As COVID tempts more people to seek a life of greater solitude, can some islands become just too small to sustain a viable population? “Safety; a sense of community; opportunity.” Mati Ventrillon chooses her words carefully as she seeks to [...]
I meet three women who have overcome many challenges to produce a multi-award winning gin whose provenance is intrinsically entwined with their island home. The Lussa Gin team, from left, Claire, Georgina and Alicia Another week another [...]
Neolithic and Bronze Age stone circles find themselves in unexpected company with an electric bicycle in the rain: an author’s odyssey; or was it idiocy? Once upon a time, in a far off land in the days before COVID, [...]
A few years ago I got talking with the then boss of IBRU, Durham University's world-recognised centre for borders research and conflict resolution. I was curious to know how much of 'Scotland's oil' would actually belong to an independent Scottish [...]
They may be tricky to pronounce and rarely visited on their own account, but isthmuses – those narrow strips of land that join larger territories together – have shaped the world we live in... Lacking the romantic allure of [...]
I first visited the extraordinarily beautiful island of Corsica at a rather troubled time in a young man's life. I vowed to return one day and give it the full attention it deserved. Shamefully, it took the best part of [...]
TWO MONTHS of lockdown really should create the head space to get so much done… and yet sleep trespasses into day from night; cooking graduates from necessity to hobby; the novelty of projecting Amazon Prime onto the living room wall [...]
Get me a cocktail and make it smoky, I said to James, my waiter in the cosy Terrace Bar at the Chesterfield, in London’s Mayfair district. Or, at least I might have done had I only known precisely what [...]
Back in my student days, in Leeds, our local greengrocer and his wife (unexpectedly for such a trade) were ardent socialists and this was reflected in their holiday choices. One such choice was Albania, then the fiefdom of the tyrannical [...]