Several of my blog-posts have criticised Cayman’s generally low educational standards, which are the consequence of a poor educational strategy. Two generations ago, the Islands’ political representatives seem to have been persuaded by the British Colonial Office (now the FCO) not to bother about the standards of all but the brightest of their fellow Caymanians.
Last February [Protection versus Education], I noted that the permanent affirmative-action program installed by the FCO negated the need for ethnic Caymanians to ever compete on equal terms with migrants and immigrants at any level. Foreigners’ expertise and qualifications would be trumped by the birthright entitlement of local bloodlines.
As long as an ethnic Caymanian was “adequately” qualified for a job – in the opinion of a committee of ethnic Caymanians – he or she must be hired or promoted or retained ahead of any foreigner. (Once, in the 1990s, the Immigration Board actually turned down the Work Permit of the Manager of the Bank of China. Beijing called in the British Ambassador, and the problem went away – but, crikey...!)
The policy explains the predominance in government jobs of ethnic Caymanians of doubtful ability, work-ethic, and international experience. In the private sector, the program has pushed and pulled native Caymanians to the top of the ladder in many fields of employment, regardless of their experience or competence. Some are properly qualified, some are not; it’s not always easy to tell, from the outside.
Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that every action generates an equal and opposite reaction. Private- sector employers don’t like to be ordered who to hire, promote or fire. Their reaction to orders was outlined in one of my very earliest blog-posts – Everybody’s Cheating, in December 2010.
Corruption, intimidation, tokenism and quotas became embedded in our society. Resentment and contempt between expats and Caymanians are almost palpable in many workplaces. In private conversation, the hostility is evident.
An economic recession, aggravated by the British FCO’s recent decision to rein in Public Expenditure and the huge unfunded Public Debt, has generated 3000 registered unemployed Caymanian citizens (including immigrants), out of a local workforce of 25,000 or so. The foreign workforce is about the same size, split 50-50 between skilled and unskilled. (I’m guessing the figures; no reliable ones are available.)
So why can’t unemployed Caymanians replace 3000 of the unskilled foreigners? Bearing in mind our annual Education Budget of thirty or forty million dollars, how come there are any unemployed Caymanians? The answer is, that for all practical purposes they are unemployable. The combined weight of government disapproval, intimidation and legal sanctions cannot shift more than half a dozen of them.
The 3000 feel entitled to be supported without working. “It’s our Island. We’re the landlords. From Jamaican domestic servants and Filipino security guards on five dollars an hour, to British lawyers and Canadian accountants earning a hundred times as much, every expat sucks at Cayman’s teats. Let them pay for the privilege!”
It could have worked, you know. Paying the ethnic-Caymanian community for their “birthright” could have worked. Fees paid by tax-haven clients could have been put aside into a special reserve fund and distributed to all native-born individuals and their descendants. Why wasn’t it tried?
Because the FCO clerks of the day didn’t think of it, that’s why. Civil Servants are all trained to think in terms of precedents. The Whitehall/Westminster system of governance was the model for our micro-legislature and micro-public-service hierarchy. The importation of indentured labour in post-slavery times was the model for the new Cayman tax haven.
With precedents in hand, the whole strategic plan for Cayman was probably devised one afternoon before a Bank Holiday weekend, and wrapped up in time for the FCO clerks to catch the 6.12 train home from King’s Cross and St Pancras. Done and dusted. Well done, Sir Humphrey!
Saturday, August 31, 2013
Friday, August 23, 2013
Pablo the Mexican
I was the youngest member of Churchie’s 1951 intake of boarders from “the bush”. (The Church of England Grammar School in Brisbane had always been called “Churchie”, for some unimaginative reason.) Painfully shy, and small for my age, I was put in the charge of a veteran boarder of my own age (eleven), who introduced me around.
Four or five of us squatted in the dirt and scratched our names in block capitals with twigs. When some older boys came by to see what we were doing, we hastily erased them, but I wasn’t quick enough to do more than wipe out my first name and bits of the surname. One of the intruders looked down scornfully at what was left. “What’s this name? It looks like PABLO! What is he, a Mexican? Hahaha.” “Yes he is”, my protector retorted. “So what?” “Huh. He doesn’t look Mexican.” “Well, his mother’s Mexican. Have you got something against Mexicans?”
Shamed, the intruders wandered away. My companions felt obliged, ever after, to call me and refer to me by the invented name, lest they be beaten up by the older boys for lying. The exotic newbie became a nine-day wonder. And indeed longer, for the name stuck like glue. Very few of the 1200 pupils ever knew my real name. Most of those alive today still don’t.
When my brother came the next year, aged nine, he was Little Pablo. Our baby brother came after we left, and he was Pablo too. Each of us was introduced to parents as Pablo, as a matter of course. Parents as a species don’t ask questions about their sons' friends' nicknames. “Rags” Alexander was always called Rags, and nobody ever knew his first name.
Six years at boarding school is a big chunk of one’s life. All of us boarders went home during vacations; on “long weekends” those of us from far away stayed with friends who lived closer, or were day-boys. One of my long-weekend hosts was Graham, whom I bumped into in Shiraz in late 1964 – reported in my blog-post Cattle Class to Kuwait [April 2012].
Years and years later, my mother apologised for sending me away so young – but I never minded, and in truth she had little option. I was in the oldest group at the one-room, six-classes, Hannaford Primary School, and the two others were scheduled to go off to (different) boarding schools the same year. I was the brains of the outfit, such as it was, and Churchie was noted for its academic achievements, so that's where I went.
Of the Hannaford kids, I ended up a political trouble-maker in the Caribbean; Ian wasted several years in Parliament in Canberra [Politics of exclusion, May 2013]; Richard was a wool-dealer in Sudan for a while; Liz Cox did professional modelling in Paris, reportedly; Kevin became a shearer in Victoria, the school magazine said. Everybody else made their lives close to home, as far as I know.
The local school didn’t open till I was seven and a half. Before then, all our lessons had come in the mail each week from the State distance-learning unit in Brisbane. Mum was a good teacher, and the seventeen-year-old sent out from Brisbane to open the School was too. So I carried my parents’ hopes and ambitions off to Churchie. I don’t think I returned much value for the money they spent on me; I should have been the one to apologise.
Academically, I peaked at age thirteen. I struggled dutifully, but could never see much sense in what I was being taught. The learning did enable me to qualify as an accountant, eventually, and that freed me to go overseas and try my luck. To the degree that it gave me a way to make a living in exotic places, it was worth the effort and expense, I guess.
Also, I finally got to Mexico, though I can’t say I identified with the culture. If my mother really had been Mexican, I might have done better. Who knows?
Four or five of us squatted in the dirt and scratched our names in block capitals with twigs. When some older boys came by to see what we were doing, we hastily erased them, but I wasn’t quick enough to do more than wipe out my first name and bits of the surname. One of the intruders looked down scornfully at what was left. “What’s this name? It looks like PABLO! What is he, a Mexican? Hahaha.” “Yes he is”, my protector retorted. “So what?” “Huh. He doesn’t look Mexican.” “Well, his mother’s Mexican. Have you got something against Mexicans?”
