Fire-breathing Dragons and Dragon Tattoos

The Northern Lights - shoals of herring, ghosts of slain enemies, fox tails, old maids dancing? Aurora Bollocks. Still, another great titfer.

Last February, the Colonel and I went to the Arctic Circle to look for the Northern Lights. We prepared for the trip with our usual heady mix of military precision and literary indulgence. He spent many hours and even more sterling on a scary website buying, yes this is where it came from, scads of petrochemical schmutter. I had no idea that, since Mallory hung up his soggy, frozen tweeds and fed the last of the meat lozenges to a passing dog, great strides have been made in cold-weather clothing.

We unpacked gossamer-thin leggings which, under the waterproof, snowproof, marauding-Viking-rape-and-pillage-proof matching trousers, could raise your core temperature to boiling point. There were boots that weighed a ton, in which you could stand up to your ankles in snow and feel you were in caressing cashmere socks in front of a roaring fire. The layers of gloves, neckwarmers, vests, fleece body things and hats made me rather grumbly at home - I was made to try them on and felt like a schoolboy in Peter Jones' Uniform Department. Hot, fussed over, incapable of bending a limb and dreading the thought of having to pee. The Colonel snorted at my hopeful, flimsy handful of La Perla and took immediate charge of the packing.

I escaped as fast as possible into every single Wallander book I could find, cooling down with gruesome Swedish murders, solved by the grey-faced, taciturn detective brought so crossly to tortured life in this series.

We went straight to Ystad on touchdown to walk Wallander's streets; tiny winding medieval cobbles and concrete sixties plazas, all soaked in an authentic depressive drizzle. We marked each lane and square with the memories of his cases - victims, interviews, criminal hideaways - and many cups of hot, sludgy chocolate in cafes lit purely with strings of twinkling fairy lights.

But it was the frozen north that called us; both enchanted by the chance of seeing the Northern Lights we had dreamed of since childhood. We took an overnight train as far North as possible, well into the Arctic Circle and jumped out on a wooden station platform in Bjorkliden, where a sign announced it was minus 30 degrees. British Officer sang-froid and stiff-upper-lip took on a literal dimension as the Colonel's moustache actually froze within seconds.

We went out one night onto the frozen lake, riding snowmobiles under the stars. We stopped in the middle and listened to the moaning of the ice, sitting huddled on reindeer skins, drinking hot berry juice and hoping to buggery that the damn lights would show. Did they hell. The Colonel took a spectacular tumble on the ice and snapped a thigh muscle, so we enjoyed a more earthly son et lumiere. There are now Samis in Bjorkliden who can swear like English squaddies.

Which meant that the next day's dog-sledding was not quite as we had imagined. Instead of bundling into furs and skins while he did Dr Zhivago and shouted 'mush,' it was the Colonel wrapped up warmly on the two-man sled, smirking as the Sami driver explained how priceless the champion dogs were that I was about to drive into a frozen tundra. My flimsy sled had some iron bits to stand on which looked like mantraps and were the braking and steering system. Chilling volpine howls drowned out all instruction, as I shook from fear as much as bone-chilling cold. The only thing I heard was 'do NOT let go'. As the brakes came off, the eight dogs shot left up a hill and I, sure as night follows day, let go, pitching headfirst to the right into a drift of snow. The volpine howls did not drown out the Colonel's shrieks of laughter as I spat out mouthfuls of ice and climbed back on.

I remember very little of the climb up the mountain tracks; the dogs' energy was electric, but balancing was surprisingly easy. The driver of the Colonel's sleigh stood backwards shouting instructions to me as we wove upwards through huge drifts under an azure sky. After a while, I opened both eyes, stood a little off the brake and gave them their heads. Amazing. At the top, we emerged onto another frozen lake and he motioned me to go ahead. There was nothing but snow, sky, the whistle of wood against ice and the singing of the dogs, my blood pounding in my ears and the water from my eyes freezing on my cheeks. I felt like a Prince from Narnia. I let go of the brakes and let the dogs carry me at full speed across the ice and snow, my lungs on fire and adrenalin crackling in me like fireworks.

