PRESENT TENSE:WHAT CAN YOU do when you live on an island and you're sick and tired of a foreign bureaucracy imposing unwanted regulation, interfering laws and ever-increasing taxes on you?
Do you lie down and accept your status, or do you stick it to the busybody elite in their fancy capital and take the most extreme step available? Do you stand up and say, with one voice, "No, enough"? Well, if you're Shetland pensioner Stuart Hill, that's exactly what you do.
Last Saturday, 65-year-old Hill declared that Forvik, the tiny Shetland island he owns, was a crown dependency, similar to the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, and thus "recognises neither the British government nor the European Union as its superior".
Citing the vaguely special constitutional status of the Shetlands - they were pawned to King James III of Scotland in the 15th century, history fans - Hill says his country, one hectare in area, will have "no income tax, VAT, council tax, corporation tax, or any of the other taxes instituted by the British government", but he's generous enough to allow Queen Elizabeth II to stay on as head of state.
He is currently taking applications from anyone interested in becoming a Forvik citizen at his website, forvik.com, and he plans to create a currency, the "gulde", print stamps and raise his own flag.
Hill moved to the Shetlands in 2001 after his home-made boat capsized there during an attempt to circumnavigate Britain, earning him the unenviable sobriquet "Captain Calamity". It isn't quite the sort of moniker that inspires much faith in a founding father, and it's hard to imagine Simón Bolívar or Otto von Bismarck, say, would have been quite as successful at nation-building if they'd been saddled with the name. But Hill isn't some Robinson Crusoe-style hermit - he claims he is trying to make a serious point about Shetland land rights and the islands' constitutional relationship with the UK.
And somebody at Westminster seems to be taking it seriously too. A government spokeswoman said: "Under the UK constitution, Forvik is part of the Shetland Islands, which are subject to UK legislation . . . and Forvik is an integral part of the UK."
Integral? Really? I'd expect they'd say that if Wales declared independence, or even Huddersfield, but Forvik? Certain people, evidently, are still smarting from the loss of their empire.
There is of course more than a streak of libertarianism in Hill's declaration - he is obviously a believer in very small government and very low taxes - along with a mischievous sense of humour. But this story appeals because of what it promises: that in this age of increasing connectedness and interdependence, individual autonomy and independence is still possible, even if we'd rather not choose it ourselves, thank you very much. In an era when turning off your mobile phone is about the most emphatic act of personal isolationism most people can conceive of, Hill's stunt has a simple, elementary charm to it - it is individualism and libertarianism brought to their logical conclusion.
But Hill's is not the only recent example of extreme isolation to grab headlines recently. At the end of May, dramatic pictures of an "unknown" tribe deep in the Amazon jungle were released, with members sporting bright red and deep purple body paint and wielding bows and arrows at the aircraft above. The photos, taken by José Carlos dos Reis Meirelles, from Brazil's department for Indian affairs (Funai), struck a chord all over the world. We have become so globalised that evidence of tribes still living in Bronze Age conditions in places such as the Amazon and New Guinea is startling.
But last weekend, it was reported that the images were somehow disingenuous because Funai already knew the approximate location of the tribe and took the photographs to pressurise neighbouring Peru into halting the illegal logging that threatens its existence. This falls some way short of Piltdown Man on the hoax scale, in that Funai never said the tribe was "unknown", merely that it was "uncontacted". It wasn't as if Meirelles had hired a bunch of extras from an Indiana Jones movie to sell some photos to the world's press.
More so, inevitably, than Stuart Hill and Forvik Island, this tribe's isolation offers a drastic solution to some of our deep-seated fears and anxieties. At a time when our lives are more evidently at the mercy of forces outside our control than ever, stories such as these offer a hypothetical glimmer of an alternative. Rather than being subject to the rise and fall of global markets or the complex consequences of international politics, the "lost" tribe in the Amazon and the pensioner on his island seem to steer a different course, where they are in charge and where they can make the decisions that affect their lives.
That sense of consolation is illusory, of course. Stuart Hill will probably never live full-time on Forvik Island, and that tribe will probably fall victim to the global markets' need for cheap timber sooner or later. Try as they might, saying "No" really isn't an alternative any more.
Shane Hegarty is on leave