A bit of a journal - three

The Bajan people are great in so many ways. They are both chilled and warm at the same time. Ladies carry umbrellas to shield themselves from the hot sun, Rasta gardeners wear huge bobble hats to keep their hair in check (which has to be hot), cars toot, children wave, dogs bark, old men on bicycles carry huge boxes of strange fruits, and the rum shacks ring with the sound of laughter as you drive past them. The people of Bim know a hot day when they see one, but to me every day here is a hot day - ain’t it hot, hot, hot? Well, yes, most definitely, and you’ll generally find me in the shade from eleven until three. Usually with an ice cold Banks. Maybe in a hammock and maybe not. I'm just rootin' tootin'.

I know how I feel about the Barbadians. Like cricket, I don't like 'em, I love 'em. But I’m not sure how the people of Barbados feel about me. Us Brits that is. I don’t see much Union Jack waving or pictures of the queen around. Three cheers for the good old UK? Perhaps.

Maybe they don’t feel anything, but hundreds of years of abuse has to take its toll doesn’t it? It would fill me with rage if some red coated soldiers in a big boat wearing silly hats and carrying muskets stole me away from my native home, locked me in the hull of a boat in chains, transported me to a strange place where I was beaten and my womenfolk raped as a matter of course, and I was put to work cutting sugar cane in the heat all day long without wages and barely enough to eat. Yeah, that might piss me off just a little.

Oh, we can easily make the excuse that it was a long time ago and even build an argument about how it benefitted those slaves long term - a nice island, eduction, drainage, pizza. But that sounds like us and the Romans and it changes nothing. Britain was the worst type of colonial tyrant, buying and selling people and doing anything and everything they wanted to them because those people had no real value in the eyes of the British Master Race – and make no bones about it, that’s what we were, a Master Race in every sense of the word. No different to Hitler and his bunch really (whoops, there I go playing the Hitler card again).

And we did it over and over again - India, China, Africa.

Are the Barbadians rude to us then, us wonderful, generous Brits? These people who we treated no better than animals for so many hundreds of years? No, in general they are warm and friendly which I think shows what a forgiving people they are, but I’m not surprised at all that I sometimes have to wait a while to get served in the rum shack, or that the older lady on the checkout seems a little offhand. Old scars are slow to disappear and we were still lording it over the Barbados people until the mid-sixties when they became independent - Hip-ra, hats into the air boys!

Maybe the fact that they turned the statue of Nelson in Bridgetown harbour around so that he no longer faces the sea speaks volumes. The story goes that they would have removed it but nobody could be bothered to take it away. Good for them I say, good for them. Nelson was no better than a marauding, womanising, pirate anyway. Perhaps the fact that you can’t use Sterling in Barbados but you can use the American dollar says something else. But I don’t think we should expect anything else given the role we played in Barbados's history.

Of course there’s still a British elite in Barbados. There’s the Sir Cliffs and the Simon Cowells, the upper middle class ex-pats, and (much worse) those descended from the original plantation owners, white Barbados polo playing society, who are probably like out aristocracy that was and still act as though nothing has changed. It has changed though. Barbados is for the Bajan people and it's a real privilege to be allowed even a little taste, a tiny share, of their wonderful island, even if I am a Brit.