Life on the edge of nowhere

I have just come back from the Outer Hebrides - the Western Isles if you will.

It's a terrible place; wind and rain scour what's left of the vegetation from the ugly rock. Dead cars, dead houses and dead dishwashers line the roads, as if Armageddon had come last week. It's a tree-less tundra, sodden with peat and moss. The roads don't often run to two lanes. Instead, there is a series of passing places, sometimes a dozen or so in a half-mile stretch. (Why don't they just build two lanes?)

When someone leaves a house on Uist, they don't knock it down, but they were so badly built that a few years of neglect ensures their descent back to the rubble from which they came. Some got electricity in the 1970s. Some residents had running water, too. They made their own fun until television came along and until then the custom was to have visitors from day to day who would sit and talk the hours away. That doesn't happen anymore, according to one man of my age who was born there.

Nothing extraneous can be seen. It is devoid of visual culture, a testament to the (until recently) subsistence living. Townies from London sometimes move there and decide to paint and make sculptures. The results are mostly very good renditions of not a lot.

When the sun shines, which it did on one day of our week, it is possible to be lost on a three-mile beach of white sand, gently nudged by a turquoise sea. Stuck in the dunes, about half way up on one such beach, there was a rusting Citroen 2CV.

It is life in the raw; no wonder the monks liked it. Because the march of progress and IKEA has left the islands behind, there are a large number of prehistoric monuments and earth works. Standing stones and burial chambers, left, like the houses that nobody needs anymore.

The people, as you might imagine, are insular and obsessed with what each other are doing. An incomer does not really stand a chance. The standard type of entertainment is drinking at home (The few pubs are devoid of all but the most unsavoury locals), gossiping and watching TV. On the latter, I was told that it goes on for breakfast and stays on, all day, until bedtime. Few do any gardening for, there are no gardens. Homes stand as if stuck like houses on a monopoly board, clinging to the rocks for dear life. Most range from functional to just ugly.

There is a kind of myth that some communities close the swings on Sunday. Well. some shops close and the churches seem to be stuck in the 19th century and a care nurse we met told us that she was advised against cutting an old man's fingernails on a Sunday, since it was non-essential. We saw washing out on a Sunday. Curiously it appeared to be a mixed weekly bag of two towels, two pairs of knickers and some shirts. Washing goes on the line in all weathers and stays there until it dries. Perhaps only the prostitutes put their washing out on Sundays as a kind of signal - short skirts, co-ordinating clothes and make up seem to be out of the question.

A word about food. It is over-priced, but some of it is very good. If you want beef that actually tastes like beef, or crab claws that taste of the sea, there is no better place in the UK. But on the whole the Western Isles don't really get tourism. It is no place for sophisticated tastes or dependence on modern technology. Sure, you can get TV and the internet, and a phone signal, but not always.

Why did I go? To see for myself and to have a change. I'm curious. I am also spoiled; I am used to things like planning permissions and garbage regulations and Marks and Spencer and soft toilet wipes. Suddenly finding myself on an island that resembled a social housing project was a shock.

If, however, you truly want to be alone, to shun civilisation give up most of its comforts and culture and become one with the Universe, the Earth and Donovan, then The Outer Hebrides is for you. But don't forget; it rains most of the time and most of your meditations will be soggy ones.