La Tante Claire at Selfridges, London

Writers in exile, it is always said, bring a sense of perspective to the depiction of their homelands that only distance, the pain of loss and total reliance on the power of recall can afford.

Joyce wrote better about Dublin when he was not there than when he was. Likewise Hemingway writing on America from Spain and on Spain from France. Similarly, your Ovids, your Solzhenitsyns, your T. S. Eliots, your Gertrude Steins.

Also others, whom I would usually name, except that I have no internet access just now, nor much of a library, and so can neither fire up the Drabble nor google “writers in exile” and copy out a list of examples that will have you oohing and aahing at the depth and breadth of my reading.

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if Sojo isn’t up there with the best two or three oriental restaurants in England, then I’m a Chinaman

Giles Coren

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And the reason I do not have these things is that I am in exile myself, in the northwest of Scotland. I am staying for a week in the house where J. M. Barrie wrote Peter Pan. Well, the screenplay for Peter Pan. Okay, a screenplay for Peter Pan. The screenplay, to be precise, for the 1924 film of Peter Pan, which was no doubt a humdinger, though I doubt anyone now living has ever seen it. And since it was a silent film, I dare say J. M.’s writing duties were not onerous. Presumably no more than a handful of exclamations each day, etched in white on black insert cards. It’ll have been, “I’ve lost my shadow!”, “Eek! Pirates!” and, “I believe in Fairies!!!!” and then a large glass of something peaty, supper, and bed.

But now the house shall breathe literary fire again, as I thump out a restaurant review here. One thousand four hundred words of foodie guff is not Peter Pan, I grant you, but it comes utterly unsullied by the whiff of kiddy-fiddling.

And how far away, indeed, London seems to me here. How far the vainglorious hustle and hustle and hustle again of the capital’s restaurant scene. At Eilean Shona, we walk in the morning, sleep in the afternoon, gather in the drawing room for cocktails at 8pm and then meander through to the dining room for four gigantic courses, accompanied by crate after crate of the wine our host has had sent up from town. The wine arrived by boat, as did we, for there are no roads or cars here. There’s no telly either, and the water we drink and bathe in is dark brown from the peat.

Almost impossible to imagine that in London they have not only restaurants (Italian! Mexican! Chinese!), but restaurants that are so hip, exclusive and flighty that they appear only momentarily and then disappear overnight, like Brigadoon (which is just up the road here).

I’ve never written about “pop-up” restaurants before. It seemed pointless, like trying to catch smoke in a butterfly net. For these are restaurants that open and close, more often than not, in a shorter space of time than it takes my written words to make the journey to the printed page. Not by economic catastrophe (although that happens too), but by design.

Each Christmas for the last few years I have been breathlessly alerted to the existence of the Reindeer restaurant, which opens for three weeks in December with a festive menu and then disappears – pouffff! – like Keyser Söze. There was Flash at the Royal Academy and the Double Club in Islington, a fantastically successful Congolese nightclub-cum-restaurant which did an unusually long stint from December 2008 until July just gone.

These few strange and scary enterprises follow a similar model to the pop-up shop phenomenon which emerged first about five years ago with outlets of Uniqlo and Comme des Garçons sprouting mushroom-like in the morning and shrinking away more or less by dusk: they occupy an available urban space at little or no cost, trade heftily on the appeal of their own transience, and then fly before we get bored. Since very few restaurants manage to maintain the lustre of fashionability much after the first six or eight weeks (anyone who’s anyone these days is already bored with a restaurant before it is officially open to the public), it seems a pretty canny move only to be open for that halcyon period. To be always on honeymoon.

It is a bizarre thing to reflect upon from here, where Rose the cook has just brought me a cup of tea in the billiard room and where the cocktail hour will be on us in a trice, followed by dinner – local crab and langoustine, then halibut – served under antler horns in the dining room.

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