Am I still me?

Old Year’s Night in Bequia

2008-01-02T16:28:00.000+01:00

Well the day of New Years Eve (or old year’s night) was spent pretty virtuously. I took my land lord and lady’s 7 year old son to the beach, shell collecting. He has always had his eye on my shell collection, which is scattered across my porch, he even told me that he comes to look at it sometimes when I am not here. So, after a bit of gentle encouragement from him, I promised to take him to gather his own,

A you can imagine, the sight of me wandering around Bequia with a 7 year old child (who is clearly not white at all) was enough to set the flexible tongues of Bequia wagging. I have only been away for 3 months and I come back with a, rather large, child. Everyone was intrigued; ‘who tha boy?’ they kept asking with surprise. Someone even said ‘it’s about time you adopted!’. You have to bear in mind that the girls start young here, 14 is a pretty standard age to start child bearing in the Caribbean. I don’t think they can quite get their head around these old childless white women who keep appearing on the island!

The shell collecting, however, was a great success. We lugged a heavy bag of clinking shells back up the hill at the end of the day. We took a water taxi to the beach which seemed to be quite a novelty for Shami. He was intrigued by my application of sunscreen and copied just about everything I did. We swam and dived and fought with sticks until the most almighty downpoor obscured the whole harbour and sent us shivering for shelter to the nearest beach bar. We ordered a bitter lemon each which came in a bottle, accompanied by a glass. I could sense Shami hesitating, waiting to see if I was going to drink from the bottle or poor it in a glass. When I emptied the bottle into the ice filed glass he quickly did the same. I felt quite the local as we both sat shuddering, wrapped in towels, and the tourists wandered around half naked, looking at us as if we were mad. Having lived through the summer months, winter really does feel like winter now. The air is cool and fresh, the water is freezing, and the evenings can hold a little nip in the twilight air.

My baby sitting duties complete I met a friend and we went and supped a sneaky sundowner on the beach, a quiet little moment before the festivities of the evening ahead. Then it was time to go home and get ready. We were going out for a ‘posh’ 5 course dinner at the fanciest restaurant in town and had decided to make a bit of an effort – well the girls had anyway. It felt peculiar putting on a dress and dusting off my hair dryer, dress standards in Bequia are pleasantly relaxed, but it was a treat to get a little glammed up for once. The only downfall was the shoe situation. I have hundreds at home, but opted to leave them behind when I left. My shoe collection now is an almost full colour palette of Havaiana flip flops. At least I had a coordinating black pair to go with my dress!

The much awaited dinner was a Caribbean travesty in itself – even though the restaurant is run by Swedes. If I had been back at home I would have kicked up a fuss but although we griped we had to laugh, there is no point getting stressed in a place like this. We had sat at our table for over half an hour before we were served. The menu was fixed so there were no choices to make. The hors d’oevres arrived, yet still no wine, and we hungrily munched our way through half of them. Before we could finish the tiny plates the heavens had opened and the little delicacies were quickly floating around in a slushy sort of soup. We ran for cover and loitered at the bar whilst polishing off the wine which appeared with the rain. The rain finally cleared as the stars started to reappear. We changed the sodden table cloth, emptied the glasses of water, wiped the seats down with napkins and started again. We ate our way through two exquisite courses before it was finally time for the main when suddenly the unfortunate result of the little interruption became clear. Our table was situated at the edge of the dance floor. we had planned to be finished before the band started up (a band we have listened to twice a week throughout the summer months) but our meal was interrupted by the squeal of feedback and Jackie addressing the crowd!. Our table was plunged into silence as we struggled to hear over the noise; and our sea view was quickly replaced by wiggling bums and bouncing bodies.

The meal finally finished and with midnight fast approaching we jumped into the moke and raced around the harbour to the Frangi where the throngs were gathered awaiting the New Years fireworks. We scrabbled to find ourselves a bottle of champagne in time, fought our way through the bodies to the beach and sat back and watched the show. We were sorry not to have a countdown or a clock but gradually cries of ‘Happy New Year!’ floated through the crowed and we guessed it must be the midnight hour. The fireworks were added to by some of the many yachts in the harbour letting off flares. We joked that New Year’s Eve was not a good night to be in trouble at sea. You would let off your flares to signal distress whilst anyone watching would remark at the pretty display (I shuddered to myself at the horror of the reality of this joke). The fireworks complete, the bar soon was filled by the arrival of the ‘bang gang’. The team who, so valiantly, had let off the display. They were dusty and shell shocked and some were even bleeding, but there was a buzz, a high, a rush of adrenalin as they all grabbed their first drinks.

The night lead on from there; a street party at Penthouse, then a beach party at De Reef. Everyone was out, everyone was dancing and everyone, of course, was drinking. But as far as I know the only trouble was a dinghy missing from the dock in the morning. The atmosphere was happy and calm and there was none of trouble-brewing-in-the-air feeling which can sometimes fill the harbour late on a Friday night. I staggered home by sunrise, legs weary from dancing and glad of my shortfall in the feet dressing up department as I climbed the hill in my Havaianas.

I awoke on New Yea’s Day feeling weary but surprisingly well. I caught a ride to the beach where we struggled to find food in either of the only 2 places open. Everyone, it seemed, had had the same idea. No-one wanted to cook on this day of recovery, we all just wanted to be served and fed. I managed to beg some fishcakes which filled a gap, but I could have eaten more. A swim and a nap on the beach and the previous night could never have happened. We sat and watched in awe as the Maltese Falcon, the largest, expensivest, fastest sailboat in the world, pulled into the harbour and narrowly missed a collision with a ferry. Then a call from a friend who was flying to England that day; I had left her in a bar as the sun was rising and I have no idea how she made that journey to Barbados a few hours later. She had arrived at Bequia’s little airport to find it closed. If it had been me I would, at that point, have turned around and gone back to bed. She, however, got in touch with a friend who has a water taxi, but then they needed fuel. The gas station was closed but she managed to find someone who had a tank. Enough to get them to Mustique, to where her plane had been diverted, but not enough to get her friend back. He had had to beg steal and borrow more gas once he got there to get himself home. She had arrived in Mustique drenched and battered (those boats throw you around some in the seas out there), it was not only her who was wet, her luggage was soaking too, but she had made the flight and was waiting in Barbados to catch a soggy red eye back to London.

So, as the sun was setting, it was back to the Frangi for evening New Year’s Day cocktails. We all sat at the bar and recounted tales from the night before. Some energetic souls showed up who had not yet been to bed. They were kind of wobbly but impressively still standing. Then Stan appeared out of the night astounded to find ‘Fix-man’ at the bar.

‘I been trying to call you all day’ he said ‘the fire truck’s broken at the airport, people have been having to get boats all day, they need you to come and fix it’

Fix-man looked at him in thoughtfully, stared deep into his rum, and said ‘Perhaps tomorrow’.

Happy New Year from this island in the sun!

'You put on some size man!'

2007-12-27T16:49:00.000+01:00

I left this little Island some 3 months ago, in the height of the summer sun, the raging heat, the island fever and the empty streets. Now I am back and the season is here (although not as much as it should be by all accounts). The harbour is filling with boats, the streets are peppered with lost looking tourists. It feels strange to see so many foreign white faces after a summer of being one of the few pale skinned souls remaining.

But it is lovely to be back, after so much time on the road, on the water and living out of a bag. It is lovely to stop and take stock and be somewhere which feels like home again. I flew in last week, from Grenada, after leaving the boat, Osprey, which had carried me some 3000 miles across the Altantic Ocean. That became ‘home’ too for a while, but this ‘home’ doesn’t move, it doesn’t rock and it doesn’t throw me across the galley when I am trying to make a cup of tea. This home will do for now.

In the strange way that things go sometimes, the first person I met at the airport was Harvey. Last seen waving me off as we sailed out of Tenerife over a month ago. We sat together on the ferry, swopped crossing stories and photographs and watched excitedly as the Christmas lights of Bequia came into view through the gloomy wet night. It was a good way to come back, with someone who had just done the same journey as me, it brought me back slowly and made me feel as if I belonged.

I awoke the next day to the sounds of roosters and dogs. The strains of dancehall reggae Christmas Carols were blasting out of most of the speakers on the island or so it seemed. The day was spent ‘catching up’. There is much to catch up on after 3 months away from an island like this. The old summer crew were still here, their numbers swelled by the incoming winter faces, some old and some new. There was talk and chat and gossip and news; burglaries and stabbings, break ups and get togethers, paternity riddles solved but murders not (solved but ‘sensitive’ is the word on the street so nothing has been done) it was all too much to take in.

I had missed the slow Bequia build up to Christmas, but was here in time to catch the end. Each night of the preceding week there had been ‘light-up parties’ around the Island. It is an intensely fought competition between villages with months of planning and fund raising to get the lights in place. Then one by one they turn them on, with music and sound systems and chicken stalls and rum. These parties go on all night, until dawn, then the next night someone else does it all again.

So I have caught up with the chat and spent my first Christmas in the Caribbean sun and now it is time to make up for those weeks at sea where I sat, and read, and slept, and ate. There is a much vented theory that it is ‘good for you’ being at sea. You don’t drink, I suppose, so that is a bonus. But people say that your muscles are constantly compensating for the movement of the boat, even when you are asleep, it is like a 2 week pilates class, crossing the Atlantic, 24 hrs a day. ‘It’s good for you, you’ll lose weight’ or so they say. It is a theory I have never bought into, much as I would love to. It’s rubbish. You move very little. Sails are raised, reefs are put in, things are fixed, ropes are winched, there is activity, of sorts. But when you are not asleep, or winching, or cooking, you are eating; all the time. I don’t think I got hungry once on that crossing. We had always put something into our mouths before the hunger had found time to kick in. I ate, solidly, for 2 weeks. So maybe they are right about this pilates thing. It is a 24 hour pilates class, but one you eat your way through too!

Well if I thought I could slip back into Bequia with this little fact unnoticed I was sorely wrong. Apparently it’s a complement with these VIncy boys, it wasn’t the women but the men who commented, 3 or 4 times a day I was greeted by ‘well you put on some size man!’. A complement, they say, it means you’re looking well, happy, healthy, or something. It didn’t really work like that for me. I have dug out my old running shoes from beneath the bed, dusted them off, checked for scorpions nestled inside, and hit the early morning streets with a vengeance.