I circled the lake like a frozen Ben Hur before the dogs took me back to where the driver and Colonel were resting their dogs and drinking the hottest, bitterest, strongest, most ambrosial coffee I have ever gulped down. I could hardly speak, other than to pant 'thank you' to the blue-eyed huskies.

We never did see the bloody lights, though Sami lore has it that you must return again and again until you do. In the meantime, I am slaking my Skandi-lust with the phenomenal trilogy by Stieg Larsson; the perfect sharp antidote to overindulgence, overheated houses and overencumbrance of relatives.

Happy New Year.

Resolutions and Revolutions

Apologies if this is upsetting, but if it hurts to look at, imagine how it is to live with.

I've never been cynical about New Year's Eve; after all, having your friends around, lovely party or dinner and positively encouraged to stay up too late showing off - heaven.

The thing that does bore me though, is the harping on about giving stuff up, resolving to make life-shattering changes, join gyms, stop drinking, shopping, eating chocolate, enter a monastery. I've never subscribed the whole suffering-is-good-for-the-soul Protestant anti-fun ethic. Suffering and denial is crap for my soul. It makes me short-tempered and deeply resentful; bottles of wine appear on my desk at work from terrified employees and by January 15th, they have usually staged an intervention and taken me to the pub.

A couple of years ago, full of turning-40 mortality, I agreed to run a ten-mile marathon, which to my surprise involved months and months of training. I did the marathon (nobody more stunned than me), but ended the year about a stone heavier than I started as I have NEVER been so hungry in my life.

I think it's easier to resolve to add to one's life. I have sucessfully kept a five-year-old resolution to eat more cheese (I had to also buy a small fridge for my own personal use, but it was a small price to pay for on-tap Gorgonzola and Stinking Bishops) and only buy cashmere.

This year, I am counting blessings, and adding to someone else's life. If, like me, you are overwhelmed and sated by the sheer amount of STUFF there is to manage after a good Christmas haul, I suggest you give some away. I am adding clarity and peace to my existence. Encouraged by the saintly Maxminimus and someone close who knows the life-changing difference it can cause, I will pay for a couple of cleft-palate operations for children who have literally nothing.

In the meantime, there's a perfectly ripe Camembert in the kitchen with my name on it.

Making a list and checking it twice

The bloody kitchen floor is under here somewhere...

Firstly, I hope very much that all of you had a peaceful and lovely Christmas and if not, that you had a decent supply of booze to get you through it. Chez nous, it has whizzed by in a blur of presents, visits, laughing and some ill-advised late-night singing on the karaoke machine that Santa left.

Well, forgive the long radio silence; I have been without internet and with enchanting people since I came back from the sun. I now am sitting in a strangely silent house nursing a dog who ate I cannot imagine what when I wasn't looking and is very ill and just wants to snuggle in front of the TV. That'll make two of us then.

My time in the sun was epic and when British Airways theatened to strike and strand me on the beach, I merely shrugged. However, they got us back, landing between airport closures and snow storms and giving me just enough time to race round the supermarket and speed-listen to carols to get me in the mood.

I have two wonderful men who join us for Christmas each year who were also stranded, in Morocco, and also made it over in the nick of time. One comes all the way from Melbourne, one from heaven. They cook like angels and wash up like plongeurs. They also teach the bots exotic swear words and make us play Sardines when it is way past bedtime.

So the bots and Edward are in London at the Panto and Freddie is going to a Chelsea match tomorrow. The angels have flown to go skiing in France. The Colonel gets back from his peace-keeping mission tomorrow. I have a fridge full of left-overs and probable renal failure. I have a camera full of videos of grown men grabbing microphones from small children and transmogrifying into Robert Palmer. The library door is firmly closed on a sea of wrapping paper and there is tinsel in my hair.

The dog and I are on water and boiled rice. We had  fantastic time.

Puddin and Souse

The last time I was here, a decade ago, Edward & I were invited to the home of my first boyfriend Roger and his wife; she and I were both pregnant and exhausted - as we bonded over swollen feet, the lads got stuck into the rerserve rum and we had a splendid evening - apart from having to drive back to the hotel (me) from the midddle of a canefield in the middle of the island in the pitch black with a helpful singing soul (Edward) for company.

