On this drizzly day, Jackie did a great deal of planting and composting. We then carried off to the dump two more bags of the griselinia cuttings that Aaron and Robin had filled for us on Sunday. We only came back with a hoe.
After completing the scanning of the March 2004 colour slides of Barbados, i discovered some negative film I used when walking around the island before Sam arrived. The first dozen of these are of a ten mile walk from our first hotel at the southern tip to the capital, Bridgetown. It was a bit hot, and this was when I earned the epithet ‘the white man who walks’.
This street scene shows the sign for a roadside bar; a well cared-for church, and typical chattel houses,
one with some kind of lean-to constructed of weathered corrugated iron, which was a common roofing material.
The gardens of some of these houses contained car wrecks.
Other owners preferred shrubs,
such as this bougainvillea trained around a porch behind a little picket fence.
Chickens, some having been instructed in the art of deportment, strutted around with the apparent freedom of a New Forest pony.
Coconuts
and breadfruit hung over the road which lacked a footpath,
and along which rampant buses tore. There were not many stops, but local people kept telling me I should use one.
The children who emerged from these simply constructed homes were clad in crisp, clean, uniforms and certainly were not ‘creeping like snail, unwillingly to school’ (William Shakespeare).
This evening we dined on Tesco’s fluffy fish pie; cauliflower, mushrooms, tomatoes, and peas. Jackie drank lemon squash, and I drank merlot. Jackie is still carrying a cough from the virus, although I am not.