Shamed, the intruders wandered away. My companions felt obliged, ever after, to call me and refer to me by the invented name, lest they be beaten up by the older boys for lying. The exotic newbie became a nine-day wonder. And indeed longer, for the name stuck like glue. Very few of the 1200 pupils ever knew my real name. Most of those alive today still don’t.
When my brother came the next year, aged nine, he was Little Pablo. Our baby brother came after we left, and he was Pablo too. Each of us was introduced to parents as Pablo, as a matter of course. Parents as a species don’t ask questions about their sons' friends' nicknames. “Rags” Alexander was always called Rags, and nobody ever knew his first name.
Six years at boarding school is a big chunk of one’s life. All of us boarders went home during vacations; on “long weekends” those of us from far away stayed with friends who lived closer, or were day-boys. One of my long-weekend hosts was Graham, whom I bumped into in Shiraz in late 1964 – reported in my blog-post Cattle Class to Kuwait [April 2012].
Years and years later, my mother apologised for sending me away so young – but I never minded, and in truth she had little option. I was in the oldest group at the one-room, six-classes, Hannaford Primary School, and the two others were scheduled to go off to (different) boarding schools the same year. I was the brains of the outfit, such as it was, and Churchie was noted for its academic achievements, so that's where I went.
Of the Hannaford kids, I ended up a political trouble-maker in the Caribbean; Ian wasted several years in Parliament in Canberra [Politics of exclusion, May 2013]; Richard was a wool-dealer in Sudan for a while; Liz Cox did professional modelling in Paris, reportedly; Kevin became a shearer in Victoria, the school magazine said. Everybody else made their lives close to home, as far as I know.
The local school didn’t open till I was seven and a half. Before then, all our lessons had come in the mail each week from the State distance-learning unit in Brisbane. Mum was a good teacher, and the seventeen-year-old sent out from Brisbane to open the School was too. So I carried my parents’ hopes and ambitions off to Churchie. I don’t think I returned much value for the money they spent on me; I should have been the one to apologise.
Academically, I peaked at age thirteen. I struggled dutifully, but could never see much sense in what I was being taught. The learning did enable me to qualify as an accountant, eventually, and that freed me to go overseas and try my luck. To the degree that it gave me a way to make a living in exotic places, it was worth the effort and expense, I guess.
Also, I finally got to Mexico, though I can’t say I identified with the culture. If my mother really had been Mexican, I might have done better. Who knows?
Sunday, August 18, 2013
Unexpected places (pidgin English)
Our housemaid (four hours on Fridays, from an agency) is from Colombia and speaks English as her native tongue. She’s from San Andres off the coast of Nicaragua, which is home to forty thousand descendants of African slaves taken there by their British owners when the Island was British.
Our first-ever maid in Cayman was from Nicaragua – a large and cheerful woman who was on hugging terms with us and our son for years afterwards, till she retired back to Bluefields on the Caribbean coast, which used to be a British protectorate. She was a Miskito Indian, who spoke standard English, too, as well as Spanish and the local patois. I remember her with tears streaming down her face one day in 1980. The last of the Nicaraguan Somoza dynasty had just been assassinated. “They have killed my President”, she sobbed. I hugged her until she stopped crying.
The English language pops up in one form or another in unexpected places all over the world, as a by-product of Britain’s former trading empire. The Bay of Islands off Honduras is populated with families of early settlers from Cayman and Jamaica, as evidenced by the surnames. On the north coast of Panama, the black residents of Colon are descended from the diggers of the Canal, recruited from Jamaica and the eastern Caribbean islands. After Castro’s revolution, English-speaking residents of the southern islands of Cuba fled to Cayman, from where their ancestors had emigrated.
What should amaze us, but doesn’t, is the fluency of English spoken by so many black people of African descent in the Caribbean and North America. It was the strict policy of slave-owners and traders to split up tribes, clans and families on their arrival in the New World, in order to minimise the danger of revolt. Pidgins and patois originated to provide means of communication between owners and slaves and among the slaves themselves. Nevertheless, most blacks in the US, for instance, speak standard English.
Trade is the most powerful of forces. The word pidgin is reckoned to be the closest the Chinese merchants of Canton could come to the English word business. (It’s plausible.) Pidgin is called creole in most languages other than English. In Haiti everybody speaks a French-based creole except the brown-skinned social elite. In Curacao, Papiamento is Portuguese-based. The best-known Dutch-based pidgin is Afrikaans – influenced by so many other tongues as to be almost a separate language today.
Almost. Chris, my flatmate in London all those years ago, spoke Afrikaans, and could be understood in the Flemish part of Belgium. Once, though, he narrowly escaped getting beaten up in a bar for speaking what the locals heard as mocking baby-talk.
In the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in the South Pacific, a pidgin called Bislama (from the French beche-de-mer, the sea-cucumber animal of the region) was the simplest possible pidgin. English words strung together separated only by long and blong (= belong). Something like that. We all made it up as we went along. It doesn’t seem to have developed much since we lived there in the 1970s, but – as happened in New Guinea – the native politicians changed the spelling of words to disguise their English origins.
It is now the main official language. The national motto (Wikipedia says) is "Long God yumi stanap", which translates as “in God we stand”: yumi is you-me, and stanap is stand-up. I would have said “blong God” was more correct, but what do I know? Bambae is “soon” or “later”, a vaguely phonetic rendition of “by and by”. Olgeta is “everybody”, literally “all together”. And so on. Wonderful stuff!
Well, that’s what politicians tend to do, especially in artificial nations with no common language and no sense of the ridiculous. In other circumstances, the process works in reverse. One of Britain’s former Australian colonies has a city called Air Delight, named for a British Queen Consort. Fortunately, the original spelling, Adelaide (she was German, actually), has been retained. Thank God for small mercies.
Our first-ever maid in Cayman was from Nicaragua – a large and cheerful woman who was on hugging terms with us and our son for years afterwards, till she retired back to Bluefields on the Caribbean coast, which used to be a British protectorate. She was a Miskito Indian, who spoke standard English, too, as well as Spanish and the local patois. I remember her with tears streaming down her face one day in 1980. The last of the Nicaraguan Somoza dynasty had just been assassinated. “They have killed my President”, she sobbed. I hugged her until she stopped crying.
The English language pops up in one form or another in unexpected places all over the world, as a by-product of Britain’s former trading empire. The Bay of Islands off Honduras is populated with families of early settlers from Cayman and Jamaica, as evidenced by the surnames. On the north coast of Panama, the black residents of Colon are descended from the diggers of the Canal, recruited from Jamaica and the eastern Caribbean islands. After Castro’s revolution, English-speaking residents of the southern islands of Cuba fled to Cayman, from where their ancestors had emigrated.
What should amaze us, but doesn’t, is the fluency of English spoken by so many black people of African descent in the Caribbean and North America. It was the strict policy of slave-owners and traders to split up tribes, clans and families on their arrival in the New World, in order to minimise the danger of revolt. Pidgins and patois originated to provide means of communication between owners and slaves and among the slaves themselves. Nevertheless, most blacks in the US, for instance, speak standard English.
Trade is the most powerful of forces. The word pidgin is reckoned to be the closest the Chinese merchants of Canton could come to the English word business. (It’s plausible.) Pidgin is called creole in most languages other than English. In Haiti everybody speaks a French-based creole except the brown-skinned social elite. In Curacao, Papiamento is Portuguese-based. The best-known Dutch-based pidgin is Afrikaans – influenced by so many other tongues as to be almost a separate language today.
