There are just two days to the island week. On one of them the ferry calls; on the other it doesn't. On a ferry day the island is alive, the village buzzes with good cheer and people drift with undaunted expectation to the pier - to see what the day will bring. Will the food arrive? What about that part for the washing machine? Will the "club" parcels come today? Why not? What's the delay? Who has ordered all that furniture? What new faces will we see, who are they and where will they stay? Let's see who's going away.
Sometimes the aged leave, never to return. Sometimes the children go away; that fraught time of ambivalent separation that stretches from the age of twelve years till the end of your days. That unimaginable time when the mainland high school eventually claims some small part of each island family. The ferry is both artery and vein to the island and from the shelter of the pier shed curious fingers probe the uncertain pulse of island life for, to some extent, each person's days are structured by this flow. Possibly, it is this same uncertainty that breeds a measure of patient fatalism in those who wait.

Extracted from `A Romantic Fallacy' by Martin Lunghi, first published in The Scottish Review.