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Shhh, don't tell Carol, but I'm not actually on Coll at the moment. Most people do pub crawls on the drinking side of the bar, but I'm doing one from the serving side. It is interesting; as a customer pubs give off a certain atmosphere, warm and friendly, as a new-start the atmosphere is quite different. At one end of the bar is the till. I'm terrified of the till. My log-in name is Tim. At the other end is a coffee machine (the cappucino frothy shiny stainless steel type). I am even more terrified of the coffee machine. At least the customers in the middle are nice. This is only my second pub as a member of staff, any one out there want to help me on my unique pub crawl?

We moved to Coll almost on a whim. We don't normally make decisions that way, but sometimes something is so right it doesn't need much discussion. I don't think, in nearly nine years, we have ever really regretted making the move. That isn't to say there aren't things I don't miss from England (trees spring to mind), but there is an awful lot of Coll that I would find hard to do without. However, during that first year there were a lot of new things to get used to, don't believe anybody who thinks Scotland and England are the same, because they are two different countries, not better or worse, but different. Different priorities and attitudes, certainly a different sense of humour and a difference in seasons too. Summer arrives earlier and finishes earlier.
None of this has anything much to do with my illegal blog except it gets very quiet on Coll in October, so when I was offered a tempory job as holiday cover away on the mainland I thought it might be a fun thing to do. So here I am blogging away 40 miles from Coll, and although I am still in Argyll it is sooo different to home. It has really made me aware of some more differences between island and mainland life. On Coll people work at what they can get, being on Coll is a lifestyle decision and jobs are a means of earning money, not a description of the kind of person you might be. I've only been here five days and already I feel that working in a bar has become a label around my neck. I look forward to them asking where I come from (the old English accent again) so I can say 'Coll' and re-assert my identity. Although this would be more successful if a few more people had heard of Coll!
There are lots of advantages living here. I can leave my bedroom window open (I have to, I am not used to central heating). Back home the only time I would want to open the window all the midges would come visiting, but I know if I managed to get the window open it probably wouldn't close again. There is a shop just five houses away. I can think 'I'd like an apple' and just go and get one. I haven't been that close to a shop since I was a student in Leeds and whenever I needed a break from revising I'd nip out for a samosa. The pub where I work gets today's papers every day so I can have up-to-date sports reports. Sports reports don't work on stale papers! And I can take the old papers home and read them the next morning (no animals to feed here so my mornings have a curious lack of structure). I would like to say I am an expert on the credit crunch, but although I've read articles and comments from a politically wide range of papers I am still slightly confused by the concept of lending stuff when you don't have it. If I lend someone a tenner (it happens, now and again), then I give them the money. I might not get it back but it had to be there in the first place to be lent, even if I borrowed it off someone else. Then there are the trees. The trees here are beautiful. The birch leaves are all turning, so even when it is raining (it is about as good at raining here as it is on Coll) there is a fantastic yellow glow. I have seen some enormous ash trees with horozontal branches crying out to be turned into treehouses, an oak tree grown from an acorn from South Africa which was grown from an acorn from King Alfred's oak at Blenheim (I must look this up somewhere), horse chestnuts, sycamores, lots of willow and hazel; in short, everything a frustrated tree-addict could want. And yet, I don't know, something is missing, the big skies and far views of Barra or Jura, and especially Ben Mor on Mull, visible from all over the West End of Coll. Until now I don't think I had completely realised how much Coll had got under my skin!