Almost. Chris, my flatmate in London all those years ago, spoke Afrikaans, and could be understood in the Flemish part of Belgium. Once, though, he narrowly escaped getting beaten up in a bar for speaking what the locals heard as mocking baby-talk.
In the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in the South Pacific, a pidgin called Bislama (from the French beche-de-mer, the sea-cucumber animal of the region) was the simplest possible pidgin. English words strung together separated only by long and blong (= belong). Something like that. We all made it up as we went along. It doesn’t seem to have developed much since we lived there in the 1970s, but – as happened in New Guinea – the native politicians changed the spelling of words to disguise their English origins.
It is now the main official language. The national motto (Wikipedia says) is "Long God yumi stanap", which translates as “in God we stand”: yumi is you-me, and stanap is stand-up. I would have said “blong God” was more correct, but what do I know? Bambae is “soon” or “later”, a vaguely phonetic rendition of “by and by”. Olgeta is “everybody”, literally “all together”. And so on. Wonderful stuff!
Well, that’s what politicians tend to do, especially in artificial nations with no common language and no sense of the ridiculous. In other circumstances, the process works in reverse. One of Britain’s former Australian colonies has a city called Air Delight, named for a British Queen Consort. Fortunately, the original spelling, Adelaide (she was German, actually), has been retained. Thank God for small mercies.
Thursday, August 15, 2013
The slow-boiling frog (Chamber of Commerce)
My friend Colin used to refer to it as The Chamber of Comics. For its first 21 years it existed only as a monthly luncheon club. Then it had a few years in the public eye attending to its founding principles, and then twenty-odd more years of futility. The Chamber of Commerce today stands for nothing and achieves nothing. It has remained silent and immobile. A frog in a pot of water will stay there while the heat is raised one degree at a time, until it has no energy to jump out before the pot boils.
Back in its glory-years of 1985-90, led by dynamic Presidents and Councils, supported by Managers who believed in the founding principles, the Chamber had a strategic vision that is absent today. When Cayman’s first Labour Law was mooted, our people clearly perceived the danger of establishing a state labour-control entity to reinforce the existing affirmative-action program for native Caymanians. For the ruling politicians and their Civil Servants, control of the local workforce was an end in itself.
A new Labour Office would further forestall the prospect of a private-sector labour union. The Immigration authorities could deport any experienced labour organiser brought in from overseas; and the Labour Office would act as the Islands’ monopoly labour union. It was a standard Soviet trick. The British FCO knew that, but the locals didn’t.
The FCO had failed to perceive any long-term danger in the establishment of the semi-slave workforce in the early 1970s that bedevils our society today. And it is the FCO that is reaping the whirlwind. Its lack of strategic vision at that time is why Britain is having to send in its own auditors, accountants, and economists to fix the present fiscal mess.
To oppose the proposed Labour Law, in 1986, the Chamber’s newly created back-office assembled all the trade-associations into a Council of Associations. In response, the politicians threatened to suspend their de facto subsidies to the hotels. It was a bluff, but it worked; the Hotel Association broke ranks. Government’s annual budget for overseas advertising was several million dollars, and the hotels chose not to risk losing that.
The Labour Law passed pretty much as drafted – a year late, but that made no difference. Emboldened by this success, the politicians pushed ahead with their next socialisation measure – a tax on private-sector wages and payrolls. The revenue raised would fund government’s Civil Service pensions-liabilities and perhaps even its equally unfunded healthcare liabilities.
Again our Chamber people clearly perceived the politicians’ purpose, and considered the new threat even more dangerous to Cayman’s future prosperity than the Labour Law. Cayman’s private sector had already developed a defence against additional labour costs [my blog-post Everybody’s Cheating, December 2010]; everyday shelf-price increases took care of them. But Cayman Islands Social Security (CISS – “the CISS of Death”, we called it) would force the private sector to bail out government’s reckless over-spending until the end of time.
In the years since the CISS battle, the Chamber’s leaders have been careful to stay on the right side of the politicians. “Look what we did to Gordon Barlow” [Confessions of a Subversive, October 2012] was warning enough for employees; “Look what we did to Nick Duggan”, enough for Councillors. [Our President was denied citizenship for sixteen years for his devotion to duty.]
Now the Chamber – and we the public – are back to Square One. Again the FCO and its local agents are desperately seeking revenue, as an easy alternative to cutting waste and extravagance. Will the Chamber find the courage to do its duty? Doubtful. Like a slow-boiling frog it just doesn’t have the energy, now, to jump out of the pot.
Back in its glory-years of 1985-90, led by dynamic Presidents and Councils, supported by Managers who believed in the founding principles, the Chamber had a strategic vision that is absent today. When Cayman’s first Labour Law was mooted, our people clearly perceived the danger of establishing a state labour-control entity to reinforce the existing affirmative-action program for native Caymanians. For the ruling politicians and their Civil Servants, control of the local workforce was an end in itself.
A new Labour Office would further forestall the prospect of a private-sector labour union. The Immigration authorities could deport any experienced labour organiser brought in from overseas; and the Labour Office would act as the Islands’ monopoly labour union. It was a standard Soviet trick. The British FCO knew that, but the locals didn’t.
The FCO had failed to perceive any long-term danger in the establishment of the semi-slave workforce in the early 1970s that bedevils our society today. And it is the FCO that is reaping the whirlwind. Its lack of strategic vision at that time is why Britain is having to send in its own auditors, accountants, and economists to fix the present fiscal mess.
To oppose the proposed Labour Law, in 1986, the Chamber’s newly created back-office assembled all the trade-associations into a Council of Associations. In response, the politicians threatened to suspend their de facto subsidies to the hotels. It was a bluff, but it worked; the Hotel Association broke ranks. Government’s annual budget for overseas advertising was several million dollars, and the hotels chose not to risk losing that.
The Labour Law passed pretty much as drafted – a year late, but that made no difference. Emboldened by this success, the politicians pushed ahead with their next socialisation measure – a tax on private-sector wages and payrolls. The revenue raised would fund government’s Civil Service pensions-liabilities and perhaps even its equally unfunded healthcare liabilities.
Again our Chamber people clearly perceived the politicians’ purpose, and considered the new threat even more dangerous to Cayman’s future prosperity than the Labour Law. Cayman’s private sector had already developed a defence against additional labour costs [my blog-post Everybody’s Cheating, December 2010]; everyday shelf-price increases took care of them. But Cayman Islands Social Security (CISS – “the CISS of Death”, we called it) would force the private sector to bail out government’s reckless over-spending until the end of time.
In the years since the CISS battle, the Chamber’s leaders have been careful to stay on the right side of the politicians. “Look what we did to Gordon Barlow” [Confessions of a Subversive, October 2012] was warning enough for employees; “Look what we did to Nick Duggan”, enough for Councillors. [Our President was denied citizenship for sixteen years for his devotion to duty.]
Now the Chamber – and we the public – are back to Square One. Again the FCO and its local agents are desperately seeking revenue, as an easy alternative to cutting waste and extravagance. Will the Chamber find the courage to do its duty? Doubtful. Like a slow-boiling frog it just doesn’t have the energy, now, to jump out of the pot.
