Paradise birds...

I didn't go to Barbados for the birds, but I got them anyway. They seemed to come with the territory. In fact on the very first morning, unable to sleep and up before first light, I shared the dawn with a hummingbird, a green legged heron who languidly walked across the lawn looking for frogs, and a beautiful grey and white kingbird; a flycatcher that the Bajans call the rainbird and sometimes the catbird.

It wasn't long before the cheeky Barbadian sparrows arrived, so bold that they would fly into the house and take crumbs from the plates in the kitchen. Once we had half a dozen of them on the dining table making a feast of the tiny fragments of toast we'd left behind. The grackles came later with their yellow eyes and plumage as black as the darkest night. They looked like a cross between a blackbird and a starling, roguish and forever darting here and there.

Down on the beach brown grey sandpipers paddled in the white surf, whilst up in the sky flocks of huge frigate birds circled following the fishing boats, looking for all the world like prehistoric pterodactyls. Inland there were cattle egrets in the fields, small brown doves pecking beneath the palms and up in the trees the scaly naped pigeons with their scary red eyes. For some reason I didn't like the way those pigeons flapped about in the trees, it really wasn't very British.

There were other birds. A pair of yellow breasts on the Atlantic coast, a flash of blue in the rain forest near Welcheman Hall Gulley and a big white bird flapping over the sea in the distance that might just have been a pelican. I never did get a picture of a hummingbird, although I did capture a flash and buzz on one when we visited Hunte's Gardens; so I had to borrow one.

The rainbird would come every day to watch me after that first morning, sitting on the wall and quizzically cocking his head and, despite the numerous sightings of hummingbirds (once just a few feet away above the pool) I think it's the kingbird flycatcher with its pipiri pipiri call that is my favourite memory of all the birds on my trip to paradise.

Gaynor...

She only allows me one picture every five years or so. but I am determined to get more. Still the girl I married.

Bloody knees...

Just look at this. Marvelous isn't it? My daughter Holly swimming with the turtles and fishes. Yes, it's something to marvel at. I wonder how many people on this planet get to see a live turtle in the sea up that close? I envy her latest turtle experience.

Of course I could have gone. I went eleven years ago when we were last in Barbados. Both Holly's and my first swim with the turtles. I was younger then, not as fat, and my knees didn't buckle at all back then. It was my knees that stopped me going in with the turtles, not the swimming, I can still swim, if not like the fish I was - a barracuda - then at least like a minnow.

No, it's the knees and that long steel ladder back up to the deck. I was worried that I wouldn't have the strength to haul myself up, and what if my knees had given way? It's my own fault of course. If I lost some weight then I'm sure I could get myself into the water to swim with the turtles and then get myself out again.

A lost chance, but hopefully not my last chance. I could kick myself now, but my knees would probably give way and I'd fall over.

When you're younger you never expect to get old really do you?

A turn up for the books...

You know every now and again I pick up my sketch pad and paints and wander off to do a sketch. Of course nine times out of ten my sketches end up in the bin, actually ten times out of ten almost. I rarely keep the sketches I do considering them not worth keeping. I must have thrown away hundreds of these things over the years, days and days of observation and painting into the trash simply because I wasn't immediately happy with the result. Usually they aren't very big, smaller than A5, so not a great loss really.

Occasionally though one survives, forgotten in one of my dozens of sketchbooks, left languishing away in some forgotten corner. This one did survive, I found it today in a sketchbook shoved between some cookery books on the cookery book shelf in the kitchen. It's a ten minute sketch of the stone jetty at Trevor in Wales. I painted it last summer I think.

It's not great. It's just a quick impression of the day, the ten minutes that I sat there with my paints splashing out the colour and trying to catch a fleeting likeness of what was there before me. It's hard sketching in the field. The wind blows the paper as you paint, the sand lands on its surface and sticks there, it never seems to go well and then, as I have already said, afterwards I find the nearest bin and drop it in.

