‘Tom Island’ — that was the name I was given once by a girl I met on an island in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Of course, she broke my heart in due course. Turned out to be a lesbian, or so she claimed. But I liked the nickname, and as I think about it now, my life seems to be defined by islands of one sort or another (even putting aside England, which isn’t one).
I live, at least part of the time, on the Greek island of Corfu. (It’s de rigueur, these days, for writers to ‘divide their time’ rather than be so dull as to live in just one place. I divide my time between Corfu and Chiswick.) In the past two months I’ve visited an embarrassment of islands, including Albania’s Sazan, whose landscape is scattered with Soviet-era gas masks; Montenegro’s Gospa od Škrpjela (Our Lady of the Rocks) which is said to be built out of shipwrecks; and Croatia’s Mljet, where Odysseus was held prisoner for seven years by the witch Calypso, and where (rather suitably, I thought) I proposed to my girlfriend.
And I’m currently editing the memoirs of HRH Prince Michael of Sealand, who spent his formative years living alone on a tiny artificial island off the coast of Essex — in reality, a metal platform on concrete stilts, where, in February, I spent five excruciatingly cold days, so I have some idea of what he went through. My sojourn was short, but I was made a lord for my pains: Lord Thomas of Sealand, another island-related alter ego.
So it’s hardly surprising if, like J. Edward Chamberlin, I should make extravagant claims for the importance of islands in human history and culture. Chamberlin, incidentally, is an old hand at this kind of thing.
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