A Farewell To Palms

Even outside of Carnival Trinidad is an interesting place. One of our favourite locals, who went by the strange but appropriate name of Gerbsy, described it as a cultural gangbang and perhaps that's not so far from the truth. Certainly the language there reflects a variety of influences and whilst the English is less impenetrable than elsewhere in the Caribbean it does make use of various colloquialisms which can trap the unwary visitor. For example if you're lucky enough to do any brushing during your time there, chances are you'll end up braking and be in need of a herecloth. But if someone has been macoing on your business they may push baskets so as to cause bacanal, which may ultimately cause one or more parties to enter a tabanca. All very strange.

They've even taken to finding alternative names for vegetables, a case in point being aubergines which they refer to as bhaygans. Ever keen to defend the Queen's English I considered remonstrating with them on this one by pointing out that if you need a different name for said vegetable it's eggplant. Ultimately, however, I decided not to do so for fear of inflaming colonial tensions, at the end of the day sometimes it's best just to let bhaygans be bhaygans.

We did do our bit for Queen and country by joining the Barmy Army on the Trinidad leg of its march across the Caribbean and spent three days forlornly hoping that England might produce a decent performance. The first two were great days out despite the lacklustre nature of the cricket, helped in large part by a huge cooler of beer and free doubles all day. On the third day we attempted to stay sober, I don't advise it. Cricket without beer is like a broken pencil: pointless.

Also crammed into our hectic schedule was a trip to Tobago where we met a Templeton prize nominee and spent a few hours discussing his unified theory of everything. We had to go over it a few times as bits of it are hard to get your head round and some the concepts hard to visualise, but I think we've put him on the right track now.

Other than that, a few trips to the beach, some jaunts on boats and extensive limin' there's not much more to report except that we did eventually manage to tear ourselves away and caught the ferry to Venezuela a couple of days ago. Since then we have been mostly sitting on buses and consequently are now out of sight of the Caribbean for the first time in two months. I miss the palms and the beaches, but you can't have you cake and eat it and you can't visit Angel Falls and be by the sea, so something had to give. I'll let you know if the sacrifice was worthwhile on my return.

Hasta Luego

Don Simon.