Strange things happen in the countryside. It’s not necessarily a place that I recommend, and I deplore the smugness of rural supremacists. Self-mythologising is, in my view, a deadly sin.
Your best bet is probably a small, semi-rural town, something approaching the polite and friendly idyll of the American Mid-West.
Where do islands come into this demographic tomfoolery of my devising? They’re like the countryside, but worse. There is, of course, the sea. But it offers both a way out and a feeling of being trapped, especially when things go a bit Wicker Man or Lord of the Flies.
The best compromise is an island with a bridge. You know where that takes us: yep, back to the magical Isle of Skye.
The Misty Isle has, for sure, its fair share of strangeness. Along the way from the place where I sometimes stay is a deserted cottage on the fringe of the forest where it meets the pebbly beach.
There are a few such houses, deserted during the Clearances. In this one, amidst the ruins, someone has carefully placed a selection of empty whisky and old glass juice bottles along a section of wall.
They – well, let’s face it, we all know it’s a he – have also left two chairs in the body of the house, piled some nameless stuff into Ikea bags, and put up a birds’ nesting box inside the walls.
Most strangely of all, half-way up a nearby tree, they’ve wedged a black car seat in the bole. It looks like someone has been playing arboreal Mastermind. How odd it all is. But, hey, each to his own, and it’s nice to have a hobby.
Shortly after I witnessed this scene and was mulling it over, I prepared to take a picture of a wild primrose in the wood – everyone has a hobby, d’you see? – when I found myself at a loss as all the batteries (four) had disappeared from my camera.
This was odd, and my imagination was prepared to make it odder. The battery compartment is locked and a bit fiddly to get into it, so it quickly became clear to me that trolls or goblins had been up to mischief. When I told the police this later, they said they would look into it, though I’m sure that I heard tittering.
More prosaically, perhaps the compartment had been left unlocked, and the batteries had fallen to the ground. Still, the incident was enough to unnerve me.
Next morning, after a night of agitated clouds scudding across a full Moon, I was awakened by loud thuds shaking the house. Sufficiently experienced at rural or even suburban living, I assumed it was a large bird or pterodactyl landing on the roof (then dancing on it), and just ignored it.
However, later, when I was up, I saw it was rooks throwing themselves against the big window that faces the woods. Honestly, does any creature in so-called “wildlife” actually have a brain?
They must have been attacking their own reflections, rather than doing the sensible thing, as I do, and trying never to look.
In the meantime, I have put up a sign outside the house, facing the woods. It says: “Please stop all the oddness.” But I’m not holding my breath.
