I spent most of last winter living in solitude, on an abandoned island in the Outer Hebrides. It is one of the best things I’ve ever done. The island is bordered by rugged cliffs, and a great sweep of beach the colour of moonlight. The hill at the centre is home to a sea-eagle, a crowd of stags, and the crumbled ruins of a community of three hundred souls, who once inhabited this spectacular place.
Wonderful as these things were, I had come for the things the island lacked. Accommodation took the form of a cabin, without electricity, central heating, or internet. I had a book to write (The Spider) and wanted solitude, and space from the clutches of the internet, in which to finish it.
They sailed away and I was alone on the island
So it was that on a clear January morning, I was deposited at the island’s storm-battered pier. The boatmen helped me unload tins, flour, cheese, rifle, ammunition, and large bags of salt and coal – a panoply fit for a Victorian expedition. They cheerfully bade me not go crazy, and then they left. They sailed away, and I was left alone on the island.
Well, almost alone.
I had brought with me an old comrade named Mufasa. Man and dog, we deposited our provisions in the cabin, and set off together to explore the island. After the exhaustion of the journey and the manic rush to prepare for it, the island looked very much like paradise. We careered along the beaches together, Mufasa barking, I laughing, both seeming completely insane, as befits the lone inhabitants of an island.
It was so dark, it felt like I was in the Blitz
We stayed out until darkness pushed us back to the candle-lit cabin. I prepared supper to a crackling fire and the tinny intonation of the radio, feeling slightly as though I was in the Blitz. I will admit that when the radio was off, I found that evening a little frightening. It was so dark. And so silent. My dog and I were the only fragment of civilisation for miles of black, heaving ocean, and so we would remain for the foreseeable future.
I retired to bed on that first night, exceedingly grateful for the sweet, wordless companion sleeping against my back. It was he who awoke me at about 0600, informing me with a paw that it was breakfast time. It was still pitch black, but the cabin had begun to groan and strain like a storm-tossed ship on the Atlantic. It is fortunate I had the memory of that calm first day to sustain me, because the gale which had started did not abate for the next two weeks.
I spent time writing, reading and baking
No matter. Time inside was spent writing, reading and baking. Without the internet, my writing progressed apace, and I was able to produce more than twice as many words as I do at home. They felt like better words, too. Clouds trailing sinister tendrils of rain swept the island like Portuguese men o’war.
Mufasa and I would brave the gale to hunt for food, to chop firewood, or to sit above the island’s high cliffs and watch the Atlantic heave on to the granite beneath, the boom so profound that we could hear it back at the cabin.
Some days, the hail drove hard enough to cut my face when I ventured into it, and rattled vengefully at the windows after my retreat.
After two weeks on the island, things got strange
It was after about two weeks that something strange started to happen. I had developed a routine of rising early to give Mufasa his breakfast, before kindling the fire and brewing a pot of coffee. I would sit by the fire, coffee in hand, and watch through the windows as first light, and then colour, returned to the world outside.
One morning, I was struck by the particular beauty of the grain on the table next to me. It was old, and worn, and the sunlight falling over its surface was mesmeric.
It was an interesting, and slightly alarming experience to be so captivated by an old pine table. When we ventured out later that day, I found myself similarly engrossed by tiny fissures on the beach, caused by the retreating tide. Then the neat arcs drawn by marram-grass tips as they were whipped back and forth by the wind. And suddenly, it was everywhere. In Mufasa’s fur, the copper kettle, flakes of cheese, rain running off the windows. Everything acquired texture, symmetry and a sense of the extraordinary. In some profound, energetic and hitherto alien way, the world had come alive.
I didn’t care if this was madness
Truth be told, it was so different to normality that I thought I was going mad. And after a while, I started to think that I didn’t care if this was madness. It was too good. To my newly sensitised eyes, starlings spread themselves over the sky like butter. Sand between my fingers satisfied like a back-scratch. The wind moaning down the chimney was like ghostly, half-forgotten music.
I kept expecting this euphoria to fade, but it snowballed. I don’t know whether it was because I had no distractions: no demands on my attention to stop me living in the present. Maybe it was the solitude, and the shift of perspective that caused. Maybe it was a life of unbroken cause and effect: every task (hunting, chopping firewood, charging oil lamps) followed by an elemental reward (being fed, being warm, having light).
In the end, I didn’t want to leave the island
Whatever the cause, that winter passed by in an ecstatic haze, and when the boatmen finally came to collect me from the island, leaving was the very last thing I wanted to do. I took with me my finished book, and a new, slightly inspiring, thought. Perhaps the euphoria which came from that elemental island life is how we’re supposed to feel about existence.
Maybe it got lost under the insidious creep of administration, the distractions of internet and media, the obfuscation between what we do, and what keeps us physically comfortable and alive. The thought is that life is great, but maybe it’s supposed to be transcendent.
‘The Spider’ by Leo Carew (Wildfire, £18.99) is published on 27 June