Ten years on, Roger's daughter and my son are almost teenagers; his brother arrived back this week for Christmas - he lives in Switzerland with his wife - and we are all invited to a Bajan restaurant for a homecoming lunch. Roger and Kiki live bang in the middle of the island, in St George. His family have been there for hundreds of years, working on, owning and latterly restoring some of the beautiful old plantation houses that are falling into disrepair all over the shop. His dad is 86, remembers the 13 year old me like it was yesterday (which both makes me cry and delights me at the same time) and pitches up this morning demanding a rum like the rest of us have coffee.

To be honest, I was debating whether to bring the bots or not. I remember myself these interminable lunches, adults banging on and drinking and the pudding and souse the only thing to eat. It's a similar peasant dish to haggis or black pudding - the unspeakable parts of the animal mixed with whatever is to hand - oatmeal, blood, whatever. Pudding and souse I remember to be just bloody awful - pigs intestines mixed with cucumber and vinegar and hot sauce. I love flying fish, adore pumpkin fritters and could live on goat curry, but pudding and souse is plain yucky.

However, I am out-voted by Roger's family and there is no debate whatsoever on this. We are all whisked away to the restaurant which is in an old rum shop on stilts. Open on all sides with huge shutters and a view which is exactly the same as it has been for two hundred years. Even at ten thirty, there is a little queue. We move plastic tables about and the lads come back from the bar with quart of rum, Sprite, Coke and a plastic tub of ice. The breeze is soft and Chelsea is playing on the screen behind the bar. Freddie is cross-eyed with happiness. Some Rastas chat to him about Didier Drogba; he grows about seven feet, takes a slug of Sprite and calls one 'mon.'

Luckily the food arrives - we have spicy jerk pork, flying fish and barbeque chicken - our plastic plates are piled up higher than we could ever hope to finish. There is macaroni pie and even chips for Roger's daughter (I had threatened to mangle the bots if they ordered them..). We get stuck in - Roger's dad enthralls me with tales of going to the school where my father taught by horse-drawn buggy; being taken to choose the rod that would cane you from the bamboo grove; shares my memories of tea-parties on long-ago Friday afternoons with my parents; long Sunday lunches at the tumbledown Atlantis Hotel, falling into the sea on the East Coast, sandy and hot from swimming, swarming the buffet like starvelings. These are parts of my life that I thought had been lost forever; I cannot begin to describe how valuable the jigsaw bits are.

So I won't. I'll leave you with us ordering another quart of Mount Gay; great gales of laughter; new friends and old; wonderful food that feeds the heart and belly; memories and reminisces; good-natured ribbing and jostling at the bar; the wind playing across the canefields and through the banana trees; the settler-built church on the hill that has served this valley for centuries; the bots full of chicken and Coke and sweets someone has found for them.

It will be hard to leave.

A very happy hour

With Pavlovian accuracy and lolling tongues, the English chaps here present themselves at the bar-in-the-pool at exactly 3.29pm just before the bells rings for happy hour. We're not a race noted for style, whatever my anglophile blogmates may fondly imagine. And especially not in hot weather. Other races cover up chicly in linen and chiffon; the Brits like to parade their ancient shorts and palid guts as the mercury rises.

Anyway, yesterday three were perched politely awaiting the bell (Style, no. Manners? Always). Opposite them, an American Marine (yes, he told the entire poolside) strutted out of his apartment. He looked like he was wearing the stick-on wrestling chest that Freddie has, so defined were his comic-book muscles. He dropped to the ground and began counting out beautifully-executed push-ups. (You see the lengths I go to, to bring you tales. Watching that was no picnic, I can tell you.) The Brits discreetly slithered their eyes at each other and got stuck into their first drink.

The Marine went back inside, and we all settled back down to the exhausting, relentless round of decisions - beach or pool? Front or back? Italian or Bajan? Sebastian Faulks or Vanity Fair?

After an hour, the bell rang again and the Brits slithered off their aquatic perches a shade less steadily that they had leapt up. The Marine came back out, dropped again. Only this time he had a small boy on his back. He got to seven before all three Brits offered noisily and seriously to sit on his back too.

