The sea has been in something of a teenage sulk for the last couple of days. Don’t ask me what we did to offend it but, obviously we did or said something untoward. Now it is just barely raising the enthusiasm to flop over the reef that protects our beach, causing only a tiny dash of white wave to break dully on the white sand.
It is an endless fascination and privilege to be able to get to know the various moods of the sea, although it will be many years before we will be able to read it with a seasoned eye. What we certainly know already is that it is mercurial.
In December the rollers sweep in majestically at 10 or 15 feet in height and crash spectacularly onto the reef, although mostly we enjoy a more modest wave that is just high enough to send a brilliant white spume of bubbles high into the air. Then there are days like today when the floor show is, frankly, a tad disappointing.
However, if the sea is not performing at its best, the sky, as if almost embarrassed by its neighbour’s lacklustre performance is doing its best to dazzle. Yesterday evening I was sitting in my favourite chair watching as the sun bleached out the blue of the sky... yes, alright, I was supposed to be writing a script but it’s very distracting... when I noticed a bright red vertical neon light in the sky. I wondered if aliens had finally realised that Grenada is probably a lot more fun place to land than Washington or the Nevada desert. But no, it wasn’t an alien space ship but something even more exciting. The most extraordinary double rainbow I have ever seen.
It was so solid, rich and vibrant in colour that it looked like a very badly done piece of special effects as created by an over enthusiastic five year old let loose on a FLAME machine. It was genius. What’s more it emerged clearly from Sandy Island opposite our house and then travelled in a huge arc before landing right on top of tiny of Handkerchief Island which is a mile to the right... or vice versa. Actually I prefer to think of it landing on Sandy Island, perhaps it’s good omen... sorry, I suffer from chronic ‘magical thinking’. My dear departed, old Mum’s fault as she never walked under ladders, looked at the full moon through glass, crossed a black cat or failed to make a wish when she could see the end of a rainbow. If she could have seen this one with its crystal clear double ends she would have been ecstatic. Perhaps she did!
On a more mundane note, our never-ending building saga continues but, I’m happy to report that our little Boat House went up in less than 3 weeks and looks very sweet, especially now it has windows... a house without windows always looks like a child’s smile before the big teeth grow in. We still have to paint the outside and do the inside of course but that is the fun bit... well, relatively. I have to say after working on these houses for so long, the novelty has definitely caught the last train out of town, but at least the houses are now nearing completion. Well, to put that in perspective, we still have 5 bathrooms and two kitchens to do in one month but, in the grand scheme of things we classify that as ‘nearing completion’!
We need to move on apace because Kitty has her first booking for July which she is very excited about. Perhaps the Caribbean is slowly beginning to work its magic on me, if I’m taking the idea of building 5 bathrooms and two bedrooms within a month in my stride!! Actually I’m not taking it in my stride at all, that’s a complete lie, I keep waking in the middle of the night panicking about the whole thing.
When we used to sit smugly around the fire watching Grand Designs type programmes, I used to think how do people get in such a pickle? Why do they take on such impossible tasks? Why didn’t they do something more modest, but of course when it’s your turn to step up to the plate you end up doing exactly the same bloody thing... although to be fair we did have some extenuating circumstances we could not have predicted!
Still every expat we know here has told us it takes a couple of years at least to acclimatise to island life and those foolish enough to have built their homes says it takes years to recover from the stress. Yet those very same people have all now nestled into the fabric of the Caribbean lifestyle and drawn it around them like a comforting cloak, so now they all look gently tanned, quietly content and hugely settled into this strange little corner of the world. Of course it would be remiss of me dear things to mislead you and not mention that a good number of them are also mildly or wildly batty. So give me another couple of years and hopefully I’ll be wearing a do-rag on my head, wearing tattered shorts, smoking strange cigarettes and staring out at the world with a hitherto unseen expression on my face... that of a contented man happy in his own little corner of the world. In this case exactly 12 degrees north of the equator... in case you were wondering!
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