I’m a highly paid architect, and I live in an expensive four bedroomed suburban kennel surrounded by thousands of acres of four bedroomed suburban kennels. I spend over two hours a day on the train going to work in the city and back home again. It’s how my stay at home wife wishes to live. I rarely get back home to the Isles because she doesn’t like going there and won’t entertain the idea of me going on my own. My life is claustrophobic, and I’ve started to yearn for the wild, wide open heather, the soaring, violent, clashing waves of the ocean and the howling winds that never entirely overcome the plaints of the gulls. I keep in touch with friends and family via the internet and skype, but my wife resents me doing so, and I’ve come to the conclusion nothing I do is ever going to please her.

It’s beginning to make me ill. I know I’m losing concentration and my work is suffering. Even spending time in my garage, which is a poor excuse for a workshop, no longer helps, and Penelope resents the little time I manage to spend in there too. I need to do things, mend things and gods forfend even make things. Even the handkerchief sized garden is just a square of turf she refers to as the lawn surrounded by plastic looking bedding plants.

When I suggested I could grow some vegetables there she shrieked about my obvious insanity and what would the neighbours say for a week. When I’d said we’d paid for our garden, but if the neighbours wanted to grow vegetables in their own gardens I wouldn’t mind I was locked out of my own bedroom for a month, and to be honest I didn’t care. I haven’t enjoyed the grudgingly granted sex with Penelope for years. We haven’t made love for over ten. Now I’m being accused of paying her no attention and of seeing someone else. I bloody wish! Penelope has never worked, but I was being diplomatic when I said we’d paid for the garden because if I said I’d paid for it I’d have been accused of never appreciating anything she’d ever done which at least would have been true for once.

I’m getting irritated with Penelope’s constant inconsequential chatter about things I don’t understand never mind care about and of people who she thinks I at least ought to know who they are. The boys haven’t said a word to me in months. I’ve been married for thirteen years, but it seems like forever, and I can’t see anything ever changing. I’m frightened I’m going to end up so stupefied by the happy pills the doctor is prescribing that I’ll lose not just my job but my mind as well. I’ve tried talking to Penelope about it, but she just tells me to take a bigger interest in life, her life, pull myself together and stop complaining.

It’s Christmas and I’ve been manipulated into going to my mother in law’s for five whole, interminable days. I’d only been there five minutes and I’d been longing for escape. I knew they didn’t like me, which is fair enough I’m not unreasonable, I didn’t like them either. My wife’s family are loathsome, touchy feely, insincere, pompous, pretentious, supercilious, I could go on but can’t be bothered, I’m already fighting off a yawn just writing this. I don’t like folk touching me and won’t stand for being hugged. They know better than to try now, so I let my wife get on with all the insincere nonsense and went out for a walk in whatever inconsequential Kent town it was they lived in. As I walked my mind was somewhere hundreds of miles to the north listening to sounds I hadn’t heard in years.

That was yesterday, my legs all by themselves had found the station, and my feet had found themselves on a train for the highlands, so naturally the rest of me went too, as well as the ticket to Oban. There would be hell to pay when she got back home with the boys, but I’d left her the car so she could stay as long as she wanted. I can’t say I was over fond of the two boys, because despite my best efforts to be a decent, caring, male rôle model, she’d bribed, cajoled and bullied them into becoming carbon copies of the useless female dominated males in her family and they seemed to be tied to her apron strings. In my more cynical moments I had wondered if their testicles would ever descend.

As I looked through the train window at the oh so familiar and welcome to my soul dreichness my mind started to clear and I felt better than I had for a long time. Who knows, she might even actually return home, but what the hell. I was going to go to Malaig, it’s only spelt Mallaig in English, and see where I could get to by boat from there. However, I’d made a few phone calls and Cousin Douglas said he’d pick me up at Oban station on his motorbike. I was so eager to get there I’ve no recollection of changing trains at Perth. Gods it was good to see him again, and even better to be taking a dram of Laphroaig of a proper volume with him. That’s a quarter bottle, which to those who don’t understand is a third of an Imperial pint [7 US fluid ounces], and more than Penelope would have ever considered allowing me to take without giving me at least a week’s worth of grief for. As we saw the bottle off, he told me the only thing that surprised him was it had taken me so long to rebel. He was home because his fishing boat was in for engine repairs, but he agreed as soon as it was ready to take me to the Faroes or Iceland and drop me where ever I wanted. Like a lot of families with fishing connections, we’ve kin in both places and I speak both languages as well as English, and having a Norwegian passport too helps, for with a Scandinavian passport one is welcome as a resident in both places.

I’m a useful man with tools, and I crofted, sailed and fished in my youth before I made the mistake of studying and then settling in England with an English lassie, so finding a nice lassie or better a widow of my own kind with kids looking for a man willing to work who’d love her kids and rear her sons as men wouldn’t be a problem. Douglas said I’d be certain of a job teaching if I wanted it, but I don’t. I told him my hands had been idle too long, and I was going looking for tools to take with me. No power tools, the electricity supply is too erratic in the kinds of places where I’m thinking of going, and having to buy fuel for a generator is madness, and I’ve already been a hair too close to that.

Douglas looked closely at me and told me Gunnila Thorsdottir had been widowed eighteen months and had turned down several proposals of marriage from what he described as apologies for men. Gunnila was a second or third cousin of ours and we’d always got on. She had three sons and two daughters, and kept a few sheep, so she would be struggling. I smiled, and Douglas said, “So I’m to drop you at Tórshavn is it?” I’d just nodded. I’d cleared all my ready cash from my bank account in Oban and bought a new mobile phone as well as four crates of hand tools, some new but mostly second hand quality pieces that needed a bit of tlc. There was plenty of money left for my wife to go at but it would take her a few days to get it, and she did have a credit card. As we cast off I dropped my old mobile phone overboard in the harbour.

I’ve tried wealth and disdain in the south and it nearly unmanned me. It’s time to go home to hard earned money with some care and love. I haven’t lived like a man for all too long, but at least I’m going to die a man. What’s left of my life is too precious to waste, so I’ve arranged to meet Gunnila next week some time, she told me she was looking forward to it. So am I. She’d said, “I’ve a window needing a man’s hands to it,” but the line was poor, so it could have been, “I’m a widow needing a man’s hands to it.” Either way I’ll have the necessary equipment with me when I visit.

P.S. We’ve three daughters now.