So I am back, in the sun, for the winter, and I am glad. Another season looms with countless adventures to unfold, I am sure.

A belated merry Christmas and a Happy New Year (or oldest night as they call it here) to you all!

Rumbled!

2007-12-27T16:46:00.000+01:00

I have crossed an ocean in a 44ft sail boat since I last posted on here. In fact I have done an awful lot since I last posted on here. I have been slack and not blogged, I have even started to wonder what this blog is all about any more. It started off as a therapy of sorts, I suppose, looking back. Not only did it help me but it helped many others, they wrote and told me so, and that was really what kept me going; that and the joy of putting down words and creating a sentence which sounds sort of right. Eventually the bombs and the politics and the incessant study and analysis and the TRYING (and how could I ever have expected to succeed) to understand the minds of suicide bombers started to fade from this blog and it grew into a more inherent study of minds in general. I guess it became a kind of mental health blog for a while. I have seen enough of those close to me losing their minds and then for it to happen to me, well minds started to occupy my mind so I blogged about it, and that seemed to help people too so I blogged about it some more.

Now I have left a lot of that behind. I am living a sort of wandering, spontaneous, plan less life, a life free of bombs and politics, full of people and sunshine and oceans and rum so that is what I write about now. I suppose you could say that I am trying to show anyone who may pass by this blog that anything is possible. I suppose I am trying to say that sunshine after darkness can be found, no matter how black the darkness and how deep the tunnel, there is always a way out. A way which I have found, for now, but never a way which I will take for granted, I am done with taking things for granted any more.

So a natural progression has occurred in this little blog of mine, but now another, more confusing dimension has come along. I have always been anonymous in this blog, and with most of what I have written for anyone, even on TV and radio I never use my real name. I have people who know me who read this blog, but they are people who have known me since then, since the beginning and before. Now I am living on a little island in the Caribbean, starting afresh, I suppose. I have told very few people here why I came, why I left my job, my home, my friends and my commute to work. Any who have asked usually assume there was a man involved (if only that was all it had been!) but generally I have managed to live in the present out here.

The past is always there but it is fading back to where it should be, into that file named ‘past’ instead of the file it remained in for as long as it had to, named ‘current and not yet ready to go into ‘past’’. It is really not so important any more, it is not what defines me. I am not a ‘survivor’ or a ‘victim’ or any sort of label which the media so adore. I am just me, living a life which makes me happy. But now I have been rumbled on this island in the sun. People know who I am, they know I am ‘Holly’. I have only discovered that since I returned last week and I don’t know how it makes me feel. I don’t want this blog becoming another gossip column for Bequia. I don’t want to be talked about as a ‘victim’ any more, I didn’t really want anyone to know. But now they do, what do I do? I love this blog (slack as I have been lately) and I love to write. Not a day goes by when I don’t scribble or jot a thought or a passing little moment which I don’t want to forget to write about later. My mind is always full of ‘writing’ much of which never makes it onto here, but still, I don’t want to give up on Holly Finch yet. So I suppose I will go on, knowing that now I know my audience more intimately than I did before, and trying not to let the fact that I will be passing them in the street or drinking with them later inhibit what I write on here. It will be fine, I am sure, it always somehow is.

Sailing across the Atlantic...or not...yet?!

2007-11-17T16:44:00.000+01:00

Well we are back where we started – in Tenerife; the land of bleak rugged volcanic landscape and tacky white Brits thumbing through copies of the Daily Mail which are printed on this very island.

It is Saturday and it is hard to believe I only arrived on this boat called Osprey a mere 5 days ago. We are docked in a floating marina of waiting boats. Hundreds of yachts of all shapes and sizes, with crews from around the world, inhabit this pool of protected water. There are French and Americans, Germans and Swedes, and even a friendly face from Bequia to make me feel at home in this transient world of strangers. I last saw Harvey 5 months ago in the Eastern Seaport of Manhattan and here we are now crossing paths again, if only to reinforce what a small familiar circle I am travelling around on this great adventure of mine.

We are all here waiting; for the day, the weather, the boat, the crew, for the moment to be right to leave and cross that great gulf of 3000 miles of Atlantic Ocean to the glistening isles of the Caribbean. We are all playing the same game, the difference being that we had found our day, we took the moment and we left, on Wednesday, but now we are back after 2 days and nights at sea and we are no further on from where we started.

A dripping salt water pump was the cause of this return. It was discovered on the first day at sea but for another 12 hours we carried on. The wind, which had been forecast as non-existent, was pushing us along gently from behind. With our foresail poled out we were surfing down the following seas at a happy 10 knots, a state of affairs which would have landed us in our first port of call in a mere 4 and a half days time. We didn’t want to stop, to turn back and fight our way into the wind and the swell, to bash our way through the night back to the place from where I had yelled at Harvey ‘See you in Bequia!’ as we quietly slipped out of our cramped little berth. So we spent the night gathering more information to enable us to decide if it was foolhardy to carry on. Calls to New Zealand on the satellite phone, part numbers and Volvo dealers located across the world. What if we just DHL it to the Cape Verdes? No turning back, it will be there by the time we get there, a plan to keep the crew happy and motivated, but on further examination not necessarily safe. What if the pump blew before we got there? No pump, no power, who aboard could navigate by the starts? What if that angry looking low we had seen lingering to the north west didn’t get swallowed up by the spiralling Azores high? What if, instead, it was pushed down to the south gaining momentum as it headed our way? What if we couldn’t fight into it, had to head further south and missed the Cape Verdes all together. ‘What if?’, What if ?’ rumbled through the night until at 4am it became to much. The pole was brought in, the main was gybed over and back to Tenerife we went. Back in a longer, bouncier more tortuous way; zig zagging towards our destination, jumping over waves. What had previously felt like a gentle rolling wind, by the change in angle to our little vessel, suddenly felt like a gale. Even my, usually hardy stomach, was beginning to feel green. I started to wonder if I had taken on more than I could swallow, if I wasn’t actually cut out for this crossing of oceans. 18 knots of wind, granted on the nose, but still it was only 18 knots and I was already feeling sick! But then Craig appeared, rapidly through the companionway; he knelt over the leeward rail and threw up whatever he had eaten last over the side. Instantly I relaxed. He had endured worse seas than this for 10 days on the trot when Osprey crossed the north Atlantic, beating their way into the lows, yet he was throwing up and I was (barely, but still I contained it) managing to keep it in. There was hope for me on this ocean crossing after all!

12 hours later, weary and hungry, we arrived back into the unfathomably peaceful Marina del Atlantico. A different berth gave us a different view, hey, we could almost be somewhere else. Thankfully my already rehearsed explanations went unused, a new boat was nestled against the concrete wall where Harvey had stood and waved us off. Sea Hawk had left, taken the same window as us, but they were still on their way, and we were not, we were back here searching for a part.

A stationary 4 hours sleep and we awoke to the day, hardly believing that the previous 2 days had occurred at all. Emails had been answered whilst we slept in our bunks and phone calls were made over cereal and tea. Parts were located in New Zealand and Belgium and eventually to our surprise in Tenerife itself. We hired a car and drove to the side of the island where package holidays are contained. We found our man on the first floor of a shopping centre inhabited by aimlessly wandering tourists who seemed unsure as to what they were supposed to be doing on this much anticipated break in the sun. Young and German and fluent in our lingo he produced our part like the trophy it was. He explained how to fit it, what had worn and how the leak had meant it had been sucking in air. We shuddered at the thought of our engine overheating and seizing itself up into a lump of motionless metal without the steady flow of sea water to cool it. Coming back had been the right thing to do after all.

He wished us luck and added as what seemed like an after thought ‘I’m going across the Atlantic too’. We nodded in acknowledgment; another person crossing from here was hardly an occurrence to stop us in our steps. We were nearly out through the door when he casually added ‘but I’m rowing across’. It took a few seconds to absorb what he had said, then we turned on our heels and stared at him in disbelief. He showed us a picture of a vulnerable looking little open boat with 2 people sitting and pulling on oars. Twenty five or so boats, it appears, do this race of madness every year. They row across the Atlantic. The record, held by Kiwis, is forty three days. Our friendly German was proud to explain that they were the first ever team from Tenerife and they were hoping to do it in fifty. Fifty days, rowing across the ocean?! We exchanged satellite phone numbers and promised to keep in touch whilst we were out there. We left that shop suddenly feeling the scale of our insanity for attempting to sail across one of the world’s great oceans diminishing rapidly beneath our feet. He was the nutter, not us!

Last night we celebrated our success with Spanish steak and beers and I survived my third cigarette-free night. (The boat is a smoke free zone so I stopped once we set sail. Now we are back it seems pointless to pick up the habit for a token few days, it will only make the proceeding days at sea harder to bear.) We may have not come far geographically over the last few days but now we are a team who have been coerced together by the shared goal of wanting to get the hell back out of this joint. Everyone, it seems is getting ready to go. The industrious sounds of tapping on metal fill the marina from every corner, last minute checks and double checks and repairs. We have found another hitch, but this newly formed team is unperturbed. The adjacent part to this one is worn as well. In hindsight we should have removed it before. But Peter, the German, is on the case, we will have to wait until Monday to find out whether one exists on the island, if not then the wait will be longer again. But eventually we will leave and perhaps the wind will come with us, perhaps our new window will have been worth waiting for in the end.

Sooty, for one, is happy that we returned. His owners are expected back any day now after a hurried return to France. When they left here, their cat with a strange French name was missing. They put a notice on their boat, the cat was found, renamed and Osprey became his home. Yesterday he was lounging on the deck of a mega-yacht looking down at us snootily pretending he had never known us. But today he is back, curled up happily in the cockpit, waiting with us for the part that, hopefully, will be our long awaited ticket out of here!

We can't see the goal!

2007-09-14T23:44:00.000+01:00

My house sits perched on the edge of a valley that is Port Elizabeth. From my porch I can see straight down this tranquil valley and out to the crescent shaped harbour of Admiralty Bay. The bottom of this valley is a flat, fertile flood plain, not peppered with patches of small domestic agriculture, as you would expect, but a patch of grass that is the hub of this town, a green rectangular playing field.

Throughout summer it was cricket which inhabited this space, with a tiered concrete stadium on the north side. Now autumn is upon us (although no leaves are turning here) and the football season has begun. Matches are played as the heat falls out of the sun. They finish just before the great glowing orange ball immerses itself in the harbour and extinguishes its heat for another 12 hours. At around 4.00 every Wednesday and Friday evening I can almost track the highlights of the match from my house through the jubilant and derogatory noises of the crowd.

