WITH everything going on in the world at the moment, hiding yourself away can be a very attractive prospect.

For our half term holiday in Scotland, we really were off the grid, located in a beautiful forest lodge in Glen Hurich on the Ardnamurchan peninsula.

There was no internet, no mobile signal, no television, and a 40 minute return drive to the nearest shop.

Ordinarily all of the above should have set me off in some kind of mild panic. As a journalist I have a natural tendency to want to know what's going on in the world and when I don't it kind of makes me nervous that I'm missing out on something huge.

But stuck away in the most spectacular valley with views that made your heart ache, being cut off didn't seem so bad. Even the prospect of running out of something important like peanut butter or orange juice with bits didn't fill me with dread. By the end of the week I was actually thinking may be I could do this for the rest of my life.

While away we went on a boat trip to Tobermory, the place where they filmed Balamory for those with children, and as part of the trip I got to meet Andy.

He was our skipper for the day, taking us through quite lochs where seals were playing, pointing out sea eagles swooping across craggy outcrops, and most importantly telling us stories of the people who used to live there and still do.

Originally from Southampton, he escaped from it all nearly 30 years ago, arriving in this wonderful part of the world to start scallop fishing, and then salmon fishing, before setting up his boat chartering business out of Laga Bay.

He's never regretted moving to a place where it takes you an hour to drive 30 miles, where the shops don't stock every kind of comestible known to man, and where the weather can turn in an instant.

While on the boat he told us about a couple who had hired the nearby Carna Island for their Honeymoon. A couple from London who because of their respective high-powered ridiculously busy jobs had spent their entire relationship, up until then, communicating over e-mail, phone and text.

Now they were on this island, cut off from the world, for three weeks!

Andy visited them after the first week to make sure they were ok and things were little awkward. They had had their first real argument and both were having trouble adjusting to the fact they had to properly communicate with each other. After the second week, Andy returned. They had made up, they had talked, they had discovered things they had never knew about each other.

When Andy went to pick them up after their third and final week, the couple were in love. The experience had literally changed their lives.

Being the cynical kind of guy I am, I suspect Andy may have been embellishing what actually happened, but I really liked the notion of escaping to an island becoming the catalyst for something so life affirming as falling in love with your wife.

I fell in love with the Beautiful Wife years ago so for me escaping to Scotland was a time to reflect, a time to think, and a time to appreciate what a very lucky so and so I am, even when I haven't got peanut butter to spread on my toast.

NEIL D'ARCY-JONES

WEEKEND WINDOW

"Huge congrats to you Isabelle on finishing Uni with a first, so proud of you," Love you loads Suzette & Roger.xx