AFTER living for nearly a month in the Scottish countryside, some strange transformation has taken root within me. As I stare out of my window at the blue of Loch Long and Loch Goil and the green and grey of the Arrochar Alps, and as I count the weeks I still have left within this idyllic wilderness before I must return to Glasgow, I feel two powerful impulses stirring:
1. Real estate acquisition.
2. Hippyness.
You would think these two impulses are contradictory but they seem to go well together in the plan that's half-forming in my head; which whispers to me through the leaves in the trees: "Buy a shack in
the country and drop out of society completely."
Now this is strange because:
1. I don't have any money to buy property with;
2. I hate hippies; and
3. I don't believe in inner voices.
None the less the whispering voice of hippy real-estate acquisition is becoming more persuasive: "You hate the modern world," it says, "you're well known for being a ranting miserable git who despises everything from supermarkets to television. Why not leave it all behind and live in a wooden hut with no telephone. No more struggling daily through the stinking alienated masses. Just you and your loved ones in the wilderness."
To have such thoughts is even stranger considering that this "escape to the countryside" was pretty much the failed utopian project that my parents and their hippy friends attempted in the 60s and 70s. As a child I used to be surrounded by educated escapees from England and the Central Belt who kept pigs and goats in remote Highlands shacks with corrugated iron ceilings and no electricity; who walked barefoot and composed pieces of free jazz based on the patterns of stone circles.
They all ended up miserable, lost, alone and in many cases they ran back to the very cities they had run away from in the first place decades before. The hippy dream did not lead to the transformation of society or to thriving communities, but to divorce, alcoholism, madness and to some very confused and embittered offspring; me included.
Perhaps the only lasting positive that came out of the experiment is that a whole lot of hippies now possess large tracts of real estate throughout the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. This is positive for those involved but generally they're not very welcome in the communities they bought into. All of this should really be putting me off, but the voice in my head is relentless: "Look at the sea, listen to the little birds, they are telling you there's no going back; the city will kill you, you must become one with your inner nature. Wake up to the hippy within."
Other than the fact that I would make a huge financial loss if I did sell my Glasgow flat and move out here, there is one major thing that puts me off this escape to the hills. I fear I would go mad in the woods. Unlike the hippies, I don't believe in the things they believed in: peace and inherent human goodness. Perhaps what my inner-nature voice is telling me when it whispers of the beauty of lochs and glens is: "You hate people. Get a shack and a gun and if anyone comes into your space, kill them."
Yup, peace and love, man.
