Islay Festival woes – the queues

This week is the Islay Festival of Music and Malt , aka Feis Ile. For eight days, the small, southern Hebridean island doubles its population with an influx of people from around the world, almost all of them whisky fans. Compared to the rest of the year, the island gets crowded – you will occasionally see another car on the road, you can’t always get a table in the pub and the Co-op runs out of avocados much faster than normal.

One of the tell-tale signs of having become a jaded whisky geek is the desire to avoid the island...