Thursday, August 8, 2013
Not the Swiss Family Robinson
You have to be pretty fit to be a hippy, sometimes. When my son lived in Guatemala, on the outskirts of a lakeside village, he had to lug a huge bottle of water every three or four days up a zig-zag path to his treehouse, then up a narrow ladder of 28 steps to the platform halfway up the trunk. Then go back for the two-year old and carry her up the ladder; then help his heavily pregnant girlfriend up too, and then the groceries.
I never stayed overnight there, not wanting to be present when the little girl fell over the fragile wooden railings. This was not a treehouse built to Swiss Family Robinson standards, I may say.
The local Mayans had built the platform to his specifications while he was away in Peru and Ecuador. He had bought the land for a song, in order to protect access to a sacred cave where a Mayan shaman held court. Something like that. I think I paid for the treehouse, and maybe the land too; I really can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter now. He still owns the narrow strip of hillside – in theory, at least: Guatemala has no central registry of land-titles.
On my next vacation in England, I checked in with my cousin Pip, a respectable lady who had not forgotten her own hippy life of thirty years before. Was it smart of me to be subsidising my son’s exotic lifestyle? She gave me a look that was half amused and half indignant. “Gordon, really! One should never not support somebody who chooses to live in a treehouse.”
The Norwegian was one tough Viking woman. She stopped for breath at each zig and each zag, but she made it home up to the platform every time. And her daughter was one tough Viking toddler.
By the time of my visit, Ross had been promoted from Ross to Papa Ross. Being el papa de Ross, it made sense for me to be called Papa Gordon. The little scrap spoke Spanish (well, two years old...) with Ross and the Mayan girls who babysat her from time to time: all forgotten now, more’s the pity. Spanish Papa became Norwegian Pappa when they removed to Norway for the birth of the new baby, and I became Pappa Gordon. Indeed, I am Pappa Gordon to both girls, and Linda is Mamma Linda, by analogy.
In Oslo, Ross took up the cause of the homeless, fighting in the front lines. He helped them “squat” in buildings left vacant by property speculators. The girls tagged along. The baby slept through most of the action in a pram, but the other was totally on her Dad’s side, whatever it was. During one Police-enforced clearing of an occupied apartment block, she wandered off on her own. After a frantic couple of minutes she was found in the cubicle of a security guard, lecturing him (well, three years old...) on his human-rights obligations. “She told me, ‘these people have to have somewhere to sleep, you know’”, he said.
Today, they live in their mother’s forest cabin, except when visiting their father’s cabin in a different forest. There is a court-sanctioned custody-arrangement, which the parents observe more often than not. The parents and their new partners, and grandparents both official and unofficial, all provide a regiment of support. School concerts and PTA evenings can attract a delegation of as many as four adults. “We have so many people who love us”, they say in wonderment, to us in English.
Forest cabins are a step up from a treehouse, by and large. But there is a ladder inside Ross’s place, and a thousand steps up to their mother’s house from where she parks the car. We look forward to the day when flush-toilets and septics will replace the present camp-toilets traditional in Norwegian cabins. Then, there will be no ritual daily burning of the family toilet paper, for the first time in the girls’ young lives.
Sigh. Hasten the day!
I never stayed overnight there, not wanting to be present when the little girl fell over the fragile wooden railings. This was not a treehouse built to Swiss Family Robinson standards, I may say.
The local Mayans had built the platform to his specifications while he was away in Peru and Ecuador. He had bought the land for a song, in order to protect access to a sacred cave where a Mayan shaman held court. Something like that. I think I paid for the treehouse, and maybe the land too; I really can’t remember, and it doesn’t matter now. He still owns the narrow strip of hillside – in theory, at least: Guatemala has no central registry of land-titles.
On my next vacation in England, I checked in with my cousin Pip, a respectable lady who had not forgotten her own hippy life of thirty years before. Was it smart of me to be subsidising my son’s exotic lifestyle? She gave me a look that was half amused and half indignant. “Gordon, really! One should never not support somebody who chooses to live in a treehouse.”
The Norwegian was one tough Viking woman. She stopped for breath at each zig and each zag, but she made it home up to the platform every time. And her daughter was one tough Viking toddler.
By the time of my visit, Ross had been promoted from Ross to Papa Ross. Being el papa de Ross, it made sense for me to be called Papa Gordon. The little scrap spoke Spanish (well, two years old...) with Ross and the Mayan girls who babysat her from time to time: all forgotten now, more’s the pity. Spanish Papa became Norwegian Pappa when they removed to Norway for the birth of the new baby, and I became Pappa Gordon. Indeed, I am Pappa Gordon to both girls, and Linda is Mamma Linda, by analogy.
In Oslo, Ross took up the cause of the homeless, fighting in the front lines. He helped them “squat” in buildings left vacant by property speculators. The girls tagged along. The baby slept through most of the action in a pram, but the other was totally on her Dad’s side, whatever it was. During one Police-enforced clearing of an occupied apartment block, she wandered off on her own. After a frantic couple of minutes she was found in the cubicle of a security guard, lecturing him (well, three years old...) on his human-rights obligations. “She told me, ‘these people have to have somewhere to sleep, you know’”, he said.
Today, they live in their mother’s forest cabin, except when visiting their father’s cabin in a different forest. There is a court-sanctioned custody-arrangement, which the parents observe more often than not. The parents and their new partners, and grandparents both official and unofficial, all provide a regiment of support. School concerts and PTA evenings can attract a delegation of as many as four adults. “We have so many people who love us”, they say in wonderment, to us in English.
Forest cabins are a step up from a treehouse, by and large. But there is a ladder inside Ross’s place, and a thousand steps up to their mother’s house from where she parks the car. We look forward to the day when flush-toilets and septics will replace the present camp-toilets traditional in Norwegian cabins. Then, there will be no ritual daily burning of the family toilet paper, for the first time in the girls’ young lives.
Sigh. Hasten the day!
Tuesday, July 30, 2013
On not being famous
It must be fun to be a politician: a great wage and all the cash you can fiddle – junkets to faraway places with five-star hotels, regular bribes from lobbyists, all the standard goodies. Embarrassing, though, sometimes. Lying is a necessary part of the package of politics but it doesn’t come easily to me, even in trivial matters.
What book are you reading at the moment, they ask at interviews. Or, whose music do you like best of The Who and The Whom? What’s your favourite opera or ballet or Shakespearian sonnet? A well-prepared politician always carries the latest published report of some heavyweight institute in his briefcase – and a hardback copy of the latest fiction best-seller as well, to show his human side.
I’m a philistine, with little respect for the classical arts, or the classical pop-artists. My favourite musical genre changes every six months; my favourite authors have been dead for decades. Only recently have I discovered the joys of Bluegrass music, on YouTube. Over and over I can watch Brittany Haas stamping the beat with her boots while playing the violin to some rousing number. I’ve never seen anybody do that before. Yehudi Menuhin never did it, I don’t think.
I’ve made a special effort to read some of the classic literature, just to check the quality – The Trial, Crime & Punishment, Don Quixote (all in translation, of course!), Boswell’s Life of Johnson... Mark Twain is the most skilful writer, in my book, but no more so than P G Wodehouse. I’m a sucker for epigrams. “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” Ogden Nash wrote that, in 1931 – and what a masterpiece it is of brevity, wit, and sexual and social commentary.
