Sunday, March 11, 2007

A Tale of Two Islands

Grasspoint Cottage, Isle of Mull, where Kate and I spent the last week

A very lovely hello to Steve Hender for his lovely comments on a blog from yesteryear, and yes, the earth most definitely moved for me! And a big thank you to Lou, for the link to even more Danny Dyer, just when I thought a Google image search had satisfied my soul. The stills gallery has dominated more of my time than is strictly moral.

After a nine hour journey home from Oban yesterday, I'm back in England. G has done an admirable and unforgettable job of maintaining the blogosphere while I have been off, orbiting the Inner Hebrides on the Isle of Mull, this week.

Mull was almost entirely another world for a city girl like me. I could relate to Mull before our arrival there, as a fellow islander. Yet Mull is entirely dominated by its self-determining, rich, bare landscape, its weather, its small population, in a way that I had not conceived of from my experience on our intimate isle.

I have yet to discover the relative difference in size between our two islands. I suspect they may be similarly sized. Yet Portsmouth has a population of approximately 186,000 and Mull has 2,500.

When I sat at my window this afternoon, drinking a glass of wine - I am, technically still on holiday, after all - across the Common I could immediately see about fifty people. After a week in a cottage where I would be unlikely to see five sheep from the cottage window, it's a huge change.

Is Mull a place I would want to live in for a while? Without a doubt. How many months would it be before I went completely insane by modern standards? Possibly not many.

But I'd go back in an instant.

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