Caribbean dreaming
Iknow it’s a first world problem and there are bigger things to contemplate, but my annual holiday in the Caribbean has been postponed for the third year running.
My British Airways vouchers are starting to look creased and dogeared, and I’ve started to obsessively doodle palm trees in the margins of my notepads.
This would have been my twelfth visit to the charming and old-fashioned island of Nevis.
These days I go with a gang of converts, but I used to grab a bargain bucket offer, up sticks, and take myself and my bike off to Gatwick, and within ten hours I’d be pedalling along past sandy strands whistling the theme tune to Desert Island Discs.
In four hours one could cycle round the entire perimeter of the island. One day I would go clockwise, another day I’d go anti-clockwise, just for variety.
And despite the village children who would chase after me shouting ‘Hey, Fatty Bumbum!’ as I struggled up some of the more murderous slopes, I did pretty well for a deskbound chubber.
Although doing nothing for a fortnight seemed irresistible at first, I must admit that on one’s own, the days did start stretching out.
On one trip, everyone else in the hotel seemed to be on honeymoon, so it was a table for one for yours truly every evening.
My bike got sand in its gears, so I had to find something else to do. I decided I should use my time off constructively, so I visited the hotel library with the intention of selecting the most difficult book on the shelves and giving my brain some challenging exercise.
This wasn’t easy. The library consisted entirely of books donated by departing guests and as they were mostly Americans, it was all stuff with titles such as How to Make Your First Million or Lose Weight in Days with My Colonic Drainage Plan.
Eventually I found the most obscure and difficult piece of literature I had ever tried to read. It was somebody’s master’s thesis on the subject of Bedouin allegorical poetry. Folks, I had to read every paragraph twice, but armed with copious amounts of Pina Colada, I ploughed through it.
An overdose of useless information to be consigned to the nether regions of my mind you might think. But many years later I was serving on an Arts Council committee, and someone had applied for funding to stage a reading of… yes, you guessed it…bedouin allegorical poetry.
I sometimes felt out of depth in these rarefied cultural discussions, but when the chairman, wearing what could have been interpreted as a supercilious smirk, asked if anyone had any knowledge of the subject, I piped up.
To everyone’s astonishment, I spoke eloquently on how arguments about date trees and access to water sources could be solved by allegory and example rather than through confrontation and that this form of law had existed for centuries alongside conventional legal systems, with the poems becoming like roleplay to those who inherited them.
And I got them their grant!
Ralph Oswick was artistic director of Natural Theatre for 45 years and is now an active patron of Bath Comedy Festival