Waiting on the container

The container should be here; the shipment from Uncle Eneil in New Orleans (which includes a peddle boat) should be here; the internet access via Skyweb should be here: but, of course, none of them are. This is Jamaica. No problem. We have Mark Lobban from MPS shipping in London working on trying to find where our container has got to, and we have Fred Mundy in the UPS office in New Orleans trying to work out why our peddle boat is sitting in a warehouse in Kingston, instead of on the sea shore here. The good news is that as I started to write this blog, the guys from Skyweb arrived. They’re fixing a satellite dish facing towards the hills behind Montego Bay where a mast will connect us to the rest of the world. In just a few minutes I may be able to sit here on the patio, facing the open sea and wirelessly publish this blog. This has been such a long-cherished dream of mine that, along with the almost full moon rising, it almost makes up for the fact that 131 boxes inside a container haven’t turned up.
To be honest, part of me is relieved. The thought of heaving those 131 boxes off the container and into their designated spots would have been a daunting prospect straight off the plane – even with the help of Shelley and Hamish who came out specifically to help us negotiate the container, and have now returned to London without lifting a box in anger.
Instead we did a lot of cleaning, painting and general repairing. And eating. We’ve done a lot of eating. On my birthday we went to the Houseboat, which is moored directly across the lagoon from us (conch fritters followed by grilled prawns with wild rice, topped off nicely with a chocolate soufflé). I might have gone for the lobster, but the previous evening History, the Rasta fisherman who looks after the place for us when we’re not here, barbequed about 10lb of lobster using only butter and garlic. Believe me, this is to die for.
Yesterday, Hamish’s last night, we went to the Plantation Inn, a beautiful restaurant about a mile out of town run by Paul Hurlock and his wife Jennifer. Paul was a professional musician during the hey-day of the north coast music scene in the 60s and 70s, before starting his restaurant project 30 years ago. He’s a charming man with a wide range of passions: he spent all evening at our table and we talked about everything from gazebo design using old 70s-style (ie huge) upturned satellite dishes for the roof, to the Rastafarian settlement in Ethiopia. Fabulous smoked marlin starter followed by jerked grey snapper.
We also managed the obligatory pit stop at the Pelican (a wonderful Mo Bay diner that hasn't changed in all the 26 plus years I've been coming to Jamaica)) where I consumed a chocolate milk shake followed by curried shrimp, Yard-style. In between, Hamish and Shelley made lots of raw vegetable salads supplemented by fried kingfish and patties from Miss Mell’s roadside bar. History followed up his first lobster dish with stewed lobster – the tails cooked in the shell in a soy-inspired sauce. Waiting for a container is a tough business.
Mr Campbell and his assistant from Skyweb were here for five hours installing the dish and wireless router. It was past 10 when they finally left. hey did a fantastic job, were extremely professional and really helpful. So we're finally online on the ocean.
PS The weather is unbelievably beautiful. My brother-in-law phoned today to say it was minus five in Birmingham. Hah!

Of horses and dogs

Note: this post was written on November 18 but only posted today due to internet connectivity issues which should happily be resolved later today.
Friday was my birthday and as a special treat I got the day off. We went horse riding at Chukka Blue in the morning. This was my first time on a horse, and I really felt very comfortable: all those hours as a kid watching the Lone Ranger and Rawhide now paying dividends as I sat straight-backed in the saddle, reigns nonchalantly but firmly held in the left hand, leaving my right free to draw the Colt45. Chukka Blue offers a range of ‘adventure’ experiences in Jamaica – from horse riding, quad biking, tree canopy swinging, and so on. Our trip was well organised, plenty of guides on horseback to cajole and organise the group, with a good line in patter that took in history, culture, wildlife and ecology. Riders are taken on a 90-minute stroll through part of the old Maggoty sugar estate and then for a gallop through the sea. The route goes via small hamlet where kids with bare feet gaze up, but without a great deal of interest because they see this twice a day. The place is grindingly poor, but very clean and tidy. Chukka Blue have helpfully provided some branded trash cans. Further on we take a detour through the grounds of Kennilworth great house, where the ruins of what must have been a stupendous 18th century stone house are now part of Kennilworth training college - where youngsters from places like the hamlet we’ve just ridden through are training to be waiters, barmen and cocktail waitresses. The ruins we’re looking at were destroyed during the Sam Sharpe Christmas rebellion of 1831, when tens of thousands of slaves working on sugar plantations (which then covered virtually the whole of the western end of the island) rose up demanding emancipation. Now, the descendants of those rebels are studying in the grounds of said great house to be waiters. What with the heat and everything, it’s quite easy to be overwhelmed by the irony of it all. But it’s a good half-day out – they pick you up from the front door and drop you back afterwards.
Later on we went to look for a dog. The Dog Saga has been going on for a long time. We need a nice dog for the Beach House, we keep saying to one another. It’s complicated by the fact that we’ve never kept dogs, and our only experience is that Merrise was bitten by one when she was a young girl in Jamaica, and I had one when I was boy (called Rex) but he was taken way pretty sharpish when identified as a potential source of my asthma attacks.
Briefly: we went to see our friend Gloria who runs a guest house just outside Lucea (pronounced ‘Lucy’), saw three dogs, didn’t take any, went back next day and brought home one - a sweet mongrel bitch, with a lot of labradour in her, so now we have a dog called Lucea (pronounced ‘Lucy’). OK. So don’t mess with us. We ride horses. We have a dog.

