You don't choose Mull in January. Or rather, you do, but only if you have chosen Mull in some larger sense beforehand. The casual visitor doesn't appear in the second week of the month. The car-park at Craignure is half-empty even when the boat is in, the queue at the Co-op moves at a different pace, and the conversation at the bar in Tobermory is — when there is conversation at all — about whether the ferry will run tomorrow.
I have spent fragments of every January for the last fifteen years on the island, and the winter has not got easier, but it has got more legible. The things that wear on a non-resident — the weight of weather, the cost of a litre of fuel, the calculation about whether to drive to Salen or pay the inflated price at the petrol station closer to home — are simply part of the texture of life if you live here. They cease to be a story. They become a fact.
The ferry timetable has not, contrary to the public conversation, got worse. It has got more brittle. CalMac's reliability on the Oban-Craignure route is, by the published figures, marginally higher than five years ago. What has changed is that the consequences of a cancellation are harder to absorb. The supplementary roll-on services, the second crossings on a weather-day, the diverted Lochaline route — all of these have less slack in them. When the system fails, it fails for longer.
The shop at Bunessan is still open. The medical practice is, as ever, a triumph of local commitment over national workforce planning. The school in Tobermory has a slightly larger roll than it did three years ago, which is encouraging; the school at Bunessan has a slightly smaller one, which is not. The island's population, as best the Council can determine, is more or less holding — a small net inflow from the mainland mostly offsetting an outflow of school-leavers heading to Glasgow or Stirling for further education.
What the figures don't capture is what makes a small place small. There are six functioning year-round restaurants on the island, give or take depending on how you count. There is one cinema, sort of — the An Tobar arts centre's screening programme is essentially a community service. There is one bookshop, which is also the post office in the off-season. There are three petrol stations. There is, at any given moment in the winter, between six and ten people who do the bulk of the visible community work — the festival committees, the school-board roles, the harbour user-group meetings, the Friends-of-the-X groups.
Six to ten people is not a lot. It is also enough. The thing about a small place is that the people who keep it going are not anonymous. You can name them, and so can everyone else, and that produces both the strain and the resilience that small communities are famous for.
January on Mull is harder than summer on Mull. It is also, in its own way, the season in which the island is most itself. Winter strips out the costume drama and leaves a small place doing what a small place does: keeping its school open, getting the ferry running where it can, looking after its own.
Fraser Lindsay is Opinion Editor at The Scottish Review. He writes on rural Scotland and devolution.