Just below my house there is a wall which holds the road to the edge of the valley. People sit and linger here and watch the football as they pass. Tonight I joined them to watch the game. There was the white team and the fluorescent yellow team. Most of the white team had dreadlocks and any time one of them touched the ball the crowd would cry 'go rasta go!'. They even addressed each other as rasta, 'here rasta", 'pass rasta'. It struck me that this was a trifle confusing and may account for the team of flying dreads being 3-1 down to the belisha beacons.

The pitch is still raw from the season of cricket, with a gaping brown scar down the middle where the crease had been. It is tended to, it seems, by grazing goats in the day and in the season becomes a place for sound systems and dancing after dark.

Young boys, seemingly oblivious to the match, played their own game as they kicked a ball around behind the sidelines. The crowd exploded with cheers and taunts every time the ball approached a goal. From our elevated seats on the whitewashed wall we could only tell when the white team had scored by the reaction of the crowd. A beautiful young 'dread' with Egyptian cheekbones had greeted me when I perched myself onto this exclusive viewing spot. Not with a word or a sound, just a nod. As the game progressed he ventured a bit further down the conversational field, the talk was preceded by the customary offering of a half smoked joint which he pulled out of his back pack and lit as if he had been saving it for this precise moment. He asked me where I was from and if I was enjoying the game. 'It's a nice spot' he said 'only problem, you can't see the goal for the mango tree. It doesn't matter tho' he said 'we like it'.

I liked it too, high up above the pitch, looking out to sea as the sun was setting. Watching the vibrant colour washing itself out of the island as the evening haze marched in. Taking in the game which seemed to have drawn every inhabitant of the town to participate in the accompanying vocal chorus I emptied my mind, smiled again at the beautiful cheekbones and felt a deep seated sense of being part of this place. I didn't mind either that we couldn't see the goal.

UPDATE:
Last night I met Egyptian cheekbones man in the street. He hailed me from the darkness and greeted me with the handshake of a clenched fist; knuckles touching knuckles. He introduced himself as, wait for it, 'Specialist Ninja Man'. Not just any Ninja man then, a specialist one to boot!

Local lingo

2007-09-08T17:23:00.000+01:00

There is feeling, simplicity and clarity in the local lingo which is easy to be seduced by and eventually embrace. That is when you can understand it of course! The locals are fully aware that once they slip into their personal patwa they may as well be speaking another language as far as us whities are concerned. I would like to think that my ear is gradually tuning in and beginning to make sense of the hidden vowels and consonants but it may all just be an illusion. The only clue I can usually grasp which hints that I am being talked about is the proliferation of the word 'she' in every sentence.

When I first arrived I joked about the cat's mother but really I found the overuse of 'she' when referring to women as mildly offensive. On further examination though I have noticed that the men cop it too. 'He' and 'she' is used here in the traditional sense in which we use it at home. It is, however, also substituted for his and hers. So if someone is talking about 'her father' they will say 'she father' instead. This can lead to a lot of shes in one breath. For instance:

'She went to pick up she child from school and take he back to she house where she cooked he some dinner'

Once you have clicked it makes perfect sense and being referred to constantly as 'she' is no longer a problem.

They use the same words here but in different ways and sometimes to great affect. If you are thinking about a person or a situation too much, so much so that you become preoccupied or stressed, you are said to be 'studying' . If your girlfriend has run off with someone else and you hit the bottle to drown out the hurt and the pain then you are 'studying she too much'. I like that. For that is what you do. You are not just 'thinking' about her in a situation like that. You are going over and over the whys and wherefores. You are studying the situation and trying to work it out and usually it is best to stop. I have been told many a time not to study something or someone too much and usually it has been fine advice.

If you are going somewhere for lunch, let's say to Dawns, a lovely little Creole restaurant on the beach, you are not going to Dawns, you are going by Dawns. This has the added advantage of being slightly unspecific. I am forever calling people on their cell phones and asking them where they are; 'by Andy's' they will say. Which means, in all reality, that they can be anywhere in the near vicinity of Andy's, they do not actually have to be at Andy's. This can make tracking people down an exasperating experience. You usually find them in the end though. This, as I have said many a time, is a small small place. It is uncanny the amount of times you are talking about someone and lo and behold a few moments later they will show up, as if they knew.

You are always hailed and acknowledged by people who know you as you pass. They shout your name, a greeting or sometimes just a sound. Some will stop and chat and some will walk on by. The ones who acknowledge you but do not stop are known literally here as shouting friends. People you know, who also know you but with whom you do not have a personal relationship. Acquaintances, we would call them at home, but I much prefer shouting friends.

And what do these shouting friends of mine shout at me? A long time ago I wrote about the myriad of terms, mostly derogatory, that have been assigned to me over the years due to my elevated height. Lamppost, Giraffe, Lofty, Gangley, the list goes on. Here, I have found myself a new name and it is I want to hold on to. It is celebratory and positive, complementary in the way it is spoken. When I walk the streets of Bequia I am greeted from bars, from beneath the shade of trees, from the markets and from boats. 'Tallest!' echoes across the streets and the waves. Tallest by name and Tallest by nature, Tallest I will forever be.

What do I do all day?

2007-09-06T17:16:00.000+01:00

The sultry season is well and truly upon us. The harbour front is closing down and the staff of the little restaurants and bars are taking their much needed holiday. They work all year round until now, the summer, the quiet season, the hot season, when they close for a month and we all retreat to our homes waiting for life to return in November.

They say if you can survive a summer in Bequia you are 'hardcore'. We are getting there but are not yet through the worst. 'The worst' of course is all relative. What can be bad about living on a Caribbean Island? Nothing really, nothing is bad. But it is trying at times, a test of something. 'Silly season' they call it; the summer. There is little to do and even less people to do it with, but still we pass our time.

People at home ask me what I do all day. 'Nothing' I reply playfully. I try to convince them that it is a fine art this nothingness. You wrestle, at first, with guilt and restlessness. 'I should be doing something, I should be busy'. It takes not weeks but months to wind yourself down to a state where you can happily wake up each morning with no idea of what you are going to do. But still the day passes and happily, usually. I still fight the inbuilt urge of list writing. If I have more than a couple of things to be achieved in a day I feel I should write it down. But I don't, I stop myself, I just get on and do it. If I forget something there is always tomorrow.

I have moved house again this week and extended my visa; these have been stressful times. House hunting here, like everything, is done by word of mouth. There is no register or list of places to rent. You carry on with your daily life and ask everyone you know or pass whether they know of anywhere that's free. I was passed from person to person, driven from this place to that. I discovered secret gems and art studios high up on deeply vegetated hills and finally landed in the new place I call home.

Extending your visa is always a nerve wracking experience. There is no rhyme or reason to how the system works. When I first arrived I was given 3 months. I went away, sailed to North America and on my return was given only a month. The visa extending process usually involves going to immigration, filling in a form, showing them your flight ticket out of here and stripping yourself of all the freedom you have ever known by leaving your passport with them for 3 days. You return, anxiously to collect it, are met by an expressionless face which gives nothing away, and are eventually told to go to the next desk to buy your $25 stamp. This is the signal that you are in, you have made it, you can stay.

This time however it was different. For starters I was given a new form to fill in, a 'sponsorship form'. This worried me slightly, why was it different? The form involved me tracking down my landlord and asking him for various details. He had to make a trip back up the hill to find his passport number for me. The form explicitly stated that even if you had a sponsor you were 'prohibited to work'. The next section asked for details of your employer! A trick question perhaps? Who knows, I left it blank. When I finally arrived back at immigration with all my forms complete they were closed, for lunch. An hour of loitering and chatting to friends and I finally went back and submitted it, gritted my teeth and handed over my passport. Without looking up he told me to go and buy my stamp. I looked at him perplexed, this usually happens when you collect your visa. I bought my stamp, carried it back across the room, he stuck it on the form, stamped my passport, and handed it back to me. That was it, no stripping of one's identity, no nervous 3 day wait, my visa was granted right there on the spot. No-one I know has ever had this happen to them. I have no idea whether it is to do with me or the mood of the man on the desk, but I walked out quickly, without looking back, in case he changed his mind!

And so the days go by. The laundry gets washed, the floor is swept and meal after meal is made. The beach is walked to, the length of the bay swum, talk is talked and gossip is passed.

And sometimes I actually sit down and write my blog!

Back to basics

2007-08-27T19:03:00.000+01:00

I am having what could be construed as a minor crisis. But I am not letting it become one. It is only a computer after all, stacked full of photos and the writing I have been doing since I moved out to the Caribbean. It has died, kaput, just when I had found a wireless connection from my house.

Technically speaking it is not actually dead. A light flickers when I turn it on, it even makes that celebratory de dah! niose of welcome as the hard drive starts whirring and I wait for the apple to appear on the screen. But it doesn't. Nothing does, the screen remains blank. Until yesterday when there was a moment of hope, the screen glowed, an apple appeared but was sliced from all sides by horizontal bands of colours and greys shooting across the screen, building up on top of each other until they swallowed the apple and just left a screen of flickering pixels which hurt my eyes so I turned it off.

So now I am back in the internet place. My lovely office with a harbour view lies abandoned. I have no tv at home, so internet and laptopless I am really back to basics. I have books, but they are running low. Having read every book with a gold embossed cover on the island, I was overjoyed to discover that Amazon deliver here. I have a consignment of literature to last me a year arriving ( I hope) in a couple of weeks.

It is a basic existance on this island of ours. I have bought nothing but food (and mostly local food at that) since I arrived 6 months ago. This is a girl who shopped for England. Nothing to do on a Saturday, well let's go shopping! I have a wardrobe large enough to clothe a (tall female) army back home. Yet in 6 months here I have bought nothing. And do you know what? I like it. Unecessary shopping is an unimaginable extravegance out here. But what you do have becomes emminantly valuable. You lose or break a watch, or a laptop, or a bikini at home; someone will fix it or you treat yourself to a new one. 'I was fed up of that old thing anyway' you convince yourself and lo and behold another days shopping is legitimately on the cards! If it breaks or disappears on an island like this, that is it, no more and no replacement either until you can get yourself on a plane and back to the world where retail rules.

