Islander: A Journey Around Our Archipelago

"Patrick Barkham, who’s a nature writer for the Guardian , visits a number of the islands around the United Kingdom, wondering if there’s anything which makes life on those islands different from the mainland, and if so what it is – and, if there is something distinctive, if it is something from which we jaded mainlanders might benefit. Many of us have a romantic idea about islands. Many of us dream about living on islands. Why should that be? Is it because islanders are, by necessity, physically ‘edge people,’ because on a small island you’re near the edge of the place where you live? Is it the resonance between that fact and the fact that we humans are always on an ontological edge – poised on the edge of eternity – that makes life on an island more fulfilling than our normal lives? Barkham explores this and other theses in a number of conversations. One of the reasons I like this book is that Barkham is a wonderfully congenial travelling companion. He’s easy to talk to. And he’s a nice chap . He likes humans. He doesn’t want (as so many writers do) to sneer; to denigrate; to show how clever he is in relation to others. He is sunny company. It’s fun to wander with him through pages and along beaches. And it is also shrewd: his subjects trust him and open up to him. So, first of all, this is a book about how good it is to be good; how much more human beings reveal of themselves in the presence of mere kindness. “Many of us have a romantic idea about islands. Many of us dream about living on islands. Why should that be?” Jay Griffith’s book Wild, a few years ago, talked about consistently finding ‘wild kindness’ in indigenous, un-urbanised people. Patrick Barkham’s book is about how kindness can bring out the ‘wild best’ – and therefore (since we’re all, at bottom, wild creatures) the authentic best in everyone. What’s his conclusion? It is, I think, that when island-ness is done properly (and it’s often done very badly – diminishing people and pushing them towards depression and alcoholism) it can be an exemplar of how we all ought to live. Exactly. This isn’t terribly surprising, but it is well worth saying. It’s not possible always in the communities in which we live – I live at the moment in Oxford, you in Edinburgh (how I envy you that) – to know our communities. They are physically far too big and far too complicated. There’s a self-protective tendency in Oxford and Edinburgh to build a carapace around yourself which prevents you from forming real relationships. I talk about that in Being A Beast. It’s an experience of relentless loneliness; of dispossession from the physical place that we notionally inhabit. If you live in a community of several hundred, it’s possible to know the names and the concerns of everyone there. It’s less possible to maintain the corrosive Nietzsche-esque illusion that you’re a messianic superman. It’s possible, in a small community, to have a relationship with a physical place which I think is somehow – and I’m not sure why this is –impossible to have when there are a lot of people. I know I keep returning again and again to the notion of ‘thriving as a human being,’ but, since our most recent ancestors seeped out of the land (although our ultimate material origins are in the sea – a theme I’m exploring in the book I’m trying to write at the moment), our roots are in the land: we grow there like trees. To soil we will return. If we’re not properly rooted there, we wither and die. It’s easier to have an organic connection with a physical place on an island. It’s also possible to model community on an island in a way that’s not possible to do elsewhere. The danger is that rootedness in place becomes stagnancy. We’re made to walk, not to sit. Unless we walk, we die. How can we be rooted in the land, while remaining wandering hunter-gatherers? By some sort of continual, restless, cyclical pilgrimage around ‘our’ piece of land, I think. “Our roots are in the land: we grow there like trees. To soil we will return. If we’re not properly rooted there, we wither and die” Lots of my academic work is devoted to arguing for a communitarian model of human identity. What is Charles Foster? Well: he can be described only in terms of the nexus of relationships in which he exists. Take away that nexus and he won’t just be wretched, lonely and miserable. He will evaporate. Charles Foster will cease to exist. The more visible and palpable the community, the more solid and real he will be. And therefore the more capable he will be of enjoying red wine, of realising what he really thinks, what he really is, and so on and so on. When Barkham talks about the island of Eigg, he sees that rather sunny romantic model of island-ness made real. You have there, apparently, a community that works. When human beings work as humans (which is terribly unusual), everything else falls into place. Economy falls into place. Health falls into place. It’s ludicrous to think that you can sort out the economy without sorting out the hearts and minds and identities of people for whom economy is meant to be a servant. Perhaps islands can demonstrate that."