New chapter
Inspiration on Bute, plus cycling in the New Forest
My first encounter with the Isle of Bute was actually a literary one. In the spring of 2003 I read and fell in love with Andrew O’hagan’s heartfelt second novel Personality, loosely based on the tragic life and difficult background of child superstar Lena Zavaroni.
Like Zavaroni, the novel’s central character Maria Tambini is born into a family of Scottish-italian ice-cream makers who run a cafe and fish-andchip shop on the Isle of Bute.
It was O’hagan’s clear-eyed portrait of the town of Rothesay that most stuck in my mind, that made me determined to visit the island during a week-long stay in Glasgow just a couple of months later.
This was to be my first ever visit to Scotland.
It sowed the seeds for what was to become a life-changing move north of the border, and I can still remember the excitement I felt, setting out from Glasgow Central for the ferry terminal at Wemyss Bay. For railway enthusiasts, Wemyss Bay station, designed by Scottish architect James Miller in 1903 and with its stunningly curvaceous glassand-steel structure, is worth a visit in its own right. At the time of that first journey though I barely noticed it; my mind was focused on the voyage across the waters of the Firth of Clyde, and the mysterious, mist-shrouded island on the horizon.
For more than a century, the resort town of Rothesay had provided a haven of fresh air, seaside amusements and, more often than not, sunshine for boatloads of day trippers from Glasgow as well as holidaymakers from further afield.
I had read about Bute’s famous microclimate: coddled in the waters of the Gulf Stream, shielded from the western wind by the Kintyre
peninsula, Bute is said to enjoy a more moderate, less windswept aspect than much of western Scotland. Stepping on to island soil for the first time, I could sense immediately that spring had arrived. I spotted oyster catchers scavenging the seaweed down on the strand line, and was not entirely surprised to see palm trees growing outside the Winter Gardens.
Exploring the small, closely packed town with its restored castle and its sturdy Victorian buildings I found it disconcertingly familiar from O’hagan’s novel. I was enchanted by the museum, with its archaeological treasures, historic photographs and local artwork, and of course
I was eager to sit and enjoy an ice cream, overlooking the harbour at Zavaroni’s. I left the island that day with a sense of regret, of having merely scratched the surface of a unique and special place. I had no idea at the time that I would return there to stay.
When that time eventually came, I was not alone. My partner and I made the decision to move to Scotland in the wake of the Brexit referendum in 2016. Earlier that same year we had visited friends in Tarbert, on the Kintyre peninsula, and fallen in love with Argyll’s unique and spectacular landscape of mountains and lochs. We both felt inspired by a sense of space and freedom we had rarely experienced in the south of England, and agreed that this would be a wonderful place to live and write. What with the deeply unwelcome political changes taking place in England, our decision felt natural, instinctive, and we were here almost
The Good Neighbours stands as a coded chronicle of my own first year here