Looking at this though I'm beginning to think that may have been a mistake. Although it's not a masterpiece it really does capture that single point in time, at least for me. I remember every moment, can see each boat on the water as it bobs, I can smell the seaweed, hear the gulls, taste the coffee that I was sipping at the time. It's a record of ten minutes of my life spent daubing a bit of paint on a piece of paper and looking hard - and it's the looking hard that is the thing rather than the painting.

Besides, it seems that they look so much better with a little distance between the painting and the looking again. I wonder if it's meant to be that way? I can't know can I? So many of them have been scattered to the winds. So my resolve is to try harder. Not with the painting, although I must do more of it, but with the urge to throw them away the minute that one is completed and then ridiculed to oblivion.

This isn't even one of my better ones. I've thrown away much better sketches than this. Why did I do that? I really don't know. In future I think that I will keep them all if only for me to look at them when I am far too old to even lift a brush. They may just remind me of a certain time, on a certain day and for a few moments I can be there again.

First day at big school...

It’s that time of year when the schools start up again and children are off to school for the first time or making the transition from one school to another. Life’s full of transitions, change is constant, but moving from my junior school into what we called ‘big school’ was one of the most daunting experiences of my life. I dreaded it for months and when it happened it lived up to my dread for a while. Everything was so different. It was a whole new world.

My school was made up of boarders and day boys. I was a day boy and day boys were treated like crap – or at least I felt that I was. On my first day I was greeted at the school gates by a group of boarders demanding to know if I was an 'x' or a 'y'. I had no idea, but turns out I was a 'y'. I was in New House, the lowliest of the low, we wore grey suits, our masters wore caps and gowns, the prefects sported brocade waistcoats and army greatcoats and the matron wore a nurse's uniform straight out of a carry on film.

The head (Stosh as he was known colloquially) played croquet on the lawn with the prefects in the summer and on Founders Day (founded 1575) there was an ‘old boy’ v ‘school’ cricket match and a speaker in the morning. Some I remember are Lord Longford, Robert Morley, David Tomlinson (whose two sons were boarders) and Jan Pieńkowski the illustrator – or did he give a talk in art class?

It was no environment for weaklings, and unfortunately I think that I was. We were addressed by our surnames by the masters, senior boys and other boys in class; nicknames were used by friends. I think that I was always Height, although for a while some boys called me ‘Tank’. We did five mile cross country runs on a Monday morning in the winter, went to school Saturday mornings, had detention in the refectory, kept homework diaries of our three hours homework a night, sang in the school choir, gave our house points in weekly at a meeting in the Chemistry Lab to cheers or jeers, had to carry a prayer book in our satchels, played rugby, learnt Latin, kept cave, had cold showers.

And straight into this from an educational syllabus of ‘All things bright and beautiful’, country dancing in the school hall and making gonks. It was a real shock I can tell you.

There was an Afghanistan prince boarding, lots of boys from Ghana whose parents lived away, a viscount, the heir to the Amey building group, the son of an MP, an émigré harmonium maker’s boy - and me. At least that’s the way it felt.

The prefects used to beat us, the teachers threw things at us, the sports master would make us stand in the rain for hours. One boy was so bullied that he tried to hang himself. It was all very 'If' (the film) when I first went there with ACF and CCF and a shooting range and sixth form boys (men) rebelling and singing the red flag and lighting a fire under the stage (which sent the masters scurrying for safety) on one very memorable end of term assembly. It was great really, a few years (three I think) out of time, stuck in another era where Tom Brown and Flashman would have easily fitted in.

As time went on my school mellowed into blandness; the girls came and the old rituals were replaced by new ones, the boarding house was not as full, the curriculum widened to include less academic subjects, teachers needed to be qualified not just bloody minded, slightly disturbed, ex-servicemen. Yes, it became a place of sanity and education. A school in short.  

It's a mixed comprehensive now, or whatever they call schools these days, and a good one I am led to believe. But I will never forget those early schooldays, and these days I look back and see only the good things; the dread has gone and I am left with memories of pranks and curry for school dinner, winning rugby matches, carol concerts in the local church, and walking two miles home on bitterly cold winters evening in the dark. Such is the stuff that dreams are made of despite the tears I shed over my homework and the fear of asking for help as it would always end badly.

