Will Self - Hebridean interlude

For the second year we returned to Jura in the Hebrides for summer half-term. The weather was, frankly, absurd: sunshine and 70-degree heat from dawn to dusk – and so far north that's a very long, very bright day. Sea mist lay on the sound, making of the mainland another floating island. Local people said the fine weather had lasted three weeks; it was so dry that the annual Isle of Jura Fell Race was completed at a brisk clip-clop by the ungulate fell runners, and the winning time of three hours and seven minutes (by Robb Jebb of Bingley), was just shy of the record. Madness! For going up and down seven peaks, 16 miles and 1,500 feet. Not our style: we arrived two days after the race to take up residency of Jura House, learning only later that the runners who'd been staying previously, eschewed its considerable comforts for a trip to the wild west of the island, where they trained by living solely on limpets and sleeping on beds of bracken and deer ticks for several nights.

By contrast, we lay about on the white sand beach below the house, peering through the spirituous heat haze to the whisky island of Islay. A few yards off sat an oddly stylish looking group: the men in lightweight summer suits, the women in dresses with full skirts. They had a hamper, champagne bottles, and the odd parasol was being twirled. The consensus among us frumpies was that this was a reunion of models for Jack Vettriano paintings – if you can call them that.

We were minding our own business when a couple of the men detached themselves and came towards us; it was only when they clopped across the rocks that I realised with an un-Hebridean chill that these were goaties. One of them thrust his eponymous chinwear towards me and baa-ed, "You wrote that piece about us last year, didn't you?" I conceded I had. "You called us goaties, didn't you?" Again: I couldn't but admit my crime. "And there were a few words in it I had to look up, like spavinous, feral, and urinous."

"Um, yeah, well, sorry about that chaps."

"That's all right," the goatie softened. "We know how to la-a-a-a-ugh at ourselves."

That may be true – but there's always something a little intimidating about goaties; they're so damn fit and wiry, they might – quite inadvertently – poke your eye out with one of their horny hands. Their does were equally lean and trim. It turned out that the older of the two goaties had come to the race with a doeling – no butting, purely platonic – and his young companion had fallen in love with her. What we were witnessing was their wedding reception, and their wedding bed was to be a tent pitched in the field outside the Jura Hotel. Hard floor – hard core. The doe raised her glass to us, then very sweetly brought some scones over.

Later in the week we set out for the north of the island. At Ardlussa our party divided, with the bulk setting out to sea with Duncan the boatman, while three of us drove on a few miles, then parked up and took to our feet. We would see the others after another seven miles walking, when we reached the rocky bluffs above the Strait of Corryvreckan, where Duncan delights in taking his trippers out into the weirdly lumpy and colloidal (dictionary time, my feral friend!) waters of the notorious whirlpool.

It was the first lowering day of our stay in the Hebricaribbean, and before we'd left I'd run round urging my friends and family to take their waterproofs. They'd all heeded my advice – while I'd forgotten my own Gore-Tex trousers. After three miles we reached Barnhill, the isolated farm where George Orwell wrote 1984. I'd arranged to drop by and see its scion, Rob Fletcher, anyway, but now the need was pressing – along with the rain.

Everything looked the same at Barnhill as last year: the foursquare white farmhouse nestling in the lush, grassy groove that runs down to the shore; the dry stone walls and fences worming through the bracken; a thread of smoke curling from the chimney. Through the kitchen window we could see Rob and his friends gathered round the table having an elevenses of tobacco and caffeine. He came to the door and asked us in.

They were perfectly friendly and welcoming, the talk was of running so short of food in this isolate spot, that they drowned a feral goat in the sea, but I wasn't fooled by this cannibalistic bravado, because I could tell by the way Rob was clopping about the kitchen and tugging at his unshaven chin. Finally I asked him point blank: "Did you do run the fell race?"

"Y-e-e-e-e-s," he conceded.

"And your time?"

"Four hours, 20 m-i-i-i-nutes," he baa-ed.

It was a disastrously quick clop! If only he'd staggered round in six or seven, but now it was too late: he was looking at the world through oblong eyes.

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