I haven't seen him today. Not that I was looking, you understand.

From far away..

Today I am in a far away place, lost way down the lanes of nostalgia. Instead of MORE sandy tales, I am honoured to be guest blogging chez Tish. Please visit me there, but more importantly, enjoy her erudite take on how to capture the chic of the French and amuse yourselves with her fabulous writing. I am on a beach watching my children learn to body surf; the next best thing is to charge over there and finish up your last-minute shopping. Amusez-vous!

A Journey

To get to my school in Bridgetown from the parish of St John, I had to travel across the island by bus. Even in the Seventies, the bus was a museum piece. Known as a Toast Rack, it had an open side, with benches across the whole width. There were no windows, just wooden frames with a rolled-up oilcloth attached to each one, to be let down in case of sudden, heavy sweet-smelling rain. To let the driver know you needed to get off, there was a string the length of each side, attached to a bell next to his head, which you would pull. ONCE.

The double-pull was the fiercely-guarded prerogative of Mistress King. Like 19th Century housekeepers, this titular courtesy was paid to respectable umarried ladies in  positions of authority. And conductress on the St John bus was a hell of a responsibility. Part disciplinarian, part moral arbiter, Mistress King was a huge figure in my life, in all respects of the word. Woe betide any schoolchild who misbehaved or lacked manners. She would bellow down the bus 'CHILE! Wunna mother would be SO shame! Show we respec or dem will be some BIG licks.' When the passenger had got on or off the bus safely, she would pull the bell twice, ding-ding and shout 'Go 'HEAD'.

The bus stopped in a seemingly arbitrary manner, sometimes but often not, observing the red and white signposts denoting bus stops. There were special stops (bang outside their houses and sod any rare traffic that would be disrupted by this) for the elderly, for bank clerks (who had god-like status for Mistress King) and for the vendor ladies who went each day to the Careenage in Bridgetown with their wooden trays to scratch a living. Their trays were a bloody nightmare to get on the bus though. Precarious piles of breadfruit, mangoes and avocadoes would roll frighteningly from side to side and if anything rolled off, Mistress King would make a child duck under the benches to catch it.

The old bus toiled up the steep bay, clutch objecting noisily and smokily, meandered through waving cane fields and rattled along dirt roads for about an hour, hooting its way crossly through early-morning Bridgetown traffic and disgorging a great flurry of poassengers to start their days.

Coming home was chaos. The bus station was an empty lot near the canal. There were a couple of burned-out cars for sitting on and a dusty pair of palms afforded scant shade from the afternoon sun. Snow-cone vendors zoomed suicidally about, bells ringing on their bikes with ice-boxes stuck on the front. For 25 cents and by banging on the side of the bus for their attention, you could get a plastic cup of ice with fruit syrup squirted down the middle which melted deliciously if you gently and rythmically squeezed the bottom of the cup. Too greedily and the contents burst out onto your clothes. Given that we were not supposed to eat in public in uniform and also that there were no washing machines in the entire parish, it was an undertaking of some daring to order one.

Being British, queuing is in my DNA. The bus would creak into view and the shout would be heard 'De bus, de bus!' Scores of people would scrummage their way on, elbows akimbo, watched disdainfully by Mistress King who seemed to accept this carnage. For the first few days, when the dust cleared, the bus would be packed and one little blonde girl would be standing politely by, satchel in hand while Mistress King bellowed did I want to get on de damn bus or not? I learned pretty quickly.

Once, my lovely gentle grandad was staying with us. He met me at the bus stop to come home with me after a day in Bridgetown. I have a blurry photo of us standing beside the burned-out car, me in uniform, clutching a snow cone, him grinning delightedly. He adored the rackety bumpy ride home, chatting happily with all the passengers I'd never even spoken to. He was enchanted by Mistress King and she by him. At every shout of 'Go 'HEAD,' he became more helpless with laughter until eventually, she motioned for him to sit by her. As the bus began its long descent into Martins Bay, each creaking stop was punctuated by a ding-ding and a very English shout 'Go ahead. Please.'