The sound of the waves is not so different from the traffic of the city. But as soon as you lift your face and taste the fresh tang of salt on the air, you will mark how this sky is as different, fickle and changeable as all you have left behind. Then, if you listen, you will hear the laughing gulls. And beyond that, heading off in a low V-shape, the haunting call of the geese.

I have lived in the Hebrides for more than 16 years – the first years with my husband, and for the past decade with my dog, Maude, alone. I had been dreaming of staring out at a raw, open horizon for years – ever since I found an old map of Scotland and pinned it up in the hallway in my London flat. It was positioned across the full length of a narrow wall where I always saw it as I was passing, at an angle where your eyes fell into that empty space between giant masses of land. It is always during that notion of transit, of passing from one space to another, that your heart opens and all of your dreaming begins. I would press my nose to that thick paper, inhaling its musty scent, as my finger traced the ragged coastline of the fractured islets and islands. In those moments, as my eyes closed, the traffic, shouts from the street, neighbours slamming doors, would evaporate into the hurl of fresh spindrift, the thick, curling crests of the breakers drenching the salt-stung air, the gulls tearing the skies apart with an aching, screaming call.

I had loved my early years in London. I lived in Notting Hill, in a flat with an iron gate leading out on to communal garden. It was a sanctuary in the heart of the city, with a buzzing, cosmopolitan local community on tap. I was there years before the film came out, when you bought your vegetables in a brown paper bag with cash, knew all the street vendors, got your cigarettes from the cashier at the toy shop on the corner of Kensington Park Road. It was a time of hope and dreaming of your beautiful life, and Britpop singing the world real again.

But in London, neighbourhoods are transient and can shift as quickly as the low skies gusting overhead. Suddenly, there was a disconcerting invisibility to the formerly gregarious community and a disheartening, unsettling and desolate feeling that permeated the streets. People started walking more quickly, heads bowed, barely meeting your eyes. Humanity is a vulnerable, vigilant thing. Our building was spray-painted with graffiti, windows were broken, the police were called. One day, arriving home, I screamed as I walked into the back garden. The plants were torn apart, some that were flowering had been uprooted. I fought tears as I looked into the pond. Cans of paint had been poured over the wall, the containers left floating in the water. Hidden in the reeds were the faded, bloated corpses of our beautiful, bright little fish. Something died in me that day.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/jul/26/i-ran-away-to-a-remote-scottish-island-it-was-perfect