Would my attendance at two operas and two ballets impress an interviewer? Linda and I watched Tosca in the Vienna Opera House in 1965, and the Nutcracker Suite by the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow a few weeks later. But those were simply “must see” items on our travelling agenda, like The Hermitage in Leningrad, and Persepolis in Iran, and Ataturk’s yellowed underpants in the dedicated Museum in Ankara.
My second opera and ballet attendances were even less laudable than the first ones. Ross got me free tickets in 2011 for performances at the Oslo Opera House where he worked: Tannhauser and Don Quixote. A backstage technician, he was actually on stage for a few minutes in Tannhauser, paid five hundred kroner a time to ensure none of the actors fell down the hole when the hydraulic platform went down to pick up the lead singer in a puff of magical mist. (He was in costume, but was so well disguised that I missed him.)
I’d be careful to omit mention of the freebies in any formal interview fame might require, but I might come clean about what books I’m currently reading. There are usually four or five on the go at any given moment. I dip into the non-fictions every day, pretty much. On my chairside table today are Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a 1982 book that gave Dan Brown the plot for The Da Vinci Code, and The Unauthorised Version, a 1991 hardback about the composition of the Bible that Ross gave me a few Christmases ago. Both of those were bought at jumble sales, for ten or twenty-five cents each.
Our Oriental Heritage, a 1935 history book by Will Durant, lies open on our dining table (at Page 623, today), bookmarked by an old Library card. (It was a Library throw-away, twenty years ago.) I’ve read all three of those before, and the Dick Francis mystery too, but they’re all worth reading again because of the quality of the writing. Would a professional interviewer be impressed? Not with their recent provenance, perhaps.
Should I confess to keeping an Oxford Concise Dictionary and a King James Bible beside my chair, for handy reference, and an Etymological Dictionary? Would that be too pompous? Hmm. I’ll decide that when the time comes.
What book are you reading at the moment, they ask at interviews. Or, whose music do you like best of The Who and The Whom? What’s your favourite opera or ballet or Shakespearian sonnet? A well-prepared politician always carries the latest published report of some heavyweight institute in his briefcase – and a hardback copy of the latest fiction best-seller as well, to show his human side.
I’m a philistine, with little respect for the classical arts, or the classical pop-artists. My favourite musical genre changes every six months; my favourite authors have been dead for decades. Only recently have I discovered the joys of Bluegrass music, on YouTube. Over and over I can watch Brittany Haas stamping the beat with her boots while playing the violin to some rousing number. I’ve never seen anybody do that before. Yehudi Menuhin never did it, I don’t think.
I’ve made a special effort to read some of the classic literature, just to check the quality – The Trial, Crime & Punishment, Don Quixote (all in translation, of course!), Boswell’s Life of Johnson... Mark Twain is the most skilful writer, in my book, but no more so than P G Wodehouse. I’m a sucker for epigrams. “Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.” Ogden Nash wrote that, in 1931 – and what a masterpiece it is of brevity, wit, and sexual and social commentary.
Would my attendance at two operas and two ballets impress an interviewer? Linda and I watched Tosca in the Vienna Opera House in 1965, and the Nutcracker Suite by the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow a few weeks later. But those were simply “must see” items on our travelling agenda, like The Hermitage in Leningrad, and Persepolis in Iran, and Ataturk’s yellowed underpants in the dedicated Museum in Ankara.
My second opera and ballet attendances were even less laudable than the first ones. Ross got me free tickets in 2011 for performances at the Oslo Opera House where he worked: Tannhauser and Don Quixote. A backstage technician, he was actually on stage for a few minutes in Tannhauser, paid five hundred kroner a time to ensure none of the actors fell down the hole when the hydraulic platform went down to pick up the lead singer in a puff of magical mist. (He was in costume, but was so well disguised that I missed him.)
I’d be careful to omit mention of the freebies in any formal interview fame might require, but I might come clean about what books I’m currently reading. There are usually four or five on the go at any given moment. I dip into the non-fictions every day, pretty much. On my chairside table today are Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a 1982 book that gave Dan Brown the plot for The Da Vinci Code, and The Unauthorised Version, a 1991 hardback about the composition of the Bible that Ross gave me a few Christmases ago. Both of those were bought at jumble sales, for ten or twenty-five cents each.
Our Oriental Heritage, a 1935 history book by Will Durant, lies open on our dining table (at Page 623, today), bookmarked by an old Library card. (It was a Library throw-away, twenty years ago.) I’ve read all three of those before, and the Dick Francis mystery too, but they’re all worth reading again because of the quality of the writing. Would a professional interviewer be impressed? Not with their recent provenance, perhaps.
Should I confess to keeping an Oxford Concise Dictionary and a King James Bible beside my chair, for handy reference, and an Etymological Dictionary? Would that be too pompous? Hmm. I’ll decide that when the time comes.
Monday, July 15, 2013
Eight o’clock White Man’s Time (T-15, Haiti)
At my boarding school in Brisbane, our French mistress (no, not really...) taught us posh French. She spent whole lessons drilling us on exactly how to enunciate eu and au and eau. As Henry Higgins opined in My Fair Lady, “The French don’t care what they say, actually, as long as they pronounce it properly.”
Not in Provence, though. There, most of the natives speak French the way the English speak French – sounding out every consonant the way God intended, and playing fast and loose with every vowel. Proper French is spoken more in Haiti than in Provence – by the ruling caste there, at least. Most Haitians speak Creole, which is a French patois – in the way that French is a Latin patois. I spent a week there in 1966, aged 27 – island-hopping by myself, on vacation from my job in Toronto.
On the plane from Puerto Rico I found myself sitting next to a boring young Canadian fellow – boring, at least, until he announced that he was visiting his brother at a Mennonite mission station up in the mountains. Then he became exciting. By the time we landed, we were fast friends and he was asking his brother if I could tag along as an extra guest for a few days.
Mennonites are a small Protestant denomination of no great renown, but they carried enough weight locally for the brother to extend my visa, change my onward flight and find me a hotel room for the night – all before the offices closed that afternoon. So instead of mooching around the desperately shabby capital city for two days on my own, I got a tour of the pot-holed mountain road through the heart of the country to a few miles away from Henri-Christophe’s Citadelle, and five days watching the missionaries at work.
The history of Haiti is depressing. Born in the vicious cruelty of a series of slave-rebellions, nurtured in the equally vicious cruelty of home-grown tyrants, and pauperised by US and European politicians (French and British) in order to discourage any future slave revolts anywhere in the world – the new nation’s government revenue was embargoed for the next hundred years and more, to pay compensation for the property lost (i.e. the slaves themselves) in the successful revolution.
(The slaves’ defeat of Napoleon’s army of occupation prompted his surrender of French “Louisiana” to the new United States of America. The removal of the French presence there left the native-American tribes open to conquest and settlement by European immigrants – and, as they say, the rest is history.)
On the Sunday I bought a ticket on the bus from Cap Haitien back to the capital, leaving next morning. I asked the bus dispatcher (in pidgin French) what time the bus would depart. “Huit heures.” Ah, but did that mean eight o’clock Caribbean time, or some local approximation? The missionaries would have to drive me down from the mountains, and I wanted to get the time right. “Oui, huit heures juste.” Okayy, but when you say juste, do you mean really, really exactly, or...? He sighed heavily. “Huit...heures...blanc!” I took that to mean “white man’s time”, and shut up. And it did leave at eight, on the dot.