Yes, my first three years at Lord Williams’ were a character building affair. It was one part Hogwarts, one part Greyfriars, and one part Monty Python – such a great mix really. I think I enjoyed it taking everything on balance (including the social layering), even if it was much in the same way that some inmates end up enjoying prison.

Rumshackle...

Barbados makes rum. It makes all sorts of rum, dark, white, spiced, vintage, cheap. It's so cheap that you can buy a bottle for 17 BDD in the supermarkets and that's under £6 a bottle. Rum is one of Barbados' major exports, not only that but it seems also to be the national hobby. It's everywhere.

There are Rum Shops, or Rum Shacks, all over the island. The coast roads are lined with them, every village has at least one or two shops, you come across them on deserted roads, hidden away behind stands of palm trees, at crossroads, even at the top of hills. It's the Barbadian version of the local pub; just a lot cheaper.

Of course like pubs there are all sorts of rum shops - tourist only shops, beach rum shacks, mixed shacks, and what might be local only rum shops. The hard thing is working out which is which and the only way to find out is to go in and have a few, a hardship I know, but it has to be done.

We visited a few and they were all friendly places where you could have a good chat and, if I am honest, I never found a local only rum shop. They might look a bit daunting, a bit cliquey, but inside they are all pretty much the same - shady and cool and full of rum.

Many cook and sell food - grilled chicken, flying fish, macaroni pie, conkie, coucou, pepperpot, and the popular pudding and souse. Pudding and souse is a traditional Saturday lunch. The souse is pickled pork, often made into a sausage. But the pork is ears, tails, snout, trotters and tongues and can be bought in the supermarkets. The pudding is steamed and shredded sweet potato. Both the pudding and souse are delicious - or so I am told.

Anyway, if you go to Barbados forget your Britishness and visit a rum shack or three, you won't regret it.

Pre-fabricated dream...

My body may be back in England now, but my mind is still in Barbados. The sights and sounds, the smiles, the heat, the smell of the fish markets, the blue and yellow buses and the incredible rich and varied landscape. Anything can happen around any corner in Barbados. It's full of surprises.

I came across this place high in the hills in St John's, above Bath Beach around Welchtown. It sat on its own just a little away from the dirt road surrounded by luscious hill vegetation. I couldn't tell if it was lived in or not, but compared to many of the chattel houses that seem to be everywhere on the island it's in pretty good condition. Mind you I have seen ones that look like a single gust of wind would blow them and their torn net curtains away, so dilapidated that nobody could possibly live in it, only to notice a satellite dish high above its patched leaking roof and an electricity meter outside.

Chattel houses, how I love the romance of them. Made from pre-cut planks and often painted in brightly coloured 'not quite' pastel pinks, greens, yellow and blues, they were designed to be packed up and moved to a new home whenever the need demanded. The buildings have no firm foundations, but are balanced on blocks of one kind or another. Coral stone or cinder block it doesn't seem to matter so long as the standing is firm and high enough to catch the cooling breeze.

As your family grew then so would your house adding a room at the front or back or building a veranda. A 'one roof house', 'one roof house and shed', 'two roof house and shed'; you see them lining the roads all over the island often with rusting tin roofs, although sometimes with wooden ones. Most have only a couple of rooms but some, like this one, are really quite big. No nails were used in the past and the wood simply slotted together. Nails would have been hard to remove quickly when you were told to get out by your landlord.

I imagine myself with my kerosene lamps listening to the tree frogs or the winds of an approaching Atlantic storm. I can see myself on my veranda drinking rum and eating souse and pudding. If I dream a bit harder I can even see myself painting pictures of the local sights in bright Caribbean colours. What a dream of a life it would be.

It's still possible to buy a chattel house if you can find a local wanting to sell one. They go from between thirty and fifty thousand pounds dependent on size and condition, how much land is involved, and where that land is. Beach front land can fetch millions. I guess you could call them the original pre-fab and I think we could all learn a lot from their simplicity of concept and compact design.

Maybe one day.