I’m happy to admit I’m just not cut out for island life

IT could be worse, I have often told myself. You could be one of those people living on Lewis or the Uists, braving sideways sleet and murderous winds. You could be passing winters watching the swollen grey seas crash against your forlorn island outpost and wondering if it will be tomorrow or the next day the ferry will sail again.

Fate could have plonked you in a small community such as Shawbost or Lochmaddy or Lochboisdale, where everyone knew your name, your number and your business.

You could be seeing the same few faces every day of life and be familiar to the point of contempt with every line in every page of everyone’s back story.

Thank heaven the stars directed you to Glasgow where the M8 is never empty, Ikea is rarely closed and the dramatis personae is so fluid, no one really knows whether they are a key player or an extra.

But then, as often happens when you think your mind has done sterling work in reaching a conclusion about something, ‘research’ arrives with the news that your conclusion is bunk.

The secret to contentment, a Government survey on wellbeing suggests this week, is not to be found in a big city such as Glasgow, which scored only 7.22 out of ten on the happy-o-meter. No, if it is good times you seek, pack up your troubles and move to the Western Isles, the cheeriest area in Britain, with a contentment quotient of 8.24.

Spectacle

Really? Stornoway more chipper than St Ives? Barra brighter than Brighton?

I am fairly well travelled in Scotland’s western archipelagos and would return to any of the islands like a shot. I’m well up for discovering new ones too. But, if you don’t mind, only for a couple of days. And preferably not between October and March.

‘I’ve never seen a sight that didn’t look better looking back,’ growls Lee Marvin in the song Wandrin’ Star. It is almost as if he has been on that mainland-bound CalMac ferry too.

I remember Mull mostly for the toddler tourism industry which grew up around the children’s TV show Balamory. It made people slightly bonkers – to the extent the hotelier who owned the canary yellow house where the character Josie Jump lived used to tell infant visitors she was dead.

Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant came to stay in Tobermory a few weeks after I was last there. As he tinkled away gently on a keyboard in his hotel room, there was a sharp rap at his door. Could he keep the noise down please?

There wasn’t another peep out of the rock god who used to chuck TV sets out of hotel windows for fun. Something about this island taming gnawed at my soul.

On Eigg, they had us pegged as journalists as soon as we stepped off the boat. Only the locals are allowed to have cars so we trudged across the beach at low tide to our B&B only to find ourselves leaping over ever wider rivulets.

Finally we had to take off our rucksacks and throw them across first to allow more athletic long jumps. We could tell the locals were enjoying the spectacle. It was there in the glint of their binoculars.

We walked a mile on a single track road to do an interview and when it was done it was pitch black outside. There was no moon, no street lamps, not even a light from a neighbouring house because, of course, there were no neighbouring houses. And iPhone torches had not been thought of yet.

In the blackness we became aware of movement around us. I felt hot breath on my hand. Something nudged me and I yelped.

We were in the middle of a herd of cattle.

I have seen the Callanish Standing Stones on Lewis and visited the spectacular white sand beaches at Tolsta, Uig and Valtos – but never on a nice day. I have tramped the sodden machair on the Uists and Benbecula as hedgehog killers and hedgehog rescuers competed to get to the marauding tiggywinkles first. It was freezing; boots were waterlogged and tempers were short. I thought of home.

Chilled out

On the Isle of Skye, a few years ago, a relationship imploded. I know it was not Skye’s fault but it is hard not to associate those filthy clouds above the Cuillins with the fury and the floods of tears which were to follow.

The Northern Isles, meanwhile, emerge as the most chilled out part of the UK – when I imagined they were merely the most chilly.

In Shetland, I have watched Up Helly Aa and dreamed of becoming one of the Viking-helmeted torch carriers – just to catch a breath of heat from the flame.

I have gazed across the treeless landscape and wondered how on earth they do it, what keeps them on their windbattered, sub-arctic crags with dicky TV reception and nobars mobile phone signal when there is available housing in East Kilbride or Bathgate?

On Orkney I once interviewed cannabis campaigner Biz Ivol, a multiple sclerosis sufferer from South Ronaldsay who could barely move and used to smoke marijuana daily to dull the pain. She was a lovely, droll lady – and chilled out, certainly, after she had a joint or two.

A few years later I was among a number of journalists who attended the funeral of a young Orcadian woman. The ceremony was beautiful as it was gut-wrenching. No one who left the church that day could have done so without a profound sense that the world had just become immeasurably poorer.

I suppose this is what island life does to people. On the remote fringes of our land the senses are sharpened by weather, by water and the fact that, sometimes, you really do have to cling on.

It is life on the edge. Colder, yes; more invigorating, certainly. But happier? I’m quite happy where I am.