I see now that a writing retreat is productive only if removing yourself from a life so full of distraction that you need the isolation in order to focus on your work. But if you are the kind of writer who doesn’t do much of a day to merit this or any other job title, two weeks on a remote Scottish island will not help you chip away at your writer’s block. And if you share that retreat and the remote Scottish isolation with your best and most annoying friend, also a writer and also suffering from writer’s block, writing is probably the last thing either of you will do.

Read Natasha’s ‘Five-minute memoir’, as published in the Independent magazine.