How not to get away from it all in the Hebrides

Some accounts of moving to the countryside are aspirational and inspiring, but this book is more of a ‘how not to’ guide. Within a few pages it’s clear that Tamsin Calidas’s decision to decamp with her husband to a tiny Hebridean island is highly ill-advised. They take on too much: buying a derelict croft, hoping to renovate the place and live self-sufficiently, with no farming experience. It’s not much of a surprise, especially to anyone with experience of life in the Scottish islands, when the relationship founders and her husband leaves.

It’s a gripping start. Surely she won’t remain on the croft alone? Surely things can’t get worse? Astoundingly, both happen. Calidas suffers an unbearable catalogue of misfortune, including divorce, heartbreaking infertility, injury, the death of friends and family, poverty and hunger (at one point eating leaves and bark) and ostracism on the island. She is brought to the brink of suicide. It is tough yet compulsive reading, carried by crisp, vivid prose.

The idea of bringing an old croft back to life is something many dream of. The couple initially think they have found ‘our slice of heaven… cut adrift from the rest of the world’, and in doing so make the classic mistake of moving to a small island to ‘get away from it all’ when the reality of island life requires more interaction with, and support from, neighbours than anywhere else. Calidas finds the manner of Gaelic life, where ‘exchanges are economical and words are chiselled’, very different to the London media world, and the culture clash is cringingly palpable. She writes skilfully and honestly about the sense of the unspoken, and of being unable to fit in, and we feel her relief when she meets another woman, with ‘an educated, English accent’, with whom she bonds.