I regard all of those living on the Isle of Islay with a kind of awe. For at least half the year, it’s lonely, dark and wet; indeed the rain and the wind in winter threaten sanity as well as health. You never sense the proximity of the vast Atlantic ocean as alarmingly as on those nights when, though invisible, you can feel it raging about you, trying to tear the roof off your house, abduct your dustbins, rot your windowframes, flatten your painstakingly tended garden and sunder the wires and cables which connect you to ‘the things which matter’.

The island’s population consists of around 3,400 heroes and heroines; so why have I picked on just one? Well, he is in charge of the largest distillery on the island, Caol Ila, and since Islay is known by most non-ornithologists chiefly for its whiskies, that makes him an important cove wherever drams of malt are drunk, which is in most capitals of the world. As importantly, though, he’s an islander by birth, a true Ileach, with all the islander’s virtues: quietness, unflashiness, modesty, gentleness, dependability. Everything you don’t want for a London media career, in sum.

The distillery manager’s job is much less glamorous than you might assume. First of all, there’s hair-greying responsibilities: the whole place is as explosive as an ammunition dump. Then there are the pressures: you have to fix the machines which go wrong at 3 am, get maximum yield from the raw materials, minimise the wage bill, make sure the workers aren’t growing too close to the product, and in spite of all that to produce spirit so good that the quality controllers at head office can’t remember your phone number. When you are working in a place as remote as Islay, extreme inventivity is often called for; the nearest spares can be three days away.

Billy’s not the only one who does it well on Islay, but whenever I think of the dignity of labour in adversity, without applause, largely unseen, in a field with which I am familiar and to an extent and degree of which I would be incapable, it’s his shy smile which comes to mind.