My laptop will have to lay dormant, until I go to Florida next month to deliver a boat. It is good timing in that respect. I am planning to be doing a fair amount of travelling over these next few months. The Caribbean is hot in the summer, and although I love the heat even I feel disabled sometimes when I emerge from under the shade of a tree and feel my scalded skin sapping the energy from my legs. Yesterday was spent in the sea and the sea alone. The sand on the beach was too hot to walk on so I had to wait until sunset until the soles of my feet could bear to bring my body out of the water. Everything is hot and everyone is hot too. The place is emptying out like an upturned skip, fewer and fewer people grace the streets and the bars. People are leaving, to escape the heat and the poverty of summer. No tourists equals no money for most people here. So they follow the crowds and make money elsewhere until the trickle of sparkling skinned whities begins again in November.

For those that do remain times are tough and tempers run high. Everyone is living off each other. Deals are struck from person to person as there is no one else left to do business with. I swear the same money is just passing around the island, each person taking his cut as it goes. I just hope that it lasts until the season, lasts until the trade winds and the tourists come back to freshen the air and the wallets.

Calm after the storm

2007-08-19T23:39:00.000+01:00

It is one of those evenings of summer tranquility in the tropics tonight. A pinkish haze is spreading across the watery sky; the intensity of its daytime colour fading away with the hours. The air is motionless and the valley is alive with early evening sounds. These are the precious hours, the cool hours. The disabling heat has dissipated with the falling sun yet there is still lingering light to work by. There is the steady chipping sound of hoes in the ground and music wafting from homes all around. The children are shrieking as they play football in the playing field which sits at the base of the valley, a rare patch of horizontal ground on this island of crumpled hills. The birds are singing their twilight melodies, the dogs are barking warnings to each other across the town and harmonious, heartfelt voices are gliding from the many churches. Two local speed boats are cutting a streak across the harbour, on their way back to St Vincent, no doubt. The seas must be calm enough for them to make their Sunday trip, to come and join the gathering that is Lower Bay on a Sunday. The day when locals and expats go to the beach to eat, drink and play.

There is still debris around the harbour’s edge thrown by the waves which pounded the shore when hurricane Dean passed 100 miles to the north of us. The roads and footpaths are hidden under a film of grimey brown mud; residue from the torrents of rain which produced rivers along every gulley. The, usually dry, storm drains are trickling with water still, 3 days after the storm hit its peak. The harbour is glassy flat and back to its natural blue. For several hours on Friday there was a sharp line across the bay, the boundary between brown and blue. The run off from the hills poured into the harbour, filling it with deposits from all over the island. The storm drains are often used as garbage disposal ditches, people chuck everything in them. Then when it rains the waste ends up in the harbour.

Everything, it seems, has gone back to normal here. It is hard to believe that the southern coast of Jamaica is being pounded by 140mph winds as I type, by the very same hurricane which has since grown into a monster. The Prime Minister has asked people to evacuate their houses to one of the many hurricane shelters set up around the island in schools, churches and hospitals. They have instead stayed at home. Fearful of crime and looting they prefer to put their lives at risk than abandon their properties. I hope for them all that the gamble pays off.

The gunshot murder, the first, remains unsolved but someone has been charged with the drunken brawl one. So tomorrow is Monday, another day in paradise as we like to remind ourselves here. Perhaps this week will be quieter, without killing or storm, but doubtless something will come up to write back home about!

Here he is......

2007-08-16T17:33:00.000+01:00

Hurricane Dean. Looking likely to hit Dominica and/or Guadeloupe or Martinique...tomorrow. Still sunny in Bequia but the wind is freshening and there is a sinister haze in the air.

7pm Thursday: UPDATE

A dark black cloud crept over the hills, the wind picked up from the deadly tense stillness and the rain began; the thunder and the lightening.

Dean has been upgraded to a Cat 2 hurricane. Only tropical storm conditions are expected here. He is expected to hit Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe or St Lucia. Still, the prime minister has addressed the nation, said the conditions could be life threatening; winds, rain, flooding, landslides, sea surges, suddenly it seems a bit scary. The excitement has turned to nervousness. The neighbours have hammered corrugated iron sheets over their windows. The dogs have been fighting and the roosters squealing and the cat has just dashed in, soaked.

Midday Friday

Well we got off pretty lightly. That initial storm last night was almost the worst. After that it was calm again and remained so until I went to bed at 2am. I heard pounding rain through the night, but not for long, an hour or so.

I awoke this morning to an overcast, pleasantly fresh Bequia. The wind is streaming in from the SW, the opposite direction to the prevailing Trade Winds. The boats in the harbour are facing the wrong way and waves are breaking on the usually calm shore. The bay is full of ferries from Martinique and St Lucia taking cover. Several have tried to leave this morning but beat a hasty retreat once they left the protection of the harbour and quickly came back.

The eye of the storm grazed the southern tip of Martinique. So luckily no-one was directly hit. However wind and rain has been raging in Martinique, Dominica and St Lucia. Buildings have lost roofs and landslides are expected.

Dean is set to intensify, however, and become a very dangerous hurricane. The heat of the Caribbean waters will fuel it up and it may reach category 4 or even 5. We have got off lightly but it is looking bad for others out there.

Tropical storm Dean is on his way

2007-08-15T02:09:00.000+01:00

Forecast to be Hurricane Dean by Friday....and damn near us!

UPDATE:

Currently most models show him passing about 100 miles north of us (St Vincent)and making landfall in Martinique, Guadeloupe and/or Dominica...keep watching.

eek...I am becoming a weather geek....like my dad!

My new office

2007-08-14T16:26:00.000+01:00

complete with wireless!....

Somebody else dead

2007-08-13T02:25:00.000+01:00

Sunday night again, but this one was earlier. No gunshot, as far as I know. The man was taken away in an ambulance and, apparently, died in hospital. He had been found lying in the street by the power station.

Last Sunday’s murder is still unsolved. I do not know, yet, whether this one is being treated as murder, but the police are apparently all over the streets tonight and names are already being bandied about. Is this death related to the murder or is it entirely coincidental? Perhaps it was illness or a fight gone wrong. I can’t believe there is a serial killer on the loose. Perhaps the dead man was about to squeal on the culprit of the last one. These theories are all in my head, God knows what talk will be flying round the streets tomorrow. I am staying safe at home tonight with kitten.

My friend, Wilf, has now been questioned four times by the police about last Sunday’s murder. They ask him the same questions each time, he is getting scared. He went to see a lawyer who told him that the police couldn’t be stopped from questioning him,
‘They are just doing their job’ he said.
He told Wilf that plenty of others had been to see him complaining of the same thing. This calmed him down a bit, knowing that he wasn’t the only one. Every time they come they tell him that they’ll be back.
‘Why would they warn you that they are coming back?’ said the lawyer ‘it is just a tactic, they won’t be back, they are just trying to see if you will run’
‘Where would I run?’ exclaimed Wilf, sitting on this island of 7 square miles.
‘They think you might run like OJ’ said the lawyer. They both laughed at this, it lightened the atmosphere, and Wilf’s mind.
‘They need evidence, and you can’t do anything unless they charge you’
‘But I didn’t do it!’ cried Wilf.
‘Well I’m very pleased to hear that’ retorted this serene man ‘in that case you will be fine’.

This latest news has sent a chill up my spine. I hope it is a coincidence, this death, and not another murder. I saw the murdered man’s father in the street yesterday. He was dressed smartly in his Captain’s clothes, still working, still keeping on. I touched his shoulder and offered my condolences. He shook my hand and quietly said ‘I hope they catch someone soon’.

UPDATE:

It was murder. A fight, extra strong rum was involved. Someone has been picked up for it. It is seemingly unrelated to the one last week.

The first ever murder in Bequia was 7 years ago. Since then there has been 1 every year. Now there have been 2, unrelated, in 1 week.

Murder she wrote

2007-08-08T16:45:00.000+01:00

The peace in paradise was shattered at 2am on Monday morning by the sound of a gunshot which woke me from my sleep. I was snoozing on the ‘bed’ on my porch and was confused about what had woken me. I stumbled inside in the darkness and climbed into my real bed, enclosed and protected by a mosquito net. I didn’t remember the sound of the gunshot until I heard the stories the following morning.

The previous night I had been walking home in the twilight when I came across a huge gathering of people outside Julie’s guest house (Julie is a man!). People were spilling out into the road dressed in more than just their Sunday best. They were sporting suits and shiny silk dresses, rubber slippers had been replaced by sparkling stilettos and the women had plaited and straightened and woven their hair. It was a spectacular sight. We are usually a shabby bunch us residents of Bequia, so I changed my route so that I could wander through this gleaming crowd and take the spectacle in. A wedding party and most of the island seemed to be there.

As I walked into town in the morning a small boy playing with his sister in the dry storm drain by the road shouted something to me, or at me I wasn’t sure. I didn’t catch what he said so smiled at him and continued to walk. As I rounded the corner I was confronted by a yellow police tape stretching across the road. Suddenly the penny dropped ‘you can’t go down there!’ is what the boy had yelled. I turned and climbed back up the hill telling him ‘I should have listened to you’ as I passed. ‘What happened?’ I asked him, ‘Somebody dead’ he solemnly replied.

I wandered down into the harbour through the back streets. For anyone unfamiliar with the place the town would have looked a picture of tranquillity. But I could sense a change in atmosphere. The gaggles of people sitting on steps in the shade and under the leafy protection of the almond trees was normal, it was the looks on their faces that were different. Dark and serious, something had happened.

An old lady standing by the police barrier told me someone had died, but she was still unsure of the cause. The area that was cordoned off was yards from where the wedding party had been held, there had to be some connection, I thought. Sitting outside the, ironically named, Rush Hour eating my chicken and rice I listened as facts were passed back and forth.

‘It was a gun’ someone declared as they walked in ‘shot in the head’. Everyone knew the boy. His father is the captain of the local schooner which I have been working on. It was his sister’s wedding which I had walked through. But the boy had been in trouble; ‘a vagrant’ and ‘a crack head’ he was variously described as. He had been “troublin’” everyone for months.

“But still he doesn’t deserve to be dead!” someone cried
“Not with a gun”
“If you’re vexed with he, just let he know, even attack he with a knife would be better, at least he has a chance”
‘Nobody has a chance against a gun”

Someone else bounced in for his lunch “what’s happenin’ man?” he asked as a casual greeting
“You not heard about the murder?”
“Wha’ murder?”
“Last night”
“Serious?”
They filled him in on what they knew and he hung his head in his hands ”I’m going home, not hungry any more, I feel different” and he left.

