Romance of the islands must be balanced with realities of life
Why do we still read Robinson Crusoe, a book 300 years old? Why is Desert Island Discs the longestrunning show on the radio, and Love Island one of the most popular on TV?
The idea of islands has always had a grip on the human imagination.
I’m no different
– as a boy growing up in Fife my family holidays were to a campsite in the East Neuk, where each evening I’d drift off to sleep watching the blinking of the lighthouse on the Isle of May halfway across the firth to the south.
I was fascinated, and hoped one day to get there. On visits to Dunfermline’s Carnegie library I’d often as not sit down in the reference section and open the immense World Atlas, running my fingers over islands of the Pacific, Caribbean, and Aegean, hoping one day to see those too.
Years went by, and that passion persisted. Even once I qualified in medicine and began to work in Edinburgh as a doctor, each holiday period I’d get myself on a ferry – Shetland or the Hebrides – or take off on longer journeys to Greece, the Indian Ocean, or Arctic Norway. It wasn’t that I didn’t love the city – I did – but there was a sense of relief I loved about visiting islands as well.
One year, in order to recover from a particularly difficult medical job, I took a month off to work as a nature warden on the Isle of May.
My bunkroom was in a terrace of lighthousekeepers’ cottages, and my new neighbours were hundreds of thousands of seabirds. The worries of the medical job dissolved and the change in work was a tonic – tending to birds rather than the ceaseless demands of my patients.
If all this sounds unforgivably romantic I’m well aware that the reality of life in a small island community is very different from the one imagined by city dwellers. And I should acknowledge that the dreams of those city folk can cause no end of problems in island communities, when people bring all their problems with them.
There’s an odd paradox at work too, in that in the city it’s easy to become isolated, but on an island to become part of a community. I now work as a GP in both Edinburgh and Orkney, and see the story from both sides.
Last year I wrote a book called Island Dreams: Mapping An Obsession to help make sense of the way my life has swung between island and city, isolation and connection.
I filled it with old maps because it’s through maps that we can see the ways islands have been imagined and reimagined over the centuries. I came to the conclusion that we each have to find our own sense of isolation, and find ways of carrying that sense with us if we go back to the city.
After all, one man’s island is another man’s metropolis – the Shetlanders think of the Orcadians as well connected, while the Faroe Islanders think that Shetlanders have it easy. There’s no firm measure of this – we’re in the realm of ideas.
From the romanticism of island dreams, to the reality of island communities, there’s a balance here to be struck – a balance I want to keep on exploring.