Touchdown

Yesterday was my first full day at the house, having arrived the previous afternoon. The flight had a goodly number of elderly Jamaicans, wisely deciding against ‘being shut up in the North’ for the winter and, like me, taking the first ‘cheap’ Virgin flight of the winter season. That’s £400, if you want to know. At Montego Bay, a stack of wheelchairs awaited them. I wondered briefly if any of them were planning a trip to the healing waters of Bath. Sangster airport has been undergoing massive expansion recently, fuelled by excitement over hosting some of the games in last year’s cricket World Cup, and the pressure exerted by airlines such as Virgin who required much bigger facilities to cope with the numbers pouring out their Boeing jumbo jets which had taken over slots vacated by Air Jamaica. Anyway, the new facilities are pretty much completed now, with a new departure lounge and massively enlarged baggage reclaim hall have opened since I was here in April. Even the passport control point was properly staffed, with helpful staff smiling and directing passengers quickly and efficiently. Whatever happened to the ‘look’?
Outside, it was chaos as usual. The pick-up area has been enlarged but when, as happened on Wednesday, a thunderstorm rolls over the hills and disgorged its contents in sheets of monsoon rain for about 40 minutes, just as the passengers from Virgin flight V065 are exiting, well, it’s just chaos and it’s difficult to think of it being any other way. Merrise was circling the pick up point with Hamish riding shotgun on the look-out for me.
Anyway, yesterday was picture perfect. We swam in the pool around nine, after Hamish had come back from a 5km run down towards Hopewell. Shelley did some vague stretching and curling up on the bed exercises. Then did 40 lengths. I managed an heroic 25.
Our mission for the day was to clear out one remaining store room on the side of the apartment building which we had never, in three years, got round to doing. It’s a small, L-shaped room, created out of what might once have been a reception point. It’s full of dress-making materials: row upon row of paper pattern hanging from the ceiling, bales of material, boxes of buttons, jar after jar of bits and pieces. There’s three old, damaged Singer sewing machines. And, in amongst it all is a portfolio of designs, address books with measurements. They all belong to Trevor Owen, the previous owner who died five or six years ago, I think. There are three boxes of labels bearing his name in elegant black lettering. Trevor Owen : Montego Bay : Jamaica WI. I keep the portfolio and all the paperwork, thinking maybe I’ll frame up one of his sketches. They are so evocative of a different time and place – where rich ladies sent postcards from England saying ‘Trevor, I shall be out in November. Can you run me up three of those cocktail dresses?’
Trevor bequeathed us many other little bits and pieces around the place, all of which we have tried to preserve. We want his ghost to be at peace. Because looking after ghosts out here in Jamaica is a very serious business.