This murder has hit the place hard, not because of the death so much but because he was killed with a gun. The neighbouring island of St Vincent is gun city. A pointless killing every week and few of them are solved. But Bequia is different and proud of it, a quality which people seem to respect. Even the Vincy boyz leave their arms at home when they visit.

So now that everyone knows the facts, the next task at hand is to decide who was to blame. 30 officers have come over by boat from St Vincent. An island of 7 square miles and 3000 people all of whom know each other. A wedding party of hundreds and a night watchman on duty in the school yard where the body was found. Sounds like a straightforward nut to crack. But things in the West Indies have a habit of complicating themselves. There are stories and gossip and bribes and corruption. The watchman is still being held which has compounded the talk.

The dead man was gay, or so they say and the watchman was a ‘batty boy’ too. This is where the theories start to spiral.

“If they were having sex and the watchman was afraid he would talk, maybe he kill he”

The poor watchman is a marked man now, guilty or not. There were jokes flying too amongst the serious talk. My friend Wilf had knocked the dead boy out in a fight 2 nights before. “It’s you, it’s you!” “Murderer!” they laughed. The gossip and the jokes became less funny when Wilf was questioned by the police the following night. They made him take them around the town and meet all his alibis, the people he had been with when he heard the shot. But still they joke and taunt him. They know it wasn’t him so they think it is still funny. He, not surprisingly, does not. But that is the humour here, it is harsh and direct. There is no room for a sensitive soul in this Caribbean world.

There is a unanimous feeling that it is “someone not from here”. No-one from Bequia would do a thing like that, they say. I would tend to agree, but then what do I know.

There is a white man in the picture too. He is the one the locals are pinning it on. A German who lives alone on his boat. He is based here but frequently sails off on trips between the islands; ‘running drugs’ is the word on the street. He reappeared last week. Arrived agitated and aggressive at Penthouse (the local rum shack, another ironically named establishment!) an hour after the bullet was fired. And, it is said, he had blood on his shirt. Well the blood could have been paint, or any such thing, we are a scruffy lot here, as I said.

So, Wilf has hit the bottle again with the stress of the accusations, the German has moved his boat but has not left the island and the watchman is still banged up. I will keep you posted but the plot is thickening and these are tense times in paradise.

Feedback from Radio 4 Saturday Live interview

2007-07-20T17:45:00.000+01:00

Fi Glover and her team have kindly sent me some of the feedback from the interview which I did with them. I am posting it below as it is fascinating to hear other people's stories......

Dear Fi and team….,
Coming Off Antidepressants
I suffer from clinical depression and was on the infamous Seroxat for some seven years in the 1990s.
Getting on to them was a bit tricky, with giddy fits, dry mouth incidents of ‘electric head’, but this was as nothing to getting off them.

They did work to a certain extent, but they took the highs out of ones mood more than they took the lows, and I came to realise I could only deal with my depression if I could feel the whole range of my moods and not have them clouded by Seroxat.

So I came off them. Didn’t refer to my doctor, I just stopped taking them. A very bad thing to do, I learned later.
Coming off them the room would swim about before me I got periods of giddiness such that I could not get out of a chair. I live alone and I was not working at the time, so I just got on with it. My moods went up and down and my emotions were greatly heightened. I listened to the radio a lot and anything with a bit of pathos had me in tears and I reacted strangely to stuff I heard. Desert Island Discs never failed to make me weep!

The worst thing was the ‘electric head’ thing. I only heard the term afterwards but understood what was meant. ‘Electric Head’ are shocks a bit like having an instant hit of extreme pins and needles deep inside the head, with a sort of electric shock crackle in the ears. Alarming, more than painful, but something otherwise unknown in ‘normal’ life.

The whole coming-off-Seroxat experience lasted, for me, about a week to ten days, then I was through it.
I went to see my doctor. He was ‘alarmed’ at the way I’d taken myself off Seroxat, to say the least, but he accepted that I’d done it and let it go.

The controversy about Seroxat (a la Panorama programmes) is that it promotes suicidal tendencies. I dispute this strongly… I felt suicidal whilst on Seroxat. Now I’m off it, I still feel suicidal at times. I’m depressed for Chris’sakes… It makes you suicidal; ‘tis the nature of the beast!

Thanks for the show – I got a mention last week with my Saturday Live – An Audio Duvet. That one’s a bit weak. I like my Saturday Live – It’s a Morning Glory myself!

****************************************************
I came off anti depresseants (Prossac) two and a half years ago after about five years on them.

I suggested coming off to the GP and he had to reluctantly agreed when he saw my determination. I'd had enough of being made to feel mentaly and physicaly inferior by the side effects. I don't think the drugs did anything to help anyway. If anti depressants work, why is there so much depression around the place? I had to do my own research and told the doctor how to help the process such as, prescribing medication in liquid form to make it easier to cut down dose slowly. Also when it comes to small amounts of medication making use of baby spoons or child despensers.

I have never regreted my decision and I imediatly began feeling better having made the decision. find groups or similar people to talk to and barrack the doctor for alternative therapies with no hidden agenda don't let them automaticaly reach for the drug company manual.

**************************************************

Dear Fi
I can tell you with authority that there are 209 grains in every capsule of Effexor (Venlafxine). I know this because I spent 6 months opening capsules and counting them out so that I could reduce the dose by one or two grains per day, in order to get my husband off the dreadful things.

They seemed to help for about a month and then suddenly it was as if he had broken through the mood-containment they initially provide and suddenly, his mood swings up and down became even more extreme. I got used to receiving phone calls from him asking me to come and rescue him from somewhere as he felt unable to move and was terrified he was going to do something sudden like leap in front of a bus.

Stopping the drugs cold made his mood even more unhinged. He started self-harming, cutting his arms, saying it was only thing he could do that made him feel anything at all. He once played noughts and crosses with himself with a knife on his arm. This formerly gentle man would lash out at me at times, dragging me by my collar, tipping food over my head, and even threatening me with a knife.

Long story short, reducing grain-by-grain took 6 months. Even then, his depression through that time was worse than at any other time in his life.

He' doesn't take antidepressants any longer. He's still depressed but at least it's his depression, and he knows his feelings now are genuinely his own, not drug induced.

*************************************

I have just heard your interview with the lady who suffered PTSD. There are NICE guidelines which explain that anti-depressants are NOT appropriate treatment for PTSD - a course of expert counselling is appropriate, and the NHS are setting up centres that offer this around the country, although there is great ignorance among many GP's regarding the nature of PTSD and the effectiveness of counselling, and, sadly, we have, through our charity, many cases of victims of fatal and serious road crashes simply being prescribed anti-depressants, which can mask symptoms, not aid recovery, and be very difficult to come off. PLEASE ADVISE YOUR LISTENERS THAT THEY SHOULD READ THE NICE GUIDELINES ON THE NICE WEBSITE RELATING TO PTSD IF THEY THINK THEY ARE SUFFERING FROM THIS DEBILITATING CONDITION.

************************

Shock and trauma needs to be processed through the body not the brain. The anti-depressants suppressed your symptoms until you came off them – the shaking and coldness is the body’s natural response to trauma – it is in fact the shock discharging.

*******************************

Re treatment of people with PTSD
There is at least one very good non-medical intervention, the Rewind Technique, which can be used by trained therapists. It takes minutes to do and is very successful as it works with the brain's memory-forming mechanisms. Unfortunately it is not widely available, and to have it recommended by N.I.C.E involves extremely expensive clinical testing which, as the technique doesn't involve big drug companies, is too expensive to do.

Poeple should read a book called "Prozac Backlash" if they want to know how drug companies have "lost" damaging info on addiction and serious long-lasting side effects caused by their products. We should always remember that these companies ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS - although very useful!

********************************
I have been on 3 seperate kinds of anti depressants - the third time because the waiting list for counselling in the area I lived in at the time (Wirral) was over a year long, and I was in such a state that they were worried for my safety. I actually wanted counselling as it was obvious after 2 bouts that the anti depressants were only masking the problem. I ended up being off work for 6 months, as much because the side effects of the pills were so severe with fatigue and disorientation as the depression itself. Subsequently I was taken off the tablets, and received 6 mths counselling after moving area. I have been anti depressant free for a year and a half now, and they help I received has given me different ways to deal with the symptoms when they arise.

*********************************

I've just been listening to the story of Kirsty's experiences with PTSD after 7/7. You may like to investigate (and to pass on to Kirsty) a relatively new and effective non-pharmaceutical treatment for PTSD that has been developed by the 'Human Givens' school of therapy. Google 'Human Givens' (or 'Mindfields College') and contact Joe Griffin, Ivan Tyrell or Piers Bishop for further information about the 'rewind' method. At first it sounds like some sort of magical procedure, but there is plenty of evidence that it works!

************************

Listening to the sad story of the bad sad effects of anti-depressants, I wonder if anyone has tried alternative medicines? There are so many available now which do not have bad side effects. I have been using homeopathy for more than 20 years and am just now doing an 8 week evening class, which is of course not comprehensive but there are so many remedies according to the precise personal symptoms that under an experienced homeopathic doctor, I'm sure they could find help. I have also done a short course in Bach Flower remedies and maybe some of these could help with expert guidance. I have not heard any discussions about anybodies use of alternative medicines, perhaps it would be interesting to hear other peoples' experiences.

A completely different successful use of alternative medicine was my finding an Alergy expert who was able to test me and successfully prescribe the right diet and herbal pills which cured a very debilitating and excruciating skin itchy rash which I had had for 20 months. I had seen my doctor several times and seen the chief dermatologist at the Jersey Hospital and all they could prescribe was anti-histamines and steroid creams, which just soothed the symptoms slightly and were not good to take as a long term treatment. The dermatoligist wrote an article in which he said that there was a lot that is not known or understood about 'skin' and it is difficult to treat. So I would say try an alergy test with an expert!

I hope this isnt too long for my first email but I do believe in the efficacy of alternative medicines rather than fill myself up with chemicals that are alien to the body. I hope this may be helpful.