Nobody on the bus spoke French, or was any colour but jet-black; no upper class representatives present! I volunteered to sit on the top of the bus with eight or nine other passengers, to help keep the luggage from coming loose, and to hand bags down and catch bags thrown up. My companions told me by gestures why we were stopping and how long for.
It was a ten-hour journey down the coast road via Gonaives, but the time passed easily; it was a lovely trip. The driver went out of his way to drop me at my shabby hotel. I was the most exotic passenger he had ever had, I expect: probably the only white person ever to have travelled the whole distance on the roof of his bus.
They all gave me a farewell salute, and I them. “A’voi, blanc!” “A’voi!” Respect.
Not in Provence, though. There, most of the natives speak French the way the English speak French – sounding out every consonant the way God intended, and playing fast and loose with every vowel. Proper French is spoken more in Haiti than in Provence – by the ruling caste there, at least. Most Haitians speak Creole, which is a French patois – in the way that French is a Latin patois. I spent a week there in 1966, aged 27 – island-hopping by myself, on vacation from my job in Toronto.
On the plane from Puerto Rico I found myself sitting next to a boring young Canadian fellow – boring, at least, until he announced that he was visiting his brother at a Mennonite mission station up in the mountains. Then he became exciting. By the time we landed, we were fast friends and he was asking his brother if I could tag along as an extra guest for a few days.
Mennonites are a small Protestant denomination of no great renown, but they carried enough weight locally for the brother to extend my visa, change my onward flight and find me a hotel room for the night – all before the offices closed that afternoon. So instead of mooching around the desperately shabby capital city for two days on my own, I got a tour of the pot-holed mountain road through the heart of the country to a few miles away from Henri-Christophe’s Citadelle, and five days watching the missionaries at work.
The history of Haiti is depressing. Born in the vicious cruelty of a series of slave-rebellions, nurtured in the equally vicious cruelty of home-grown tyrants, and pauperised by US and European politicians (French and British) in order to discourage any future slave revolts anywhere in the world – the new nation’s government revenue was embargoed for the next hundred years and more, to pay compensation for the property lost (i.e. the slaves themselves) in the successful revolution.
(The slaves’ defeat of Napoleon’s army of occupation prompted his surrender of French “Louisiana” to the new United States of America. The removal of the French presence there left the native-American tribes open to conquest and settlement by European immigrants – and, as they say, the rest is history.)
On the Sunday I bought a ticket on the bus from Cap Haitien back to the capital, leaving next morning. I asked the bus dispatcher (in pidgin French) what time the bus would depart. “Huit heures.” Ah, but did that mean eight o’clock Caribbean time, or some local approximation? The missionaries would have to drive me down from the mountains, and I wanted to get the time right. “Oui, huit heures juste.” Okayy, but when you say juste, do you mean really, really exactly, or...? He sighed heavily. “Huit...heures...blanc!” I took that to mean “white man’s time”, and shut up. And it did leave at eight, on the dot.
Nobody on the bus spoke French, or was any colour but jet-black; no upper class representatives present! I volunteered to sit on the top of the bus with eight or nine other passengers, to help keep the luggage from coming loose, and to hand bags down and catch bags thrown up. My companions told me by gestures why we were stopping and how long for.
It was a ten-hour journey down the coast road via Gonaives, but the time passed easily; it was a lovely trip. The driver went out of his way to drop me at my shabby hotel. I was the most exotic passenger he had ever had, I expect: probably the only white person ever to have travelled the whole distance on the roof of his bus.
They all gave me a farewell salute, and I them. “A’voi, blanc!” “A’voi!” Respect.
Thursday, July 11, 2013
English, as she is spoke
We were both speaking English during our three-hour flight from Cayman to Houston, this Barbadian fellow and I, but I recognised only about one word in five. There is more than one Bajan accent, and his was too strong for me to handle. I was exhausted by the time we landed, and kept as far away from him as I decently could, while waiting for the luggage.
Instead, I introduced myself to another team-mate, this time from Yorkshire. Huh. One word in five again, if I was lucky. This was in 1980. I’d spent most of the last two decades in and out of seventy countries, listening to foreigners speaking English in seventy accents. Only once before (see below) had I ever been as stumped. In the bus on the way into town, I kept my distance from both of my tormentors.
We were all members of a scratch team of local cricketers, invited by a (the?) Houston club to a fun tournament over the long weekend. Later, all the teams met up in a bar, and settled down to some serious chat, in proper English. Midway through the evening I noticed the Bajan and the Yorkie babbling away in a corner on their own, getting on like a house on fire – no communications problems in sight. How could that be? By some fluke, the two broad accents happened to complement each other. I could scarcely believe my eyes.
Everyone knows that different dialects can be a problem in any language. But accents can throw conversations off the rails just as readily as dialects or slang. Speakers of dialect usually know to switch to the relevant standard dialect when talking with outsiders. That’s only common sense. But they don’t always think to change their accents.
In England for the first time in 1963, pretty much straight from home, I hitched a ride with a young Cornishman, and... Well, you can see where this is going. Mercifully, his English girlfriend was on hand to translate every single word spoken by both of us – one sentence at a time.
So I learnt to drop all slang words, and all the expressions peculiar to Queensland. Only then could I be understood. Later, on “The Continent” (mainland Europe), the natives had difficulties with my diphthongs – so my owld (rhymed with howled) had to become old with a rounded o. Dyee became day pronounced dei – still a diphthong, but with clear vowels.
I’ve never lost my Australian accent altogether, but it has softened to the point where I can pass for English, unless I’ve had too much drink or not enough sleep. Even most English think I’m English. Which is silly, because they aren’t able to place my accent – and if you can’t place someone’s accent, they’re probably foreign. There’s that clever line spoken by Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, about Eliza’s exposure as a fraud: “Her English is too good”, he said, “which clearly indicates that she is foreign”.
It’s not just in English that accents are hard to fathom. When my son did TV commercials in Mexico for international products, the videos were used in other Latino nations; but the voices had to be dubbed in those countries’ accents. Only in one country (Bolivia, I think) was the accent close enough to the Mexican one to be acceptable.
After a few years in Norway, learning from a Norwegian girl-friend and Norwegian children, he could pass for Swedish, but he’s progressed beyond that now. Native Norwegians can’t place his accent, though, which by the Henry Higgins rule ought to label him as foreign. Instead, they suppose he’s from somewhere up north, because all northern accents are regarded as barbaric.(The world over, really! Smile...)
Instead, I introduced myself to another team-mate, this time from Yorkshire. Huh. One word in five again, if I was lucky. This was in 1980. I’d spent most of the last two decades in and out of seventy countries, listening to foreigners speaking English in seventy accents. Only once before (see below) had I ever been as stumped. In the bus on the way into town, I kept my distance from both of my tormentors.
We were all members of a scratch team of local cricketers, invited by a (the?) Houston club to a fun tournament over the long weekend. Later, all the teams met up in a bar, and settled down to some serious chat, in proper English. Midway through the evening I noticed the Bajan and the Yorkie babbling away in a corner on their own, getting on like a house on fire – no communications problems in sight. How could that be? By some fluke, the two broad accents happened to complement each other. I could scarcely believe my eyes.
