Islanders

<< Bishop Rock: So small

Heady days indeed here at Knowledge Towers - it appears my third consecutive rant about Boris Johnson drew a comment... from someone I don't already know in real life. Wooh! What a rush. OK, so it was a slightly weird comment along the lines of 'thank God Boris isn't a communist' (slightly misjudging the political leanings of this blog) followed by a haiku, of all things, but it looks like construction work has started on the road to widespread acclaim. I don't know though, this new-found fame has its perks, but there's pressure too. It appears my blog may actually be being read by people - I have to actually think about what I'm writing. I might get negative feedback. God, it's like I've got a million eyes on me. Why won't these people back off?! Every one wants a piece of me and it's too much. Hand me that crack pipe, I need to get so high I can't feel the eyes of the world burning into my beautiful face.

Nice to know people are reading though. I'm going a bit back-to-basics today, following the discovery of a nifty 'did you know?' site, which could easily keep me in facts 'til 2012. Following some fairly lackadaisical mooching around it's annals of fact, I stumbled upon this:

1 in 10 people in the world live on an island.

Funny that the idea of living on an island brought to mind images of palm trees and building shelters out of bamboo and remains of the plane wreckage. I, of course, live on an island, namely Britain, the nation for which the phrase 'island mentality' was surely invented. Until recently, I lived in Portsmouth, an island city that had a mentality all of it's own. The most remote inhabited island in the world is Tristan de Cunha, 1600 miles away from any other inhabited place and with only a couple of hundred. Given how weird the Isle of Wight is despite it only being about 5 miles from the mainland, god knows what this place is like. The smallest island in the world, as recognised in the Guinness Book of Records, no less, is Bishop Rock, one of the Isles of Scilly. Apparently, an island has to be habitable to count, and Bishop Rock comes equipped with a bloody great lighthouse, and not a lot else. It's uninhabited now, but the most important thing is that it could be. Did they make someone live there for a week to prove it? Crazy bastards.