Living outside the Central Belt

The slipped disk was growly all day yesterday. I did get up, wash and dress but then, about 8 in the evening, decided it was time to give in and lie down. Result: here I am 6 hours later wide awake. But what the hay - I have no plans for tomorrow morning and I have the internet to keep me busy.

I've had a look at the Trip Advisor site and the comments of contributors about hotels and restaurants in the west of Scotland, including the islands.

I have to say that hospitality in the area has come on a lot in the past generation. Once upon a time in the 90s,  I booked 15 teachers into a hotel in Argyll, to be told when we arrived that the bar was closing at 9pm. Teachers cut off from drink when they'd been slogging away all day and had just eaten and settled in the bar for a dram? It wasn't a pretty sight. And there was no reason. Just a curmudgeon of an owner. You don't really get that any more. Now staff are properly trained, very professional, and - a hallmark of the West Highlands - very friendly.

But in every set of Trip Advisor reviews, there's always a mention of how expensive accommodation is and how pricey meals are outside the Central Belt. And I have to wonder if visitors to these areas understand what the people who live and work there are up against.

When I lived in Islay in the 80s and later worked around Argyll in the 90s, I was all too aware of the extra costs attached to living outside the Central Belt.

I reckoned then you could add 20% to the cost of everything: petrol, coal, foodstuffs (although the Coop did a great job of keeping the costs down), bus and ferry travel, etc. Most things had to be brought in and that meant the extra cost of carriage had to be worked out in advance.

There were other unseen costs: if the buses stopped at 4.30pm, you had to have a car in order to have any kind of social life - or even go to evening classes for that matter. If the boats stopped at 4pm on some small islands or only called there a few times a week, well you had no social life except what went on in your wee community. Many people managed fine. Some found ways to be out and about most nights in the week. But you needed petrol to get around and it was ridiculously dear.

If you're running a hotel or a B&B or a restaurant anywhere in the West Highlands, you have to calculate the extra costs when you plan your season, through your room rates and your food prices. A lot of places go for the upper end of the tourist market and do very well. It's still possible to be a 'poor' tourist but it takes a bit of work.

For people who work in the hospitality industry - tourism - there's also the added problem in Scotland of the short season. Once upon a time, the tourist season lasted from Easter to the end of September. Local initiatives have tried hard to extend the season by putting on festivals - books, whisky, beer, gin - but there's a limit to how long the tourist season can last - mainly imposed by the weather, which in recent years has been fairly mild but hellish stormy.

RET has helped in some communities by reducing ferry costs. I have to say my own family would not have been able to visit Islay twice in the past year if it hadn't been for lower ferry costs. But does RET help businesses that much?

What happens with the extra costs of transporting everything long distance and across water? Well, they get passed on to the customer. So we get repeated complaints from tourists on Trip Advisor and other sites that meals and accommodation are over-priced. They're not, in fact: they just reflect the real costs - and local people have to pay the same extra costs as tourists.

And of course, some areas of Scotland have to deal with the 'postcode penalty': many large companies (the ones that don't deal with Royal Mail) refuse to deliver to certain areas of Scotland at all. No islands. No areas north of Inverness. Just for fun, turn the map of the British Isles upside down and ask yourself: how would people react if we said the likes of Yodel didn't deliver north of Birmingham?

Last month I ordered wine for a friend on Islay. It was to be delivered by Yodel on behalf of Majestic Wine. I gave them 4 weeks' notice. They told me just before I left that the wine would arrive 3 days later, when the house would be shut up with no one to take in the wine. I wasn't happy. They grovelled. Luckily, the local carrier (from Ardrossan) was a lot sharper than Yodel, and had the wine there the next day.

Maybe that's the answer: go local. Let big companies decide: do we want cheapo delivery costs or reliable deliveries?

But most of all, what I want is just for everyone to be treated on the same basis as people in the Central Belt. I don't want to penalise companies but I do want to see it written into their contracts that any major company (Majestic, for example) must have a policy that doesn't disadvantage people living outside the Central Belt. Amazon does it voluntarily. Never thought I'd see anything to praise in Amazon but there you go.

Otherwise, what happens to the half of Scotland's population that lives outside the Central Belt? Do we move them? Let them rot where they are, denied any kind of equality with the rest of us?

It's up to us to make our views known to the politicians.