I find it tastes of nothing, he confides, and it's so overpriced. We were talking about coffee in bookshops. I sip at £1.20's worth of "Mull's favourite coffee" and make no comments about glass houses, while we wait for Jen to find a Barbara Vine novel she hasn't read while the smell of petrol and grass clippings and the distant sound of barking dogs drifts through the gaps around the windows. It's been a quiet summer, but then, it's been rather quiet here since the 70s, in the village where the road ends. By the time we get back to the car, the human seats are all covered with dogs. Jen explains the history of this lost little row of houses as we go to turn around but Jerome (the dog I've met who most needs Dog Island) is getting fractious and all I hear is, "... and that was before the clearances, of course," while a local delivery man pisses himself laughing at the sight of me wrestling a white Alsation bigger than I am.