NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
Sometime in my mid-forties, as a result of constant non-stop 24/7/365 travel and some small but powerful shift in brain chemistry, I stopped doing things. I stopped meeting people and became largely misanthropic. Which means, to paraphrase the great thespian Mickey Rourke in the seminal film Barfly, it’s not that I hate people, “I just feel better when they are not around.” And while John Donne’s oft-quoted poem goes, “No man is an island”, I began to feel a profound emotional affinity for lone bodies of land surrounded on all sides by water.
As opposed to Hugh Grant’s character in About a Boy, if I were an island I would not want to be Ibiza. I hate crowds, detest the sun and do not like music created after 1988, which coincides with the release of Straight Outta Compton, whilst the charmingly provincial habit of spraying mediocre champagne drives me to near homicidal rage. I would rather have bamboo driven beneath my fingernails and be lit on fire than find myself in Ibiza surrounded by assorted Veuve Clicquot-spewing vulgarians and troglodytes that litter its shores like human detritus. If I were an Island, I’d be like Superman’s Fortress of Solitude erected on a barren tundra so remote that no man, woman or child would be capable of accessing my inner recesses, its silhouette like a raised middle finger against the bleak sky.
I’d like to be St. Kilda in the Outer Hebrides where even the scant 36 inhabitants had enough
