Four hours each way for a fifteen-minute appointment

The thing nobody accounts for is that a quick question is not quick here. Anything that needs a face-to-face costs me a working day.

I found that being organised was not optional here, whereas in a city I could have improvised.

The ferry timetable is the calendar. Everything else in my planning bends around it and I have stopped fighting that.

What Rowan described happened to me too, in a slightly different order.

My prescriber has never seen me in person and it has worked perfectly well for two years, which surprised both of us.

What I would flag is that a supply problem is much worse here, because there is no second pharmacy to try.

I keep a written note of what to do if I cannot get somewhere, agreed with my prescriber in advance, and I have used it once.

Telephone reviews changed my life. I asked for them, they were granted immediately, and I had assumed they were not an option.

What I would say is to build in far more slack than seems necessary. Everything takes longer here and something always goes wrong.

Bram has already said most of this and I want to add the one part that was different for me.

I asked whether things could be delivered and the answer was yes, which nobody had ever mentioned in three years.

The weather is a genuine planning input. Twice this winter I could not have got anywhere if I had needed to.

I have nothing to add and I did not want to leave it unanswered.

Coming back at two years to say the system has held, that the buffer has been used twice, and that the telephone reviews were the thing that made it possible.