Smooth runnings 3

OK, back to the trek around Jamaica. After the exertions at Doctor's Cave Beach, we didn't actually get going until after lunch the following day. Originally I had intended to stop off at the YS Falls, a superb set of waterfalls about 50 miles south of Mo Bay on the south coast, near Black River. However, the late start meant we had to give these a miss. After passing miles of rich farmland on the road over the island, the final stretch along a lonely, winding shoreline to Milk River was quite eerie. The pitted limestone rocks and desolate cacti at the side of the road began to assume strange, exotic shapes in the fading afternoon light. It began to feel as if we were travelling back in time and the first sighting of Milk River Mineral Bath confirmed this feeling. It's a fine 19th-century colonial structure, with the dining room and bedrooms on the first floor, surrounded by a wide veranda. The baths are on the ground floor: nine blue doors open into narrow cavern-like rooms, with steps down to a private, mini pool, into which flows the mineral spring. Inevitably, the first thing we did after a hot day in the car was dump our bags in the rooms (en-suite with a big bed, a big old air con unit and an even bigger old telly) and jump into a bath.
The water is crystal clear, pleasantly warm and has a strong saline taste. Dr Phillippo reports that Savory and Moore of London had analysed the water, revealing the following constituents: "Chloride of sodium, sulphate of soda, chloride of magnesium, chloride of potassium, and chloride of calcium, besides traces of lithia, iodine, bromine and silica. These constituents with its temperature of 92 deg place this spring among the thermal calcic waters of Hamburg, Weisbaden, Kassingen, Bourbonne, Schlangenbad, Gastein and Kranznach. It has the soapy unctuous feel that characterises the Schlangenbad and the warm springs of Virginia, imparting to the skin a velvet smoothness to the touch which continues after leaving the bath."
After what seemed like only a few minutes of floating blissfully in the water, a rude knocking at the door reminded us that guests are only allowed to bathe for 20 minutes at a time ("de watah so powerful, y'see," explained the attendant). We withdrew to the dining room to examine the effect of the first dip. No question: we felt a distinct smoothness. Velvety smooth, in fact.
We spent most of the mealtime involuntarily caressing our bare arms and shoulders to reconfirm the 'velvety feel'. Meals, it has to be said, are not Milk River's strongest point. The menu has a determinedly Jamaican solidness - cornmeal porridge at breakfast, yam, banana and rice with the evening meal. I found myself, in Phillippo-esque mode complaining to Merris(e): "If only they had a really creative, more health conscious, Jamaican chef here - imagine, fresh fruit juices, lobster with green pawpaw and chillies . . ."

Picking up the passport

Another real time update: It’s Monday night and Merris(e) left this morning with our daughter Shelley for Jamaica. This followed several days of complete brinkmanship with regard to our final preparations. First, there was the business of M’s Jamaican passport. Because of the missing ‘e’ in her name, and the subsequent delays occasioned by this rogue letter, the passport didn’t make it back into the UK until last Friday. It had to be picked up from the Jamaican High Commission in London, and so I was the obvious courier, especially since M was in Birmingham, dealing with other things.
Now I have to say that, on the whole, M’s dealings with the High Commission have been very cordial: the incredibly helpful Anita who sorted out the business of the missing ‘e’ with the authorities in Jamaica, also thoughtfully telephoned M on Friday morning to say that the passport had now arrived. Off I went, assured that it would be a two-minute job – trying to banish thoughts such as ‘But it’s never a two-minute job in Jamaica’. Sure enough, as I stepped into the passport section (round the back and in through the tradesman’s entrance) my heart sank.
I was immediately transported back to those painful hours I spent queuing in the water and electricity payment offices in Mo Bay when we were trying to sort out the outstanding amounts left unpaid by previous owners of the Beach House. First, the waiting room was full. The doorway was half-blocked by a group of men all exchanging hard luck stories. ‘Maan, me a tell yu, de woman say I don’t have all the documents I suppose to have.’ ‘Yes man, ‘ said the second, ‘She suppose to help I but she just tell the I to “G’way”.’ In the seats, arranged like pews in a church, sit a group of dancehall queen look-alikes, all with amazing hairstyles, most with a small, very bored child wriggling on their lap. I look at them as I enter: they give me the ‘look’ back. In an obscure corner of the room is one, small glass partition, where a mature woman with several decades’ experience of giving the ‘look’ to forlorn passport seekers is holding court. It is her I must attract the attention of in order to pick up M’s passport. Unfortunately, there are five or six people in front of me, all trying (and failing) to attract her attention as well. I look round in desperation. I pluck a ticket from the queuing machine. Number 49. I look up. ‘Now serving number 14’ says the electronic board. My heart sinks.
Suddenly, the woman – or number 14 as we shall call her - who is being attended to at the glass counter walks away. There is a sudden surge forward. We are all talking at once. ‘I’ve just come to pick up my wife’s/brother’s/husband’s, child’s passport’ we babble. The mature woman walks away from the glass partition and is hidden from view. I try to stay clam. I know that the slightest sign of irritation on my part will be taken very badly by the mature woman, and push me further down the pecking order. There is another white bloke in the queue. He turns to me and says forlornly: ‘I’m only here to pick up my wife’s passport. She said it would be a two-minute job.’ I empathise, but not too much.
Finally, in desperation I call M and ask her to try to contact the helpful Anita to let her know I’m there. After about 10 minutes, M calls back and says that Anita says I must push a button on the right hand side, near the door. I see a button. I push. Miraculously, another door next to the tiny glass counter opens, and four of us pile into a space just big enough for one. With difficulty, we close the door to discourage other queue-jumpers. Inside the cubicle is another glass counter and a woman holding four brown envelopes. We grab them and make good our escape. The men are still grumbling by the door. One of the toddlers has broken free from his mother’s lap and is beating out a rhythm on the water cooler, but I am back into the bright sunlight of Kensington.

