NO MSP is an island. The SNP’s John Mason found this out when he went a bridge too far and found himself inundated in a tidal wave of controversy.

I have over-egged my allusions there but can claim legitimately to have been affected by the infectious fever of hullabaloo that greeted Mr Mason’s claim that Skye is not an island because it can be reached by a bridge.

This is a deeply held belief of Mr Mason’s, as proven by the fact that he has said it more than once. Clearly, it weighs upon his mind.

Picture him at night, tossing and turning in his sweat-drenched bed as his tortured soul gives voice to his terrible torment: “But it cannot be an island. It cannot!” Ignoring for the moment the inconvenient fact that the bridge proves that Skye is an island, we are constrained to note this isn’t the first time Mr Mason has given rise to the suspicion that he lives in a wee world of his own where it is the silly season all year round.

As a fundamentalist Christian (generally, the sort of Christian in which the “funda” can be safely removed), he has averred that it’s valid to believe yon Almighty brought the Earth in under-budget and ahead of schedule through seven days of concentrated finger-lifting.

He also got his knickers in a twist as a cooncillor about an erotica fair at the then Scottish Exhibition and Conference centre (SECC) in Glasgow and has at times seemed off-message on gay marriage.

All of this adds to the gaiety of political life at Holyrood and, while I see some resentment in indie twitter circles about his pronouncements being given prominence, I’m afraid the truth is that they are newsworthy.

Papers can’t bury comments because they are dumb. Indeed, it’s the dumbness that guarantees their dissemination.

Apart from which, give Mr Mason his due. He is clearly his own man and entitled to his opinions, some of which at least make you think. They make you think he should be medicated.

No, seriously, they make you think about the nature of the islands and, to be precise, what they is and what they ain’t.

What they is is things on the water. That’s the bleedin’ etymology of it.

But it will not suffice as a definition because lots of land sits on water and, indeed, Britland is itself an island, if a right big one.

Islands are all about the sea – which you should be able to see – but, again, you can be by the sea all round the coast of Scotland and even in places like yonder America.

The “iconic” scenes you see from some islands can be matched anywhere round the coasts of mainland Scotland.

It’s the same thing: jaggy rocks, stony or sandy beach, sea.

There are places near Arbroath as bonny as many an island landscape.

You can see seals and puffins in the Forth and have nearly as much chance of seeing a whale there too (albeit one that is completely lost).

Islands are land with sea beside them, which makes them much the same as anywhere else but for a relative lack of trees.

This is less the case in Skye, which is not, uncoincidentally, the most beautiful of the islands.

That said, some islands have a lot of something that makes them very special.

And that something is … nothing. It is space, and space means freedom.

To behold the vast, open vistas of Orkney is to feel a liberation of the soul.

Not to feel hemmed in, even by a hill, is glorious. It makes life expansive.

But islands are not all beautiful or freedom-fuelling in every last airt and pairt.

All of the larger ones will have areas of dreich, barren inland landscape that would make even the most misty-eyed despair.

On any large Scottish island group, you will come across that most desolate of scenes.

This will be of two grey-harled cooncil hooses sitting right next to each other in the midst of a lunar landscape far from the sea.

They might as well be in the Central Belt.

Which makes me realise that, as so often in the course of my columns, I have boxed myself into a corner here.

Just as all women will acknowledge that every man is indeed an island – difficult to reach and afflicted by wind – so I have demonstrated quite refutably that everywhere is an island.

And if everywhere is an island, then the logic of the Tao dictates that nowhere is an island.

This must, of course, include Skye.

And so Mr Mason is shown to be right. Damn.

Let us all be upstanding, therefore, and join the MSP for Glasgow Shettleston in singing a right rousing chorus.

The tune will be familiar but the words have been changed somewhat, with due deference to Mr Mason.

Speed, bonny car, like a bird on the wing, over the bridge to Skye.