Retirement blog about splendid (note the word) isolation

For as long as I can remember I’ve had this fantasy. Before you’re imagination runs riot let me elaborate. I’ve had a hankering for isolation long before it became fashionable. This doesn’t make me unique by any means, lots of people dream about living on their own desert island (or similar) as above, far away from the stresses and strains of what we’ve come to call the modern world. At least that’s the theory.

Mine comes and goes and, this last week, it’s definitely come. At first it was just thoughts of the kind, well maybe we (it would have to include Mrs Summerhouse and the dogs) could live in what I believe is called splendid isolation. After all that’s pretty much what we’re doing right now.

Apart from taking the dogs out for their walk we don’t see anybody and don’t really speak to anybody. As I’ve admitted this suits me fine. I was quite surprised after a conversation with Mrs SH to find it might suit her also. A surprise in the sense that she is the sociable one of the partnership.

The idea started bubbling under when reading one of my Christmas books – The Summer Isles by Philip Marsden. He’s sailing up the west coasts of Ireland and Scotland and on page 198 he arrives in this hut occupied in the past by an artist who described his time there in complete isolation as the happiness times of his life.

Phillip Marsden describes it thus , ‘out on the North-West corner of Tory, off the north-west corner of Ireland, itself off Britain and the north-west corner of Europe and the great land mass of Euroasia stands a hut’. Reminds me a bit of how I used to write my address when I was a kid – my full name, number and street, town, county, country, continent, planet, solar system, universe, that kind of thing. But I digress.

Then he goes on to write, ‘Of all the peripheral places I’d been to in the past months, this hut, on this island, was the most peripheral. It hardly felt like land at all’. And of the artist (Derek Hill) he wrote, he found here something profound and rare, an island quality that distilled everything to its essence’. Now doesn’t that sound nice? No? Well, maybe it’s just me then and my silly fantasy.

This was probably when I began my musing about how different could this be from social isolation / lockdown, call it what you will. Phillip moved on across the Irish Sea to Scotland and I moved on with my thoughts. Except this particular train of thought wasn’t done with me yet.

The west coast of Scotland has figured in this fantasy of mine in the past. Many years ago it starred in an, as isolated as you can get, place called Sheigra, right in the North West of Scotland and only a couple of years ago on our 500 road trip round the North West again, the one with the caravan. In between we’ve been to Mull of Kintyre, Lewis and Harris, Mull and, if it counts, several times to Dumfries and Galloway. Neither the first nor the last of these was what you might call idyllic weather-wise, but the call of the Scottish coast persists. Particularly the remote bits.

Then last weekend, in the way that these things seem to happen, call it coincidence or call it a higher meaning, my fantasy gained weight. We were watching a TV programme called Coast. I’d even recorded it for some reason. You’ll have to take my word for it, me recording anything is rare. But then, as I keep saying, these are rare times and I thought we might need something to watch as we mope about at home.

Anyway we watched it a couple of days later and the featured west coast looked idyllic true enough. Full of sunshine and no wind. Quite unlike some of our visits but no matter. The Scottish guy with the long hair, Oliver somebody, had visited Mull and was sailing to a very remote place called Gometra. When he arrived on the island, he had walked 15 miles, I think he said, from the ferry (from Mull) to this tiny settlement.  There were 3 or 4 houses (see below). He interviewed one of the inhabitants.

Turned out she was the only inhabitant. Lots of jokes about liking your own company. And as he walked away he mentioned that ‘they’ not sure who ‘they’ are were looking for people to settle in this remote spot. Could we do that, I asked Mrs Summerhouse? Yes, we probably could, came the answer. To say I was surprised, as I said, would be an understatement.

Again harking back to my psychologist days, something I seem to be doing quite a bit of late, we used to have a strategy for those with problems called positive-reframing. As you might guess it simply means trying to make something good out of something bad. So with this concept in mind, could it be that I am taking our enforced isolation and working it up into something much better? Or more likely I am I letting my imagination run away with me safe in the knowledge that this kind of day-dreaming is harmless under current circumstances?

True enough it’s a fine line between insanity and flexibility or maybe they’re just different sides of the same coin. So all this talk of going for social isolation big-time, well it could all be one big bluff. But whether I’m bluffing you, the reader, or me the writer, I have no idea.

So, there is one last option. It’s that I am in fact going totally, 100% bonkers. What do you think? Answers on a postcard again. Number, street, town, county, country, etc etc.