Everyone knows that different dialects can be a problem in any language. But accents can throw conversations off the rails just as readily as dialects or slang. Speakers of dialect usually know to switch to the relevant standard dialect when talking with outsiders. That’s only common sense. But they don’t always think to change their accents.
In England for the first time in 1963, pretty much straight from home, I hitched a ride with a young Cornishman, and... Well, you can see where this is going. Mercifully, his English girlfriend was on hand to translate every single word spoken by both of us – one sentence at a time.
So I learnt to drop all slang words, and all the expressions peculiar to Queensland. Only then could I be understood. Later, on “The Continent” (mainland Europe), the natives had difficulties with my diphthongs – so my owld (rhymed with howled) had to become old with a rounded o. Dyee became day pronounced dei – still a diphthong, but with clear vowels.
I’ve never lost my Australian accent altogether, but it has softened to the point where I can pass for English, unless I’ve had too much drink or not enough sleep. Even most English think I’m English. Which is silly, because they aren’t able to place my accent – and if you can’t place someone’s accent, they’re probably foreign. There’s that clever line spoken by Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady, about Eliza’s exposure as a fraud: “Her English is too good”, he said, “which clearly indicates that she is foreign”.
It’s not just in English that accents are hard to fathom. When my son did TV commercials in Mexico for international products, the videos were used in other Latino nations; but the voices had to be dubbed in those countries’ accents. Only in one country (Bolivia, I think) was the accent close enough to the Mexican one to be acceptable.
After a few years in Norway, learning from a Norwegian girl-friend and Norwegian children, he could pass for Swedish, but he’s progressed beyond that now. Native Norwegians can’t place his accent, though, which by the Henry Higgins rule ought to label him as foreign. Instead, they suppose he’s from somewhere up north, because all northern accents are regarded as barbaric.(The world over, really! Smile...)
Thursday, July 4, 2013
A cupful of cold water
We all have our favourite expressions. Some we use all the time, others we let slip into disuse. Some are for public consumption, others for private – and some just for our own selves.
I can’t eat a grapefruit without thinking of my friend Bob’s flatmate and his midnight feasts [Parrots of the Caribbean, posted in June], but the story wouldn’t be funny to anybody else. You had to be there.
“Up and down like a yo-yo” doesn’t need explaining. Even people who have never played with a yo-yo know more or less what it is. At my boarding school in Brisbane we used to say “up and down like father’s pants”, which was – and is – both evocative and funny, if used sparingly. I still find it an effective way of describing erratic line-charts of company sales or profits.
Some slang doesn’t travel well. In the Queensland of my youth, “a boofter kid” was a heavily built male baby or infant – innocent enough, but too easily confused with the p-word, today. There was no exact female equivalent that I recall – only the satirical observation, “she’ll be [or she must be] a great help to her mother”. I wonder if that has survived.
My boss in Toowoomba once dismissed a Balance Sheet of mine as “like a Chinese packapoo ticket”, which offended me greatly. Yes, some of the figures were out of alignment, and they shouldn’t have been. But the insult was way too severe – "OTT", we’d say today.
A rugby coach (boarding school again) once yelled – in front of the whole team – that I was as useless as a cupful of cold water. Mercifully, he spared me the full three-litre original version, but it was embarrassing enough. (The original is too coarse to be explained in this blog – the kiddies, you know...)
Linda and I say “two tuppennies” to mean “spare no expense”. It’s a handy expression, but we don’t use it outside the family; it’s not practical to use an expression that needs explaining. That one dates from my life in the Earl’s Court flat in the winter of 1963-64, and it began with David’s need to cash his wages-cheque at Barclays Bank.
No ATMs in those days, so the choice was between waiting until Monday, taking the tube into town to “his” branch of the bank, or cashing it at the nearest branch to where we lived. Chris and I stood back while he showed his ID to the girl behind the counter. “No problem, sir; all we need is threepence for the revenue stamp.” David grudgingly passed over a threepenny bit.
“Oh dear. I’m terribly sorry," she said. "I don’t seem to have any threepenny stamps. Or any one-penny stamps. Only twopenny stamps. Sorry!” She paused expectantly. To our astonishment, the situation actually sent David into a cataleptic shock, which my dictionary defines as a trance or seizure with loss of sensation and consciousness accompanied by rigidity of the body.
The girl waited; Chris and I waited; David couldn’t move, being in a trance or seizure with loss of sensation, etc. Testing my recollection against my little table-clock just now, I believe he remained stock-still for a good sixty seconds, which is a long time to mull over even such a critical decision.
Then, with all the resignation of a gambler committing his last penny to the roll of the dice, David slowly took out what for all we knew was his last penny, pushed it across the counter to rest beside his threepenny bit, and said carefully, “I’ll have two tuppennies, please”. Then he turned to find Chris and me on our knees behind a pillar whimpering with suppressed laughter, and asked, “What?”
I haven’t seen Chris for nearly fifty years: I’m sure he remembers the incident, if he’s still alive. David remembers it, though he pretends not to. His wife half-believes it because she knows I wouldn’t lie, but she can’t quite picture the scene. She should do. After all, she smiles when we tell her about The Man Who Loved Grapefruit, which wasn’t nearly as ridiculous.
I can’t eat a grapefruit without thinking of my friend Bob’s flatmate and his midnight feasts [Parrots of the Caribbean, posted in June], but the story wouldn’t be funny to anybody else. You had to be there.
“Up and down like a yo-yo” doesn’t need explaining. Even people who have never played with a yo-yo know more or less what it is. At my boarding school in Brisbane we used to say “up and down like father’s pants”, which was – and is – both evocative and funny, if used sparingly. I still find it an effective way of describing erratic line-charts of company sales or profits.
Some slang doesn’t travel well. In the Queensland of my youth, “a boofter kid” was a heavily built male baby or infant – innocent enough, but too easily confused with the p-word, today. There was no exact female equivalent that I recall – only the satirical observation, “she’ll be [or she must be] a great help to her mother”. I wonder if that has survived.
My boss in Toowoomba once dismissed a Balance Sheet of mine as “like a Chinese packapoo ticket”, which offended me greatly. Yes, some of the figures were out of alignment, and they shouldn’t have been. But the insult was way too severe – "OTT", we’d say today.
A rugby coach (boarding school again) once yelled – in front of the whole team – that I was as useless as a cupful of cold water. Mercifully, he spared me the full three-litre original version, but it was embarrassing enough. (The original is too coarse to be explained in this blog – the kiddies, you know...)
Linda and I say “two tuppennies” to mean “spare no expense”. It’s a handy expression, but we don’t use it outside the family; it’s not practical to use an expression that needs explaining. That one dates from my life in the Earl’s Court flat in the winter of 1963-64, and it began with David’s need to cash his wages-cheque at Barclays Bank.
No ATMs in those days, so the choice was between waiting until Monday, taking the tube into town to “his” branch of the bank, or cashing it at the nearest branch to where we lived. Chris and I stood back while he showed his ID to the girl behind the counter. “No problem, sir; all we need is threepence for the revenue stamp.” David grudgingly passed over a threepenny bit.
