`Sometimes you can't get to the mainland when you need to - let alone when you want to'

We lived in Bledlow Ridge in Buckinghamshire, just outside High Wycombe. Our reason for moving to Mull was that my husband had had family on Iona and for most of his youth he came to the islands for holidays. My husband's degree was in hotel management, and I ran a small hotel in Windsor, but we'd always wanted to do something together. We had a couple of holidays here before we saw a property we liked. It was a house that had been uninhabited for 17 years. We bought the plot next to it and hoped to extend the house to turn it into a hotel. After we bought it we were told we should really knock it down and start from scratch, which we did.

Living on the island makes you more hardy. We walk to places that we would have used the car for when we lived in the south. You have to be content because there are as many advantages as disadvantages. You can't get off the island sometimes, when you need to - never mind when you just want to. But the air is clean and my daughter has a lot more freedom here. It's much safer, so I allow her to do things I would never have dreamed of letting her do in Buckinghamshire.