Smooth runnings 2

OK, back to the business of Jamaican spas. My plan was to circumnavigate the island clockwise in four days - via the radioactive mineral spring at Milk River, the hot sulphurous spa at Bath Fountain and the natural spring at Reach Falls.
We started our water quest in Montego Bay at the Casa Blanca, a graceful old building dating from the early 1930s, which snakes along the seafront next to Doctor's Cave Beach. Although there are plenty of alternatives for the Mo Bay tourist, none (to my mind) have quite the romantic atmosphere that pervades the Casa Blanca, with its wonderful marble floors and exquisite seafront location. You look out from the bar across the lucid blue waters stretching west towards Negril Point and fully expect to see Errol Flynn mooring his yacht - as once he did, when flash Buiks with big bumpers and white wall tyres lined the street outside.
Today, the Casa Blanca is owned by Norman Pushell, a Canadian who has lived on the island for so long his accent has picked up a distinctive Caribbean lilt, and his beautiful Jamaican wife Lorraine. (Mr Pushell's other great claim to fame is that he sold the Beach House to me and Merris(e).) I asked him how the neighbouring Doctor's Cave Beach had earned its reputation for curing illnesses. "Well, wouldn't you feel better if you left England every winter and spent a month or two lazing in the sun here?" he asked incredulously.
In fact, Doctor's Cave Beach dates from 1906 when a Mo Bay doctor donated his beachfront property to form a bathing club. Until 1932, when it was destroyed by a hurricane, the beach was entered through a hole in a cave - thus explaining its rather curious name. Word of its curative properties spread in the late 1920s when British architect Sir Herbert Baker spent some time there and later published a paper claiming he had been cured of various muscle and joint-related ailments. Doctor's Cave retains its slightly exclusive air - the club still charges a few dollars for entry - and it remains one of Montego Bay's most pleasant places to see and be seen.
The morning after our arrival was a classic, flawless Jamaican day, so we slipped off to the beach to try out our new snorkelling gear. Emerging from a marathon stint inspecting the reefs which fringe Doctor's Cave, I found myself gently expiring next to an elderly woman in a designer swimsuit. She enquired about my health. I mentioned something about the supposed healing properties of the sea hereabouts. We were chatting happily when suddenly my new friend asked me: "How old do you think I am?" I hesitated in my polite English way. She might be in her mid or maybe late 70s, I thought. "Well, I'm 92," she said. " I come here every year from New York in the winter. And I come to the beach almost every day. I still swim."
Elyse Whyte had run a travel agency in the US for many years, and she was still totally on the case. "I have email you know," she said. I could swear she was trying to chat me up.
I returned to the Casa Blanca feeling seriously optimistic. If this is what the ordinary Jamaican seawater does, what could we expect from the spas?

The saga of the missing 'e'

