It was nothing more than a dream. I only made it to Scotland for the first time in May of this year, and that was only to Edinburgh. But Tom Woodbridge acted on his dream – he moved to live on Skye twenty years ago. To live in that most unusual of dwellings – a bothy.

I never quite figured out what I’d do to earn my keep in my tiny croft. Mr Woodbridge must have found that quite a difficult question too. In the end he plumped for getting 99% of his body tattooed with leopard spots, changing his name to Tom Leppard and earning cash by being photographed as Leppard Man. It wasn’t an option I’d considered.

Sleeping under a tin roof, in a tumbledown croft on only a polystyrene and foam bed wasn’t something I’d imagined either. Nor was having to canoe to get my weekly supplies part of my plan. I didn’t want to freeze necessarily, but just escape the disappointments of city life.

Mr Leppard’s life seemed to be a curious mix of Walden, Henry David Thoreau’s book about living the simple life in a small shed at Walden Pond, and the Jim Rose Circus. Thoreau says , that at one point he used to think that the boxes used to store tools by railway workmen would make an ideal sleeping spot. Each box, 6 foot by 3 foot, would not only be cheap shelter, but “you could sit up as late as you pleased”.  He must have meant that you could stay awake lying on one side as late as you pleased. Neither tattoos nor bothies are mentioned in Walden, but they fulfill our ‘coarser and simpler wants’ and you won’t keep banging your head on the lid.

One of my colleagues comes from the Isle of Lewis,  the most westerly of the Outer Hebrides. McEm says some of the locals can out do any incomer for spartan, solitary living. One of his former neighbours made it to 103 by living in a sparsely furnished cottage with his TV tuned to fuzz, and was digging his own peat and vaulting his garden gate well into his eighties. Although his longevity might have had something to do with the two decades he spent in bed as an invalid from the age of 20.

Leppard Man finally decided to come back because he felt he was getting too old for such hardship, especially the treacherous three mile weekly canoe trip. Now, he’s adapting to walls and a roof.  I never managed to figure out how I’d earn my crust up there, and somehow ruses involving body modification never entered my mind.