Hot, hot, hot!
14 September 2021
The locals tell us September is the hottest month. They are not wrong. The mercury is hovering around 32 degrees C and it can be hotter inside where rooms face the sun. Coincidentally, the fresh breeze, a constant the rest of the year, has died away which intensifies the heat.
Like the locals, we are adapting to getting up early and going for walks or playing golf in the hours between 6.30 am and 9.30 am before the heat from the sun begins to take effect. We do the same early evening.
We tend to siesta in the afternoons, something as a family we used to do in India.
The problems with incoming sargassum or seaweed have abated and we can visit our favourite local beaches without having to tread through the stuff, smell it or swim in it. The sea is back to its clear, azure blue best.
There are more tourists but they couldn’t have picked a hotter month to visit. They are easily identifiable on the beaches by the deep pink of their bodies where not enough factor 50 has been applied.
We are being bitten more too, at dusk and dawn, as small sandflies add their predatory peregrinations to those of the local mosquitoes. We spray our legs and arms liberally with repellents that bear apposite names like ‘Off’ and ‘Go’.
Like the UK, Barbados has also enjoyed a lot of rain in recent weeks and it has transformed the island into patchworks of verdant green making parts of it resemble the countryside one can find in France and England.
As a result, our efforts at gardening are bearing fruit and all the cuttings ‘acquired’ from the golf clubs, roadsides and abandoned lots are turning into small shrubs and flowers. It turns out that Antonina, who has never gardened before, has green fingers and reads voraciously online about the plants involved, what to do, where they should be sited and so on. She’s a natural gardener and plantsman. Cacti and succulents which grow well here have become an area of expertise.
As for me, I am virtually a full-time writer as consultancy work with Drinkaware has fallen away. Even though I think my knowledge of the English language is good and that I write coherently I have started to use a writing editor called Grammarly, a cross-platform cloud-based writing assistant that reviews spelling, grammar, punctuation, clarity, engagement, and delivery mistakes. I always knew Ukraine was another Silicon Valley in terms of its IT expertise and it came as no surprise to find that the platform was launched in 2009 by three Ukrainians with their head office now in San Francisco.
It also provides feedback and their latest email tells me I am more productive and have a greater mastery of English and use of vocabulary than 99% of users. Some comfort, but then maybe for those who tend to use it English is not their first language. Still, if you are a budding writer, I would recommend it.
I am now deep in a Victorian love story set in the British Empire around 1897 and 1898. The heroine is an English girl who falls in love with a maverick Hussar officer who sees action in Afghanistan and Uganda.
I am enjoying doing the background research and discovering that British survey teams were uncovering tracts of land and tribes in East Africa that despite the long presence of German, French and British traders, missionaries and colonial administrators had never seen a white man before. But two local rulers unite to rid themselves of the British, and Uganda in 1897 was at boiling point as we struggled to hang onto the fledgling East African Protectorate.
Troops from India were drafted in to resolve the situation so along with the Zulu and Boer wars plenty was happening in the late nineteenth century on the dark continent, a term coined by the Victorian explorer Henry Stanley because it was unexplored by Europeans and for the savagery they expected to find there. Whether we should have been there in the first place is something for the revisionists to discuss but history is history.
