A giant grown-up's playground
A year afloat: to the Caribbean and back
Sam and Alex Fortescue
Fri 25 Mar 2011 20:08
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Woe is me; my wife has left me. I'm all alone...
Of course, she's sitting right next to me, but she
might as well be on a different planet. It's all because of books. Let me
explain. Alex is reading Gone With the Wind - all 1010 pages of it. Tolstoyan in
scope, the story is exceptionally well known to Alex whose childhood friend Lili
watcvhed nothing but the film version, round and round on video. Whenever Alex
went over to see Lili, they would settle down to another 30 minutes of the film,
but because Lili watched it with other friends too, Alex was never sure where in
the story she was. She probably watched the whole thing several times over, but
never saw the parts in the right order. So, now she has the book at hand, she's
impossible to drag away; I get constant updates on what Scarlett and Rhett are
up to.
I meanwhile retaliated with the third Stieg Larson
book - the Girl who Kicked the Hornets Nest. However, I suspect the type was
bigger in my book, and it was certainly shorter - just 700 pages. So, while I
had crawled to the end of crimes against the Swedish constitution in just three
days, Alex has been buried in her book for the best part of a week. I tried to
plug the gap with Flaubert's Madame Bovary. But since I had to ask Alex what
such-and-such a word meant at least twice every sentence, I abandoned it after
100 hard-won pages. In all that text, there can only have been a dozen lines of
dialogue; the rest was an unblinking barrage of descriptive writing. I knew what
all the cats in the Bovarys' street looked like, but I had no clear idea what
the main protagonists were thinking about.
Anywa, in the meantime, we've discovered a glorious
great playground for grown ups, in the form of The Baths. There's snorkelling
aplenty among vast heaps of boulders. Fish abound. When you're fed up of
swimming, there are fabulous, empty beaches to get your teeth into. And then,
there is a sort of orienteering course among the boulders. Part of this has been
turned into The Baths nature trail, which is duly swamped with
grockles. It's still cool, though, like walking through a series of caverns
between the boulders, some knee deep in water, some involving scrambling to get
over. We spent a happy morning here before decamping to Spanish town, the
island;s capital, to clear in. A frenchwoman next to us had to pay $130 for the
privilege, but for a reason we still haven't fathomed, they only asked us for
$13. Could we really look that scruffy?!
View from Summer Song this morning... our private
beach
 A giant rhino's foot?
 A house we'd like to rent one day
 Boulders and turquoise seas...
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