“Oh dear. I’m terribly sorry," she said. "I don’t seem to have any threepenny stamps. Or any one-penny stamps. Only twopenny stamps. Sorry!” She paused expectantly. To our astonishment, the situation actually sent David into a cataleptic shock, which my dictionary defines as a trance or seizure with loss of sensation and consciousness accompanied by rigidity of the body.
The girl waited; Chris and I waited; David couldn’t move, being in a trance or seizure with loss of sensation, etc. Testing my recollection against my little table-clock just now, I believe he remained stock-still for a good sixty seconds, which is a long time to mull over even such a critical decision.
Then, with all the resignation of a gambler committing his last penny to the roll of the dice, David slowly took out what for all we knew was his last penny, pushed it across the counter to rest beside his threepenny bit, and said carefully, “I’ll have two tuppennies, please”. Then he turned to find Chris and me on our knees behind a pillar whimpering with suppressed laughter, and asked, “What?”
I haven’t seen Chris for nearly fifty years: I’m sure he remembers the incident, if he’s still alive. David remembers it, though he pretends not to. His wife half-believes it because she knows I wouldn’t lie, but she can’t quite picture the scene. She should do. After all, she smiles when we tell her about The Man Who Loved Grapefruit, which wasn’t nearly as ridiculous.
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Letters to the Editor
The new owners of The Compass (our weekdays newspaper) have announced that it won’t publish any more anonymous letters, either online or in print. From some time next week, writers must use their real, verifiable, names.
It’s a significant change. Putting one’s name to criticism of any government action or inaction risks being victimised. Many individual Civil Servants and politicians have the power to destroy any private business in the Islands: we all know it and they all know it. They will still have the Cayman News Service (CNS) “bloggers” to worry about, but The Compass will carry almost no letters critical of the authorities.
The new owners promise that the paper’s editorial line will be rather less obsequious than hitherto. If that happens, the readers will gain on the swings what they will lose on the roundabouts. Work Permit expats, especially, have never trusted The Compass to keep their real names secret, so they will go back to their traditional boycott, and continue to express their opinions only on CNS. Permanent Residents, too: “Permanent” does not always mean “permanent”, in Cayman. The Immigration Monster invents its own definitions when it wants to, or is instructed to.
I well remember the day the boss of the Immigration Enforcement Unit came to my house in full uniform, with a uniformed chauffeur, to deliver a formal notice from the Immigration Board that it was “minded” to cancel my Permanent Residence. Oh dear. The content of some of my recent newspaper columns had upset the ruling politicians of the day, and my continued presence in Cayman had been deemed “not in the public interest”. The Enforcement Unit was reminding me, and the watching public, that its duties included acting as a political police-force.
Three earlier blog-posts of mine (*** see below) have reported the fuss that followed the attempt to deport me, and have noted the likely damage to Cayman’s overseas image. An international finance centre whose “offshore” professionals are forbidden from telling the truth about Cayman’s regulatory regime? How bizarre. Check my Archives, if you will.
It’s embarrassing to have to confirm each year that our local rulers’ suppression of free speech is as determined as ever. Since we are a British colony, we must conclude that the suppression is UK policy, too. Since the GCHQ (equivalent to America’s NSA) monitors every email within Britain's jurisdiction, wouldn’t it make more sense to encourage every dissident to put his thoughts down in writing? You would think.
Ah well, what can you do? Cayman is a very comfortable place to live, as long as you close your mind to a few unsavoury government policies. Exploiting unskilled migrant workers is one of them, standing by while boat-people drown is another, censorship by intimidation is yet another. The Immigration Department is the instrument by which those three policies are enforced.
No Work Permit expats are reckless enough to sign their names to any public letter, except on the most innocuous of topics, and few citizens either. Since all local businesses depend on Work Permits, they must strive not to get on the wrong side of the Immigration authorities or any of the clerks.
The number of “unprotected” individuals (those without political influence) who sign letters critical of public policies and practices can be counted on two hands. Of foreign-born citizens, one hand. The Compass’s new policy will severely ration Letters to the Editor, when it comes into effect.
Well, who am I to object? This blog of mine doesn’t publish comments, either. It’s a vehicle for my opinions, nobody else’s. Newspapers and news-websites are vehicles for their owners’ opinions – mainly, their opinions on what news to print and not print, and what slant to put on it. That’s just the way things are.
*** Freedom of Speech, October 2011; Telling the world, May 2012; Confessions of a subversive, October 2012
It’s a significant change. Putting one’s name to criticism of any government action or inaction risks being victimised. Many individual Civil Servants and politicians have the power to destroy any private business in the Islands: we all know it and they all know it. They will still have the Cayman News Service (CNS) “bloggers” to worry about, but The Compass will carry almost no letters critical of the authorities.
The new owners promise that the paper’s editorial line will be rather less obsequious than hitherto. If that happens, the readers will gain on the swings what they will lose on the roundabouts. Work Permit expats, especially, have never trusted The Compass to keep their real names secret, so they will go back to their traditional boycott, and continue to express their opinions only on CNS. Permanent Residents, too: “Permanent” does not always mean “permanent”, in Cayman. The Immigration Monster invents its own definitions when it wants to, or is instructed to.
I well remember the day the boss of the Immigration Enforcement Unit came to my house in full uniform, with a uniformed chauffeur, to deliver a formal notice from the Immigration Board that it was “minded” to cancel my Permanent Residence. Oh dear. The content of some of my recent newspaper columns had upset the ruling politicians of the day, and my continued presence in Cayman had been deemed “not in the public interest”. The Enforcement Unit was reminding me, and the watching public, that its duties included acting as a political police-force.
Three earlier blog-posts of mine (*** see below) have reported the fuss that followed the attempt to deport me, and have noted the likely damage to Cayman’s overseas image. An international finance centre whose “offshore” professionals are forbidden from telling the truth about Cayman’s regulatory regime? How bizarre. Check my Archives, if you will.
It’s embarrassing to have to confirm each year that our local rulers’ suppression of free speech is as determined as ever. Since we are a British colony, we must conclude that the suppression is UK policy, too. Since the GCHQ (equivalent to America’s NSA) monitors every email within Britain's jurisdiction, wouldn’t it make more sense to encourage every dissident to put his thoughts down in writing? You would think.
Ah well, what can you do? Cayman is a very comfortable place to live, as long as you close your mind to a few unsavoury government policies. Exploiting unskilled migrant workers is one of them, standing by while boat-people drown is another, censorship by intimidation is yet another. The Immigration Department is the instrument by which those three policies are enforced.
No Work Permit expats are reckless enough to sign their names to any public letter, except on the most innocuous of topics, and few citizens either. Since all local businesses depend on Work Permits, they must strive not to get on the wrong side of the Immigration authorities or any of the clerks.
The number of “unprotected” individuals (those without political influence) who sign letters critical of public policies and practices can be counted on two hands. Of foreign-born citizens, one hand. The Compass’s new policy will severely ration Letters to the Editor, when it comes into effect.
Well, who am I to object? This blog of mine doesn’t publish comments, either. It’s a vehicle for my opinions, nobody else’s. Newspapers and news-websites are vehicles for their owners’ opinions – mainly, their opinions on what news to print and not print, and what slant to put on it. That’s just the way things are.
*** Freedom of Speech, October 2011; Telling the world, May 2012; Confessions of a subversive, October 2012
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