Between Brexit and the pandemic, between illness and tax incentives to stop working, a million and a half Britons have disappeared from the workforce in the last couple of years. If London is short of waiters and chefs, Cornwall and the Hebrides – where life is much more difficult – are short of teachers, doctors, lighthouse keepers and pub keepers. But the locals have taken action on the matter. In Lostwithiel, a town of five thousand inhabitants where the South African doctor had just retired, and after the traditional advertisements did not work, they recorded a music video in which schoolchildren, firefighters and even the priest sang in chorus to the rhythm of a Nina Simone's theme: "You can ask what you want / if you cure our germs, viruses and bacteria / we are men with asthma and pregnant women / limping grandparents and unrepentant smokers." It is the real life version of that Quebecois film in which a drunk policeman catches a young doctor during a breathalyzer test who no longer has any points left on his license and offers to forgive the fine if he is going to do an internship at a Lost town by the hand of God. And hoping he'll stay permanently, people leave hundred-dollar bills on the way to his house for him to find.
Twenty thousand doctors have stopped working in the United Kingdom since the pandemic, partly because the tax system (something that the Chancellor of the Exchequer corrected in the budget he presented yesterday) punished the contribution to the pension funds of those who were still active more beyond the official retirement age.
But if Lostwithiel, in Cornwall, is considered too remote by potential doctors, let alone Foula, in the Shetland Islands, with just twenty-eight inhabitants, who is looking for a teacher for her four primary students and offers a salary of seventy thousand euros per year to those who feel able to withstand the cold, wind and rain, in addition to insulation (ferries do not run sometimes for weeks, when there are storms). It's the kind of place where everyone does everything: the electrical engineer is the fire chief and the airport maintenance man at the same time.
Much lower is the salary offered to those who want to take care of two lighthouses in the north of the Highlands, Stoer Head and Cape Wrath, an uninhabited place on the north-west Scottish coast that is only used for grazing the sheep and carry out artillery tests and which can only be accessed by crossing an arm of the sea by boat when the tides allow it. The pay is 2,300 euros per year, but the facilities are automated, and you only have to visit once a month between April and September, and two during the winter.
There have also been ads looking for someone to run the bed and breakfast on the island of Canna (six kilometers long and one kilometer wide), where Gaelic is spoken and only fifteen people live. It only has three rooms for guests (almost always empty) and one for the person who lives in it and manages it. Families with children are not worth. As for The Old Forge pub on the Knoydart peninsula, only accessible by land after a two-day hike, the problem was that its Belgian owner refused to open in winters. So the community of neighbors bought it for half a million euros, and now you can have a single malt or a pint by the fireplace, even on freezing January and February nights.
Knoydart is one of those areas of Scotland where a feudal system has existed (or still prevails), the land belongs to a landowner and rents it to those who cultivate or occupy it. In 1948 seven natives revolted against their then master (a Nazi philophilia who tried to use the peninsula as a bridge for the German invasion of Britain), appealing to legislation allowing soldiers returning from war to till disused fields. . But they came out defeated in a long and bitter legal battle.
There is no shortage of millionaires who want to buy islands as toys, to feel like the kings of the mambo, but then they don't invest a penny. This was the case of Eigg, another island in the Hebrides, until a global fundraising campaign generated the million euros that its inhabitants needed to acquire it. Since then the population has not stopped rising, and has already reached a whopping... 105 inhabitants!