**********************************

Hello Fi Glover and Saturday live team,
I heard with interest your excellent interview with Kirsty, the woman who suffered post traumatic stress disorder after 7/7, and her experience of withdrawal difficulties from her antidepressant medication. At the risk of blowing my own trumpet, I hope you will take note of my latest book and let Kirsty know of its existence.

Although the book addresses the wider condition of depression rather than being specifically concerned with ptsd, I feel confident that she will find useful information and guidance from this modest but reliable book [see attached press release]. Plus, it has great cartoons!

“Someting’s happenin!”

2007-07-18T18:44:00.000+01:00

I don’t know what it is about me and mad people. Aside from having gone slightly mad myself (with PTSD after the bombings) I seem to attract the friendship of people with unsound minds. Or maybe it is that I am attracted to them, I just don’t know.

A friend had arranged to take me to Mustique for lunch on the anniversary of 7/7 this year. He had arranged for a boat to pick us up and whisk me across the high seas to the manicured millionaire’s island a mere 7 miles from here. It was to be a surprise, a treat to take my mind off things. I can see it now from my porch as I write, but we never made it there that day.

Wilf is a friend from Bequia. A ‘typical’ West Indian rasta man. He has dreads and smokes weed and is always immaculately dressed in complementing bright Caribbean colours. He doesn’t drink alcohol, which is a rarity around here, he says it makes him into ‘a bad man’. For a couple of weeks there was calm in the rum shack at the harbour’s edge. The crew of the boat bringing over the molasses had been arrested for carrying drugs and the extra strong rum had consequently run dry. The men here drink this potent paint stripper of a drink neat with a water chaser. It is 80% proof and fuels violence and fights. Now it is back on the grocery store shelves and island fever has returned.

Two weeks ago Wilf took the boat to St. Vincent, the capital of this tiny collection of Grenadine Islands. He was going to sort out a new passport so that he could visit his son in England. But whilst he was there he was held up by 5 armed police, guns held to every part of his body, and robbed of the $800 in his pocket. Corruption in paradise runs rife. Who can you report it to when you’re mugged by the police themselves?

This was the trigger for the ‘bad man’ to return. He hit the bottle to mask out his pain and anger. The money was to fix his boat, on which he relies for his living, and to pay for his new passport. He drank himself into despair. If he couldn’t fix his boat he would never be able to make the money back to get the passport and he would never be able to see his son. A thought which has made him weep before me many a time. Emotions here run high and are worn openly on people’s sleeves. A far cry from the British stiff upper lip, it is normal to see a grown man crying, hear raised voices in the street and to pass people dancing with joy as they walk.

A week of the ‘bad man’ then a mad man appeared. A desperate phone call on the morning of the 7th
“Something’s happening, come quick!”.
I found him, face gleaming with tears, standing in front of his house.
“Every time I lie down I hear voices talking to me” he cried.
He said he had heard his mobile ringing in the night, even though it had run out of power, and when he put it to his ear there were voices on the other end. All night these voices had raged in his head, he asked me to take him to the hospital.

There was a gathering of people at the hospital entrance, people waiting patiently on benches, in the shade, to be seen. As we approached his eyes filled with terror and he started edging away from them backwards, finally turning and running out of the gate. I caught up with him to find him sweating and shaking, terrified of all who approached.
“I’m frightened of everybody” he told me “what’s happening to me?”.
He wandered around the village eyes streaming and his body dripping with sweat. He picked out his friends one by one
“Something’s happening” he repeated “I’m hearing voices in my head”. They all looked concerned and tried to help. One contacted the private doctor, who can usually be seen straight away without the nerve wracking queues at the public hospital, but he is a 7th day Adventist and doesn’t work on Saturdays.
“I’m hearing voices in my head’” Wilf told a passing old lady.
She looked deep in thought for a while and finally declared
“You need somebody who believes in the Lord God Almighty to get rid of that!”. He looked at her in despair and walked away.

I sat him in the shade under the almond tree to try and calm him down
“Who are you?” he asked me “are you an alien?”.
Another friend approached with a portrait of Che Gue Vara on his T shirt.
“Who’s that?’ Wilf asked, clearly terrified again ”Who’s that on your T-shirt?’ as he cowered under the tree “Go away, you’re frightening me”.

With the help of an old friend of his who is also a policeman we finally got him to the hospital. We walked through a small wooden door with peeling paint to find a man dressed in white sitting at a rickety wooden desk.
“We are only seeing emergencies” he said, without looking up.
“Who defines an emergency? You?’ asked the policeman incredulously as he marched through the room and into the main ward behind looking for a doctor.
“You can’t go in there” said the man in white sternly “And this is not an emergency”.
“Well in my opinion it is” replied the policeman “I have known this man a long time and I don’t like what I am seeing here”. Eventually, more through stubbornly refusing to leave the room that tactful negotiation, the man in white, who revealed himself to be a nurse, started talking to Wilf and asked him what was wrong.

Wilf told the story of voices and fear again. The nurse calmly asked him if he used marijuana or cocaine.
“I’m a ratsa man!” Wilf replied indignantly, “I don’t use cocaine”. He told of his mugging and the drinking and said he was afraid of people in the street.
“Are you afraid of me?” the young nurse asked calmly.
“No” my friend meekly replied.
“What do you think they are going to do to you?”
“Hurt me” he said.
“Do you think I am going to hurt you?”
”No”.
I was impressed with how this young man was handling the situation. He asked if he had ever had a breakdown before, if there was any history of it in his family.
“My Nana went senile” replied Wilf “a lot of my family gone that way”.
The nurse nodded and continued to make notes.
“Do you think you have any special powers?’” he asked and I knew where he was going. I have sat in enough small rooms with men in white and mad friends at my side. I know that a common symptom of mania is belief in holding extraordinary powers. The voices, the delusions and paranoia together with this belief would set the perfect scene for a manic episode. In my experience, your every day GP at home does not even know this, so this young nurse was winning my respect.
“Yes I have special powers” Wilf told him, and my heart shrank inside,
“Oh no, not again” I thought to myself.
“What sort of special powers?’ the nurse persevered.
“I can see inside people”.
“Oh God no!” I inwardly cried.
The nurse looked unmoved and asked if he could see inside him.
“Yes” said Wilf
“What can you see?”
“I can see you are a good man”. Relief flowed through me but the nurse was not yet convinced. He picked up his stethoscope and waved it at Wilf
“You can’t see solid things like this inside me?’”
“No” Wilf solemnly replied, not even flinching at the absurdity of the question. “I can just see that you are a good man”.

The nurse seemed satisfied and picked up the phone, apparently speaking to the doctor. His mumbling and his accent made him hard to understand but I gathered he was giving the doctor a brief synopsis. More mumbling, more notes, the phone went down and he walked over to the counter and picked up a syringe.
“Your blood pressure is very high, I am going to give you something for it”. There was muttering of Valium and other drugs incomprehensible to me. The doctor hadn’t even seen him yet the nurse was ready to give him a cocktail! Wilf started to quiver again
“No! I am allergic to lots of things, I’m not taking no mad person’s medicine, I’m feeling much better, I don’t need no drugs”.
“Well” the nurse replied sternly “I have no idea why you came to see me then”.
“You have made me feel better” Wilf told him and hurriedly we left. He was right, though, the nurse had helped, just by listening and talking and diagnosing a tangible physical problem of high blood pressure.

I took him back home, fed and watered him and put him to bed. He slept fitfully for a few hours and awoke looking drained and exhausted. Over the last few days he has complained of a racing heart a couple of times but there have been no further episodes. He has been eating like a horse and is slowly regaining his strength.

His insight is remarkable. Not just in the aftermath, but even at the time he was acutely aware of what was happening to him. I have seen people talking to themselves, to their voices, unaware that they are doing so, unaware that there was anything wrong with them. I have spoken to so many men, particularly black men, in hospitals in London who stringently deny their illnesses. It is, I think, a matter of stigma and pride. To admit that you are mentally ill makes you less of a man, to admit it is losing, better to deny it and keep a glimmer of hope that it can yet be beaten. But this was different and fascinating because of it. No hushed whispers, no hiding away, no denials or refusals to seek medical help. He was out there in the street wailing, desperate, telling all that were passing “Something’s happenin, something’s wrong”.

Perhaps it is the security of a small island community that made him feel able to do this. His friends are still concerned, looking out for him, but there seems to be no stigma attached to the fact that he went a little doollaley for a while and he shows no sign of embarrassment or shame. It’s just something that happened, and everyone is glad that he’s better. Perhaps it happens here all the time which is why no one batted an eyelid, I suspect not, though. I suspect that this is just the way of dealing with things here. People are open with their emotions, their troubles and their joys and are not, it seems, judged for it.

We, at home, would do well to learn from this lack of inhibition and openness, particularly where matters of the mind are concerned.

2 years on

2007-07-07T21:13:00.000+01:00

Sometimes it takes your tube being blown up on the way to work one summer morning to put the hum drum repetitiveness of your life into perspective. I took that same journey every day for a year and a half after 7th July trying to prove that I wasn’t scared, fighting a non existent battle with the already dead bombers. I wasn’t going to change my life just because of them, I wasn’t going to let them win. Gradually it dawned that they would never win, they are dead along with their innocent victims who they murdered that day, but I am alive and lucky to be so.

A Christmas card came from friends in New Zealand, ‘Carpe Diem’ it signed off whilst planting a seed. Ten years of working and commuting across London in dark overcrowded tunnels did not, suddenly, seem like the best way of living my life. In January I resigned from my job of 4 years and by the end of February I was living in a timber hideaway perched amongst the tree tops on a luscious green hill with a porch overlooking the tropical Atlantic Ocean. I live on the wild side of this little island in the Caribbean. Nine square miles, 3,500 human inhabitants and hundreds and thousands of others which bear no resemblance to human beings whatsoever. There are bats and lizards, snakes and manacou, humming birds, fireflies, cicadas and frogs. Last week I found an albino locust blown over from sub Saharan Africa along with hazy dust from the desert. The trade winds blow in from the east keeping my house cool with fresh ocean air. As the summer descends dark storms pass through, short and sudden, with wind so strong that the rain feels like hail stones against your skin. The animals awake and the parched vegetation smiles with shiny greenness sucking up the moisture as the heavy clouds pass. There is no water resident on this tropical island, only that which falls from the sky. We collect it on our roofs and store it in large echoing tanks underneath our houses. Rain is a blessing here, not the cold curse it is at home.

