Well dear things it has been some time since I dipped the aged quill into the inky blackness... still, enough of our personal problems... how are you all? I gather our friends in the UK are enjoying some proper snow and no, that isn’t a smug dig... I love snow and would be happily pottering around in it now if I was there.
We haven’t had any snow but we did have a freakish number of hurricanes tripping the light fantastic across the Atlantic and it does tend to concentrate the mind and one’s buttock muscles when you see them getting close. Grenada is officially outside the hurricane belt which is why you can insure your houses and yachts here but we do get them every 50 years or so. Hurricane Tomas decided to play with us and swung very close before reading the small print and realising he wasn’t allowed in, so he skulked off and hit St Vincent, St Lucia and of course yet again poor blighted Haiti. Living in paradise often extracts a high price for the privilege.
Before that, throughout our first proper rainy season we had been enjoying lovely short but incredibly heavy rain bursts which turn the island every shade of green before the sun reappears twenty minutes later. However, we did have one huge depression which sat over the whole of the southern Caribbean like a sulky teenager for the entire week. It was of course - oh yes, thank you God, very humorous... the week we had chosen to do the shoot for Horizon Motor Yachts. Our dear chum and hugely talented director Jel Groman from Firecracker Films came over with his lovely girlfriend Alice to shoot a mini documentary.
We had a fabulous 45 foot Catamaran, a beautiful BMW designed monohull and a 46 foot Sea Ray powerboat which looks like something out of a Bond Movie. We had glamorous models, state of the art cameras, beautiful boats and the worst weather I or anyone else had seen here in decades. Not just flat and grey skies but slashing rain and thunder. It was the most stressful shoot I’ve ever been on. Normally the trade winds blow any bad weather away in a day or two at the most but not this time.
Well, against all the odds and with everyone trying to jolly each other along and Jel playing the game of his life, we have somehow ended up with what will be a great film. When the new Horizon Motor Yachts website goes live in January complete with the film I will give you the nod and you can go and check it out. The music is by my son George’s band Greenfeet... a rather lovely, laid back summer sound with lazy guitar licks and haunting vocals by George’s girlfriend Tuala. Talented little bastards... you teach them a few chords and picks out of the kindness of your heart and then they go off and humiliate you by becoming ridiculously talented and showing up how crap you are.
We are beginning to get proper paying guests now which is a little nerve wracking. I feel like Basil Fawlty waiting for the guest from hell - who was called Mrs Richards if I remember rightly - turning up...
Mrs Richards
When I ask for a room with a view I expect something better than that
Basil
That is Tourquay madam
Mrs Richards
Well it’s not good enough
Basil
Well what were you expecting from a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The hanging gardens of Babylon? Herds of Wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain... that is TORQUAY!
If anyone complains about our view I’ll give up. Talking of Basil and hotel inspectors we had an utterly charming couple here last week who weren’t hotel inspectors but perhaps even more scary... she was in Travel PR!!! Argghhh. If PR people hate something they not only tell you, they tell the whole world. Luckily she didn’t tell us she was in Travel PR until Kitty was waving them goodbye at the gate. Had we known our nerves would have been hanging out to dry on the line for a whole week. Happily, she loved the place unconditionally... and thought of this spot as the authentic Caribbean and the beach house and pool were a real hit. Phew!!!
So things are slowly coming together and we have done that one, last crucial thing you need to do to turn a house into a home... we have acquired a dog. We are now the proud owners of Big Joe who we bought from the GSPCA (Grenada version of the RSPCA) for the grand sum of £15. He is huge and beautiful – now - but when we first saw him he was a pathetic, starved, depressed specimen. He was days from death when some kindly soul found him and took him into the GSPCA. He’d been hacked at with a cutlass, abandoned, abused and starved but when we see him in his cage he walked forward on unsteady legs and lay his head in Kitty’s hand and sighed deeply. That was it. Love at first sight.
He was too weak for us to take home then but a couple of weeks later we brought him home and he is the perfect gentlemen. Someone obviously loved him once he knows about living in houses... a lot of dogs in Grenada only live outside... he knows about riding in cars and sitting by fridges and is totally house trained and so gentle. Although if someone were to threaten Kitty they would last about 5 seconds... he weighs 120 lbs and has very large teeth. So somewhere along the line his life took a very bad turn for the worse but what is so humbling is that he is in no way aggressive or timid or bitter or unfriendly. If the things that befell him and befallen most humans I doubt our generosity of spirit would remain quite so intact.
So now Big Joe...he is to be the star of the GSPCA website as a ‘before and after’ case history. Having him here means we get to do things we should have found time for but didn’t. Like walks along the beach every evening, and sitting on the steps watching the scenery. As he has a bad heart from untreated heart worm and low white blood cells & tick-borne diseases, etc he isn’t very well so he can’t walk far or fast but he loves his gentle stroll and paddling in the sea and chasing parrots out of the garden and watching the Pelicans as they swoop low over head... and so do we, now. So thanks, Joe.
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