasses that we can relate to most easily? And if that’s the case,

could this in turn explain why far more tourists seem to want to visit, say, the pocket-sized islands of the Inner Hebrides than the west coast of mainland Argyll, even though in every measurable way a beach on the Kintyre peninsula looking across the water to Jura is much the same as a beach on Jura looking back across the water to Kintyre?

When people say they’re going to the islands for their summer holidays, they will probably tell you “it’s for the beaches,” but there are beaches all the way up the west coast that are just as good – the sand every bit as white, the water just as clear. Does the appeal of these islands in fact lie in their very island-ness? And if that’s the case, should the residents of Kintyre perhaps think about trying to boost tourism in the area by digging a narrow channel to the north of Tarbert, declaring themselves an island and setting up a ferry service?

Another quotable quote from Smith’s book comes from Darling

Buds of May author HE Bates, who claimed that “men long to possess islands as they long to possess lovers.” Bates was born in 1905 and died in 1974, so let’s give him the benefit of the doubt, say that he was a product of his age, and assume that, were he alive today, he would of course have referred to both men and women.

Setting all that aside, however, how does his statement seem to you? Ridiculous? That’s what I thought too, until I remembered that a couple of summers ago I’d told friends on Tiree that I felt as if I was cheating on their island by spending a couple of weeks of the summer on the Isle of Lewis instead. (Just for the record, the Lewis thing was just a flash in the pan – Tiree has always been my one true island love. Well, apart from Colonsay, but that’s a whole other story. What can I say? It’s complicated...)

Islands have been on my mind a lot lately because this summer, for the first time in a long time, I won’t be visiting one. Like a scruffy, oversized migratory bird, I seem to be hardwired with an internal compass that tells me to head in one direction in the winter (to the mountains) and in another direction in the summer (to the beach – ideally an island beach). This year, however, I’ve been persuaded that a mountain holiday is the way to go, so rather than pulling on a wetsuit somewhere off the west coast I’ll be pulling on salopettes somewhere in the Alps. All of which has left me feeling a bit like a swallow flying south for the summer.

Still, as Smith says, “an island experience will depend significantly on what you bring to the island” and what is a mountain if not an island waiting for the sea level to rise a bit? Perhaps the best way to deal with the weirdness of sitting in the snow at 3,000 metres in the middle of July will be to imagine that I’m perched on an island cliff-top, and that the green of the valley spread out far below is really just the sea.

I’d told friends on Tiree I felt as if I was cheating on their island by spending a couple of weeks on Lewis