The waiting room I’m in has three leather sofas, a kettle, and the faintest smell of diesel.

I’m in Fort William, and the sun has begun to set, and I hear the ‘honk’ of my car from the garage next door. At least I know it’s passed that part of its MOT.

When you live on an island like Rum, a simple annual car appointment becomes a four-day ordeal. When you live on an island like Rum with a four-month-old who has just realised he doesn’t have to sleep if he doesn’t want to, it feels like an eternity.

The journey began months before we booked our tickets or hit the road. I asked anyone with a car - just how do I do this MOT malarky? The last time I put my car in a garage, it was a wonderful women-owned plot in Glasgow. I dropped it off before my shift started, and picked it up on my way home, marvelling at the crisp paper mats left behind as I left with one advisory. I picked that specific garage out of dozens within an arms reach. I was lost in a sea of reviews and prices and eventually settled on one that was close to a bus stop, because that mattered.

Now, however, my options spanned ferry routes and single carriageways, and buses weren’t in ample supply.

A few people here take their cars to Skye. They board the ferry from Rum to Mallaig, drive off when they reach the port, only to drive back on the exact same ferry and take it over the sea to Armadale. From there, it’s a mile’s drive - and then a mile’s sprint back to make the last ferry of the day back to Mallaig, before spending the night on the mainland and heading back to Rum the following day, and pick their car up whenever they can. I get out of breath just thinking about it. But the garage is reliable, friendly, and worth the trip for many. Too many, in fact - their next available appointment wasn’t until after I needed it, and so I was back to the drawing board once again.

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For a while, it felt like trying to solve a puzzle where all the pieces kept floating away on the tide. The car needed to be somewhere on the mainland for at least two days, and only I could take it there. There were ferry timetables to consider, overnight stays, and the small but persistent needs of a baby.

Eventually, after more messages and recommendations than I’d like to admit, someone mentioned Clansman Garage in Fort William. “It’s women-owned!” they added, almost as an aside, but it stuck in my mind immediately.

There is something quietly reassuring about finding spaces like that. Not because women run things differently, necessarily, but because it still feels slightly rare in places where engines and oil stains have traditionally been presented as a male preserve. My Glasgow garage had been the same - efficient, welcoming, and refreshingly free of the slightly overbearing explanations I’d braced myself for.

So Fort William it was.

We turned it into a family affair - Cailean’s first trip to the mainland since we brought him home more than four months ago. The plan required a ferry, a careful - and very slow - drive, four nights in a tiny hotel room, and a level of organisation that would have impressed my former, child-free self. And somehow, we made it.

Which is how I’ve ended up here, on one of these leather sofas, listening for clues about the fate of my car through the garage wall. Every now and then there’s a clang of metal or the low murmur of voices discussing something mechanical.

Elle embarks on her journey (Image: Elle Duffy)

And the timing couldn’t have been better, as it turned out.

Remember the wee one I wrote about last week, whose dramatic entrance came with the whirring blades of a helicopter and the 3am launch of a backup lifeboat? It was time for little Clover to come home to Rum. And with us already being on the mainland, we suddenly became the most important taxi service of our lives.

And so when Jenny the mechanic gave me the all-clear, there was a sigh of relief. My little Ford Fiesta is roadworthy for another year of island life - with no rust underneath either, she tells me. And plenty of life left in her for a trip to Raigmore. Now, I’m getting ready to make the 120-mile round trip with an all important passenger.

There is something wonderfully full-circle about it. A trip that began with meticulous planning, ferry timetables and a wee bit of dread is ending with the chance to pick up a friend and her brand-new baby and bring them home.

On a small island, even a car service can turn into a story. And sometimes, if you’re lucky, it turns into a welcome party too.

Elle Duffy lives and works on Rum and writes a weekly column in The Herald

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