I transport myself down from this hill in my red mini moke, canvas shading the sun from above and sides open to the breeze and cooling rain, down through the valley filled with a dancing coconut plantation. Pencil thin trunks with an ecstatic growth of palm leaves at their head, bulbous coconuts waiting to fall on the grazing goats below. I wind back up another hill, past the hairpin bend that is ‘jumbie’ corner. The old folks believe that the spirits of the dead live here and the youngsters delight in frightening them with their tales. At the crest of this hill the vast natural harbour, which has made this place a haven for boat men for centuries, comes into view. A small town has spread its way along the valley and the main street runs along the water front. The harbour is lined with sandy white beaches and is filled with boats, some resident and many passing through. The population here changes every day, new faces being blown in by the wind and old ones sailing out to pastures new. This is a place where people live off the sea. One of the few places in the world where whaling is still allowed, so steeped is it in their culture. The two traditional whaling boats, complete with sails and spears are permitted to catch two whales each a year. So far this year only one has been caught. It was taken to the whaling station (built by the Japanese) out on a little island off the windward shore. Hundreds of people descended at dawn, braving the rocky island in high seas to buy their whale meat and blubber. It was the talk of the town, spirits ran high and there was a carnival atmosphere in the air. In the days before refrigeration the blubber was boiled into oil with the meat cooking inside. This oil preserved the meat for up to a year, stored in a bucket in the shade under their houses. To this day the people of the small whaling village are known for the beauty of their singing voices, said to be lubricated by years of drinking oil from the whales.

It is a small but eclectic community who choose to call this place their home. Locals and expats living uneasily but peacefully together. There is so little crime that the theft of a flashlight is thought worthy of a report to the police. Little is done, and people accused of more severe crimes can buy their way out of a prison sentence. The main pastime here, as far as I can see, is sitting around and talking. The almond tree at the harbour’s edge is the unofficial town hall under which there is always a gathering debating the issues of the day. Sometimes political, but more often than not just plain old gossip. Talking about other people is a national sport here and one in which I happily participate!

Last week I returned from a journey through the elements which cleansed my mind deeper than ever before. I sailed, from this very harbour to another old whaling island in North America. 2,000 miles in a 50 ft schooner through an ocean that was sometimes 4 miles deep and I found myself in Martha’s Vineyard. Six days at sea before we found Bermuda and a further five from there before we reached our destination. We left Antigua to the sight of a humpback whale and awoke the following morning to dolphins over breakfast. After that we had 5 days of very very little. A bird spent an hour trying to land on our mast which was the only life we saw for days. Suddenly the little things become major events at sea. We saw a moon bow (a monochrome rainbow lit by a full moon at night) the green flash as the sun rose, shooting stars and satellites and a never ending expanse of ocean, sky & horizons. The clouds became our scenery and the weather our lifeline. We were lucky to only get badly knocked about for our last night at sea. Others had worse and one boat, along with their crew of four, is still missing. We raced through the Gulf Stream watching the water temperature rise and the seas grow as we approached. Eight hours of rolling ocean and waves breaking over our cockpit and suddenly, at midnight, the water temperature dropped by 20 degrees, the air cooled and the seas around us flattened. We were though the stream in one piece, ejected out of the other end and into the cold New England morning.

I have always nurtured the spirit of the ocean inside me. My father built me a boat when I was 8 and sailing has been my freedom and my passion ever since. It seemed like a natural place for me to come and heal my wounds this haven of sun and sea. For long enough I had tried to keep living my ‘normal life’, battled the tube every day through the height of my PTSD and fought off daily panic attacks. The day I quit my job I also decided to quit the anti depressants which my psychiatrist had prescribed over a year before. Two weeks of cold turkey followed, or SSRI withdrawal syndrome as it is officially known. This felt like the final blow, I had been through enough, struggled on and conquered so much of my illness and just as I was ready to spread my wings and fly I was grounded by yet another trauma. When I landed on this tiny island, the only passenger in a terrifyingly rickety old plane, I felt as if every last strain of energy had been drained from me and I would never be able to move again.

But the Caribbean and the ocean have worked their magic. I am tanned and lean and fit from daily swimming and walking. I eat fresh fish and rice, fried chicken and plantain, nothing processed, no packaging or advertising, just the fruit of the land and the sea. I feel healthy and alive, in tune with the weather and the stars. I can sense the tiny uplift in air movement which precedes an almighty rain storm, I can tell the time by looking at the sun and the date by looking at the moon. I am not afraid any more of the squawking and rustling I hear at night or the bats that swoop from the eves to welcome me home. I have grown used to the enveloping darkness that is night on my hillside. This girl from London has found her feet in a world very far from home. My hairdryer and straightening irons have lain redundant since the day I arrived. I shower in cold water and wash my clothes by hand. My make up bag lies unopened and the only mirror in the house is no larger than my hand. There are no shops to buy ridiculously expensive clothes and indulge myself in that old therapy of retail. The record shop is a hut where I sing the songs that I like to the girl and by the following day she has burnt them onto a cd and charges me the equivalent four pounds for the service. I don’t read papers or follow the international news. That is a conscious decision to break the never ending trawling through the internet for stories of terrorism and government incompetence. Gone is the anger I felt towards our leaders for fuelling the terrorists rage by illegally invading Iraq, gone is the girl who could only talk politics at dinner parties, and ranting raving politics at that. Gone is the obsession, the hurt, the outrage and the fear.

The ultimate test, though, of the extent of this healing was found on my journey back. A bus ride from Martha’s Vineyard took me to New York from where I flew, three days later, back to the Caribbean. Arriving at the Port Authority Bus Station I felt like Crocodile Dundee in the Big Apple. Shocked and fazed, scruffy and dazed I met my old friend and we headed for her apartment. Without a second thought she lead me to the subway. Down into the dirty dark tunnel. A different subway, a different kind of under ground, but still the same cold fear. I could feel that old familiar tightening of the chest, quickening of the heart and cold sweat dripping down my neck. I breathed deeply and tried to use some of my old calming techniques. ‘What are the chances of this happening again?’ ‘And if it does what are the chances of me being on that tube again?’ But it didn’t work, this was a different city, a different subway, and one which had not been attacked before. The chances were higher, so my panicking mind told me, ‘it’s rush hour in New York and I am on the subway, the chances of being bombed are pretty bloody high.’ Eventually we emerged into daylight, out into Queens and above the ground and I began to feel my rigid body relaxing. We walked a couple of blocks to her apartment and I found myself entering a wobbly old lift with barely enough space for the two of us. Another phobia borne from my PTSD, small spaces with too many people, and lifts are one of the worst. We bounced our way up to the 6th floor and I hurried into the safety of her apartment. Safe until I heard the sirens and the car horns blaring outside. Sirens that always took me back to that day, and it seems they still do.

I wandered the city for a couple of days, caught up with friends and tried to shop, but that old instinct just wasn’t there. I walked into my favourite stores, 2 dollars to the pound I told myself, but just turned around and walked right out. I felt cramped and confused, I couldn’t see the sky, where was all that space that I had left behind? An instinctive urge took me back on the subway and down to the site that is Ground Zero. I have been there before, but this was the first visit since 7th July and it hit me like a thunderbolt. This vast empty hole in the middle of the city, gaping and raw, the site of such destruction and death, this is where it had all began. The empathy I felt for the thousands of people involved on that day was so powerful that it reduced me to tears. I thought of those that were there, those that died and those that are still living with the trauma of having been there and survived and the families that are still grieving for their losses. The colossal amount of pain radiating out of this site made me weep for lives that were destroyed that day and the spiral of death and violence which it triggered.

Three days was enough, and now I am back in my house on the hill, marvelling about the journey I have travelled and wondering how the second anniversary will hit me so far away from home. There are very few people here who I have told my story to, another conscious decision to try & distance myself from having to tell the tale. I am torn between doing something special such as having a day alone on the top of a mountain or just carrying on as normal and keeping it in my head. I will miss my friends and fellow passengers with whom I spent a beautiful but emotional day a year ago, we let off white helium balloons into the sky in honour of the people who didn’t make it off that tube. I cried with them for the first time, in public, since the bombs went off. They have helped me through so much of this journey but this year I will have to do it without them. I have a feeling that I will be all right though, a feeling that this is the right place to be, for now. It is Carnival this week end, after all, and there is so much of life still to celebrate.

Me on Saturday Live!

2007-06-30T16:45:00.000+01:00

Here I am! Just hit 'Latest Programme' and forward to 16:38.

That was wierd. Here I am sitting in the Caribbean feeling (almost) a million miles from all of that when my phone beeps with a text message from my mum saying that she's just heard me interviewed by Fi Glover on Radio 4 talking about coming off anti depressants. Well I recorded that interview before I left, which was the end of February. I guess they sat on in until a relevant moment came up like John Travolta singing the praises of the Church of Scientology which doesn't allow anti depressants, and upcoming 7/7 anniversairies, and attempted car bombs. I guess now was a pretty good time to run it, but it did feel like listening to and old version of myself. It was also quite a good reminder of how far I have come on this little adventure of mine. I had pretty much escaped it all for a while, but the old anniversary is working its magic & I am feeling incresingly uneasy. I have received emails from journalists asking me about my rection to the car bomb, I even recieved a phone call from a journo on my birthday, on a boat, in Bermuda, asking my opinion on some report which had just come aout about how cognitive therapy helps PTSD. I have to say I foudn it pretty hard to gather my thoughts and recollections together enough to be able to coherently comment. (Plus I was suffering from a pre birthday rum drinking hangover!)

Anyway, the anniversary IS coming, even in paridise I am aware of that, and hearing that interview this morning has just made me realise a little more.

UPDATE:
Oh God and now I read that a blazing car has just driven into Glasgow Airport. It seems that Gordon Brown is being welcomed to the real world of leading the country with a bang. Let's see if he can be any less reactionorary than his forebearer. (I still can't believe he's gone...puff...just like that!...oh joy!)

what the f**k is THIS?!!

2007-06-14T17:58:00.000+01:00

Any suggestions greatfully accepted! I found it on my porch, in Bequia, last night. Looks like some kind of alien to me, and none of the locals have ever seen one!

Stormbound in Bermuda

2007-05-27T03:37:00.000+01:00

I have lost count of time and days but I think we have been here nearly 2 weeks now.

