You can't go back

I'm having one of those nights. Sleepless, I mean. So to pass the time I've googled places I've lived - 14 of them - in my time and found Gortan on Islay.

It's as beautiful a building as ever - still, I hope, listed as a place of special social and community interest. I got it listed about 1980 because I was convinced some bureaucrat from Dunoon would come along, look at the crack in the gable wall and order it to be pulled down.

I lived in the right hand side. The photo above shows my aunt and uncle outside the house round about 1979. I bet the view from the dining room window is still magical.

I first saw Loch Indaal from the front doorstep of Gortan: the day I arrived from Glasgow, there were blue skies wall to wall except for a wee patch of cloud in the middle of the loch where rain was pouring down. That's what life in Islay is all about in a nutshell.

Gortan is now a holiday home. £650 a week in the high season - and it's pretty well fully booked this summer.

I notice from the online photos that the fuchsia bush at the front wall has gone. It was the bane of my life, that fkn bush. It took over the whole front garden. I tried digging it out. No luck. I cut it back so it wouldn't obscure the view. It grew back bigger than ever. The only use I ever found for it was as a place for my mad cat Thomas to hide.

I tried making a garden round the back and ended up knackered. But I found wild orchids and got them recorded by the Scottish National Heritage people - and I hope they're still there. 

If Dunoon had sold Gortan to me in 1982 it would still be occupied full time as a family home. I would never have moved. But it turned out the then director of education had written the lease for school houses himself and had included a clause that stipulated that the rent could only be raised if both parties agreed. On the instructions of our family lawyer, I didn't agree to the next rent rise but asked if I could buy the place. The man in Dunoon said it wasn't for sale. I waited a while, still paying a ludicrous rent of £104 a year and then got fed up and moved to Bowmore. He was a vindictive little b****** the man in Dunoon and I wasn't surprised to find Gortan was for sale shortly after I moved out. 

Change is inevitable wherever we live. Schools - so important to their local communities - close, merge and re-open under another name all the time in the Central Belt. It is often traumatic. Can you imagine how difficult it is in the scattered communities of Argyll and the West Highlands to hear that your local school has been 'mothballed'? Worse still, that the school will close and not re-open? You may be lucky and have a village hall but these too are under threat. Sometimes the school is the only place in the village with a big enough space to host a visit from a travelling theatre company or to host a local Mod performance. 

Fragile is the word often attached to these communities. These are also often the communities where Gaelic is strongest. It doesn't take a genius to work out what we need to do.