I'm interrupting the tale of our family trip around the spas and natural waters of Jamaica, to report on the matter of my wife's first name. All the time I've known her, her name has been Merrise (pronounced to rhyme with cerise). 'What a lovely name," I said when I first met her. 'Where does it come from?’ She gave me the 'look' - anyone who has asked a Jamaican a potentially sensitive question will know about the ‘look’, so I fell silent. Eventually she said: ‘My father called me Merrise. I think it was the name of an obscure French actress popular in the 1940s.’
Those who have only a passing acquaintance with Jamaican naming traditions will confirm that they are the most original and inventive in the world. An entire generation was named after Ken Barrington, the English cricketer who somehow took the fancy of Jamaicans during the 1950s, for example. And what about filmmaker Don Letts? His father’s first name is St Leger. So the idea of being named after an obscure French actress seemed perfectly plausible, if just a little esoteric even by Jamaican standards.
Fast forward nearly 30 years, and Merrise decides to re-new her Jamaican passport. She’s held a UK passport for many years, of course, but a valid Jamaican passport is required to claim certain tax refunds, which she qualifies for as someone returning to set up a home in the country of her birth. Since 9-11, Jamaica (along with just about everywhere else) has been obliged to review its passport requirements, so the mere fact of once having held a Jamaican passport is no longer a guarantee that it will be renewed. In order to do this, she needs her original birth certificate – something she mislaid many years ago. I will not detail the labyrinthine processes involved in securing this document – several visits to the Jamaica High Commission in London (where a goodly number of the employees also specialise in the ‘look’), the Royal Courts of Justice, help from our good friend and solicitor Mike Dyer. All appeared to going well, if slowly, until last Thursday when a phone call from Jamaica spread panic. “It appears,” said a voice from the Registrar General’s office (and from the tone of the voice it was clear this was a person who could also do the ‘look’) “that your application will have to start over again because according to your original birth certificate, your first name is spelt ‘Merris’ – without an ‘e’.”
This was not just a blow because of the amount of time, money and energy already expended, but doubly so because with the container due to arrive in Kingston in a week or so, the passport was needed quickly. Failure to clear the container within five days of arrival attracts storage charges of US$200 a day.
Merrise (or, as I now call her, Merris) was so incensed that she flew into a frenzy of activity and called the Jamaican High Commission. Amazingly, someone answered the phone (anyone who has tried to call the JHC will know how unexpected this is) and, even more amazingly, she found herself talking to a very helpful woman called Anita. Thanks to her, it seems that Merris may receive her Jamaican passport before she leaves next week.
In the meantime, I’ve been doing a bit of research. I can’t find any French actresses – obscure or otherwise – with the name Merrise. There is, however, a French connection with Merris, a small town in northern France where Australian Forces distinguished themselves in a World War 1 action in 1918. Could that have been the inspiration behind her name? Even in the complex, multi-layered, post-colonial hybridity that is Merrise’s family history, that seems a bridge too far.

Smooth runnings 1

It was while I was visiting Hay-on-Wye more than a decade ago that the idea of taking a tour of the mineral and volcanic springs of Jamaica first popped into my head. The inspiration was a tiny volume called The Mineral Springs of Jamaica, by the Hon J C Phillippo MD, first published for the Jamaica Exhibition of 1891.
I had plucked it from the groaning shelves of a second-hand bookshop by pure chance. As I turned the pages they began to crumble like an ancient papyrus. I decided to delay detailed perusal but not before I had absorbed that Jamaica had many different kinds of natural waters, most of them hot and all of them good for a number of different ailments - from skin conditions to rheumatism.
"To invalids shut up during the long winter of the North by gout, rheumatism, bronchitis, and consumption, "Dr Phillipo's introduction enthused, "we can not only give a mild and equitable temperature, cloudless skies and abundant occupation, but we can also give them our healing waters." I drew immediate comfort: after all, one day I might find myself shut up in the North with gout or bronchitis.
The Mineral Springs of Jamaica report is a fascinating read in every respect. First, it yields a detailed history of the discovery and development of Jamaica's natural resources in colonial times. Dr Phillippo relates how Sir Hans Sloane, the founder of the British Museum, speaks in his introduction to the History of Jamaica, published in 1707, of "a hot bath or spring near Morant, situated in a wood, which has been bathed in and drunk of late years for the belly-ache with great success."
He reveals also the aspirations of the educated landowners and their desire to have a spa town like the famous ones in Europe. "There are states and principalities in Europe that have been kept in a state of solvency by revenues derived from their springs," he says wistfully, perhaps thinking of Spa in Belgium, or Baden in Switzerland. Finally, the report embodies the Victorian obsession with measuring things and recording nerdy detail. It contains the first - and probably the only - really detailed analysis of the water from three of the island's most potent springs, complete with (favourable) comparisons with other, more famous, springs from all over the world.
But perhaps the most striking thing about Dr Phillippo's narrative is his basic sense of bemusement. Having discovered it had world-beating natural spas - and not just one sort, every sort, all packaged up in a small island paradise - Jamaica had failed to capitalise on them. At every turn, Phillippo is forced to lament the state of repair of the resources he is describing, and to stress the urgent need for funds to develop them to attract wealthy patrons from overseas. More than a century after the good doctor's report was published, I was about to experience a sense of déjà vu.