We left Antigua to the sight of a humpback whale, awoke the following morning to dolphins over breakfast. After that we had 5 days of very very little. A bird spent an hour trying to land on our mast which was the only life we saw for days. Suddenly the little things become major events at sea. We saw a moon bow (a monochrome rainbow lit by a full moon at night) the green flash as the sun rose (yes that really does happen), shooting stars & sattelites and a hell of a load of ocean, sky & horizons. The clouds become your scenery & the weather your lifeline. We were lucky to only get badly knocked about for our last night at sea, others have had worse & 1 boat is missing. So here we are checking the weather maps daily, watching the lows fly towards us across the gulf stream & making another decision to stay put.

The harbour is filling with familiar faces from Antigua & beyond, all with the same story, all getting restless, but all knowing that the worst mistake a sailor can make is to go to sea from frustration of being in port too long. So we are biding our time & trying to make the most of this strange island of coral that is Bermuda

It is the land of petty rules & cleanliness. A little Singapore in the middle of the Atlantic. Endless pastel coloured houses all with white stone roofs which gives the strange impression of snow covered buildings in a tropical landscape.

The weather here changes on a penny. We have felt cold that we thought we'd forgotten then burnt orselves raw the following day. We have dragged our anchor in 50 knot winds & ended up on the rocks thanking our lucky stars for our solid steel hull. We sank our dinghy with rainwater & killed the outboard so now we are rowing by hand. The captain has flown out his wife & 20 month old kid so now we have a baby on board & tomorrow perhaps a dog. Our last rations at sea but I'm not sure there is much meat on a 3yr old jack russell called 'bird'!

And we have partied our nights away, our internal clocks thrown by the late setting northern sun, it is always midnight when you think it should be 9. A birthday in Bermuda was not one to forget. Encouraged by our newfound kiwi friends the jaeger bombs were flying, a druken conversation to the only girl on board the yach(Odysseus) which has sailed from New Zealand and it turns out she knows the only person I know down there! Instant friendships are sprung overnight in this place a million miles from anywhere. They left this morning for the Azores, they are heading east so no Gulf Stream hurdle for them.

Two days of vists to the US embassy has left me the proud owner of a 10 year mutiple entry B1/B2 visa, so I am legal for a while and can sail boats into the states for a good long time now without ever having to go through the dreaded Bush security beurocracy

We entertain ourselves with rule breaking competitions;'loitering' is a federal offence here & yesterday we got our first warning whilst watching a local being ticketed for having his car stereo too loud. Carrying a beer in the street with your shirt off is 2 offences in 1 hit, and if you stop and loiter you do 3 in 1 go. Trying to get into a bar with flip flops is a no no, and the bouncer will tell you to remove your hat after 10pm. I don't know how we got away with sleeping in a park which you are not even allowed to eat in, but that was our biggest crime so far!

Anyway I am running out of time & everything costs money here, and a lot of it. The third richest country in the world and don't you know it by the prices. $20 for an hour on the interent whilst my laptop is lounging in Bequia goddam!

So I am signing off and counting the days....soon to sea I hope

pics to make you sick!

2007-03-10T20:45:00.000+01:00

Yo from the sunny Caribbean!

2007-03-05T20:17:00.000+01:00

Well I am sitting in the (freezing) airconditioned internet room at the Gingerbread cafe in Bequia; my new home. I am gazing out of the window at the windswept palm trees in front of the great harbour that is Admiralty Bay. It is filled with sailing boats from all over the world. People stop off here to taste a bit of paradise. I, on the other hand, am here for 3 months tasting it every day!

I am living in a little wooden house, high up on the hill on the other side of the island. Most days, so far, I have walked into town and am usually offered a ride along the way. People ask what I do up there alone. Well I can tell you that I am certainly not alone. There are lizards and bats, cicadas and birds. It is silent of the London noises at night but the air is filled with a cacophony of nature's music. I am woken sometimes, suddenly, by a torrent of rain or a gust of wind rippling down the front of the hill.

I am being broken in gently by the friendly full moon, I am slightly in fear of the blackened nights to come. The other night there was an eclipse and the space shuttle passed over, a night time display from my deck amongst the trees.

I have met retired Americans who live here and many sailors passing through. The locals seem to be staking me out. It, apparently, takes two sightings before they feel able to approach. Everyone who has spoken to me has seen me before.

Yesterday the tourists were shunned from the beach, sidelined in huddles watching on as the Sunday party commenced. Brightly coloured speedboats arrived from St. Vincent bringing hoards of revellors onto this shore. There were sound systems and Bbq's, football and volleyball. Girls and boys strutting their stuff and coyly approaching each other.

I supped at my Callacoo soup, drank a beer and took in the gleeful scene. This, I think, is a place I am going to enjoy calling home!

For now, this feels too much like an office, inside is a rarity over here. I need to get out and dip in the ocean before I head up the hill and sup rum in my garden.

It’s late and I’m tired…

2007-02-25T01:43:00.000+01:00

…and my schizophrenic neighbour just jumped off his roof. I shouldn’t have stayed, I shouldn’t have watched but I couldn’t walk away. He was standing on his roof talking to the sky. He wasn’t angry, didn’t seem like he wanted to jump. He was just revelling in the freedom of being up high, away from the confines of his house and talking to himself or his voices or no one. He was up there for about half an hour and I wanted to be up there with him. I wanted to hug him and help him and try and do something to save him.

The road was cordoned off and the street was swarming with police and firemen. It brought everything back from when my friend was ill and the police stormed in and scared the wits out of him and he ended up in the Old Bailey. I ducked under the police cordon and asked them if there was a psychiatrist coming. ‘We’re handling it’ she said, ‘please move back behind the barrier’. It was all too close to the bone and I snapped back ‘well in my experience you don’t usually handle these things very well’. It was out of order and unhelpful, but as I watched this sick, paranoid man ranting from his roof surrounded by blaring police sirens and men in body armour I knew it wasn’t going to end well.

There was an extraordinary collection of people spectating; the orthodox Jews in their Saturday garb and the teenage gay black boys who live across the road. ‘Are you a model?’ one of them asked as I hugged myself in fear for this man’s life. ‘I wander what’s going to happen to his dog’? ‘I knew I should have slept with him when he came to our last party’. ‘It’s not funny’ I snapped, ‘that man is ill and the police aren’t helping, there should be a psychiatrist here’. ‘Don’t worry honey’ he said as he hugged me, ‘he’s a nice guy, he wears lovely clothes, he’s not going to jump’. I tried to laugh, to find humour in blackness, I’ve managed it before but tonight it wasn’t there. He realised I was upset and hugged me harder. He was 19, he told me, just out of prison for cocaine trafficking. Such a gentle young queen, he had got off with a £5,000 fine and 4 months in jail. Meanwhile the neighbour waved his arms to the stars. ‘He’s going to be alright’ my new friend said. But I knew, without a doubt, that he wasn’t.

The American neighbour was beside himself with worry. ‘I saw him on the roof and I called the police, now I wonder if I’ve done the right thing’. The screaming sirens continued to arrive and still he ranted into the blackness. At one point he looked as if he was climbing back in through the roof light. His nephew was down below shouting his name and trying to connect with him. Occasionally he would answer but immediately continued with his torrent of words. No one could get through to him from that far away.

As the queens preened and the Jews mumbled there was suddenly a break in his rantings followed by an almighty thud. Three storeys up and he had fallen from the roof ‘you bastards’ cried his nephew ‘you fucking bastards’. The police restrained him as he tried to go to his uncle. I hugged myself harder and tried not to cry.

Stretchers and lights and men rushed into the alley way, then nothing. ‘This is really bad’ said the American ‘if he was alive they would be bringing him out’. We stood and waited and finally I could take it no more. I had to ask 5 people before a policewoman gave me an answer to my question ‘Is he still alive?’ “Yes’ she answered sympathetically and relief flowed through my veins. Finally they brought him out on a stretcher and into an ambulance, the ambulance didn’t move. ‘Why aren’t they moving?’ I asked, ‘why aren’t they taking him to hospital?’. She took the time to answer me and explained how they had to wire him up and make sure he was stable before they could take him away. Finally they drove off and I clung to myself in shock.

I wandered back to my house and as I opened the door the heavens opened with torrential rain. ‘Why didn’t that start half an hour earlier?’ I cried ‘if it had been raining he might have gone in’.

It was tragic and shocking and painful but inevitable. The police and fire services are not trained to deal with mentally ill people. It is not their fault, but looking down at a street swarming with blue flashing lights and people in uniform is not what a paranoid schizophrenic on a roof needs to see. Too often these situations end tragically, I am not saying I know how to do it better, but there should, at least, have been a trained psychiatrist on the scene.

I am still shaking and shocked and terribly terribly sad. I felt a moment of empathy with my neighbour, he looked happy up there, he didn’t seem like a man who wanted to jump. He has been let down by a system which hardly exists, even if he does survive his life for the next few years will be one of enforced medication and poorly resourced psychiatric wards. I wish I could have done more to help him.

The word is spreading

2007-02-24T19:55:00.000+01:00

In today's Guardian, a fantastic piece by Alex Linklater about antidepressant withdrawal. I'll let you into a little secret - Jane is me. Alex was asked by The Guardian to change the story as they had already run a piece on 7/7 survivors recovery. It still works even with the changed details, and most importantly continues the media trickle of pieces about SSRI withdrawal which can only be good in raising awareness.

Caribbean party!

2007-02-22T22:54:00.001+01:00

I am hanging on by a thread, so much to do, so little time. On Tuesday I will be on a plane headed for Barbados, what a relief that will be from the frantic hum drum of the last few weeks. I have bought bikinis, an air port card for my Mac that I had to go to Southgate for as they don't make them any more, a short wave radio to pick up the World Service with, shorts, flip flops, a humungous new bag on wheels, had my mobile unlocked so I can use a local sim card....oh the list is endless. And now, on top of all of that, I have had to find a lawyer to deal with a particularly friendly leaving present. All I have left to do is buy copious amounts of books, record an interview for Radio 4 for Saturday Live (to be run this Saturday I think), collect my car from the garage and leave it at my parents', clear up my flat for its new inhabitants and oh, of course, pack - carefully and within the BA stringent weight limits.

And amongst all of this I managed to have a humdinger of a Caribbean leaving party...complete with diy spray tans in my bath beforehand, rum punches with umbrellas, finger lickin' jerk chicken, rice'n'peas, thumping reggae and happy summer colours.