I knew I had to leave the city when one Wednesday morning, I couldn't tie my shoes. My body was Tasered at the thought of leaving my bedroom to shove my way onto another crowded tube and walk to work through a city drowning in over 8 million people.
Outside, a siren blared past, the kids in the flat above were screaming and my generally quiet street was saturated with traffic. Usually this is the white noise of my everyday life, but that day it was deafening. Manageable amounts of stress are healthy β repeated daily lashings of it are not. A worrying lack of money, combined with a fast-paced job, shit commute, recent heartbreak and having a general anxiety disorder anyway which, since moving to London last year, has been piping up more frequently than ever had me smashing my own personal best on the crazy scale.
Two days later, I was crying into a Sainsbury's Basics tissue in a barren therapist's office. The night before, I'd curled up in bed shivering, gnawing at my bottom lip and called all my friends to ask if they could come over β nobody could.
Reasons ranged from, 'So sorry, Jen β I'm still stuck in the office' to 'Babe, you know I love you but you're 90 minutes away and its late,' so I switched my phone off and spent the night alone drinking Chardonnay to lull myself to sleep. I shook my head and fixed my eyes on the window behind her head, at the sea of tombstone-grey tower blocks. It's the classic city-life paradox: sometimes the loneliest place in the world is slap-bang in the middle of a crowd. And often, when life isn't panning out as planned, my knee-jerk reaction is to start plotting a drastic escape by searching Rightmove for a new place, or Googling how much it'd cost to buy my own island which unfortunately is way more than my haggard overdraft can handle right now.
But if I were to follow through with my escaping-the-smog daydreams, where would scientifically be the best place to live in the UK? Orkney also boasts the lowest rate of female unemployment in the country. So, with this in mind, I tell my friends I've bought a ticket to Orkney and pencil in a week on another planet, in search of a better life. As the tiny seater plane heads towards the runway, colour fizzes from the ground up. It looks as though a Lo-Fi filter has been draped over the landscape.
