Where did all the bad people come from?

Linda and her young sister learnt to swim in the hands of a middle-aged man who knew their mother, though not particularly well. He had no qualifications, no insurance, no supervision, and (on the evidence) no evil desires. It never occurred to anybody that he might let his hands roam where they shouldn’t roam – and one assumes it never occurred to him either. Those were the days, eh?

She and her friends rode or walked to school and back unmolested, and played in parks afterwards, and crossed roads and tramlines, and skipped safely through dark underpasses. No mobile phones to tell their mums where they were, no wrist-watches to tell the time; bikes were never stolen from where they’d been dropped on the ground.

(In the Exeter City public swimming baths a few years ago I was ticked off for taking photos of my granddaughters while they swam with their grandma. I was probably lucky not to have my name put on the sex-offenders Register.)

Out in the bush, my young brother and I rode our bikes home after school – in a convoy up the dirt road, peeling off one by one at the tracks to our respective homes, half a mile or more in from the road. During the rains, horses took the place of bikes on what was then a mud road.

Some days, I would go home with the Cameron kids, and Mrs Cameron would phone Mum to negotiate a departure time. On hot days, we’d all pile into their swimming hole. I don’t think any of us could swim, but we could stay afloat; the nearest adult was up at the house two hundred yards away.

Except for the time Bryan broke his arm galloping through the scrub [reported in The Man from Snowy River in the Archives of November 2012], nothing bad ever happened to us. Frankie once accidentally rode his bike over the tail of a brown-snake: that could have been nasty – but he was lucky, so we didn’t even bother to tell the parents.

Back then, we were allowed to look after ourselves – Linda in her seaside town, me in the bush. So was our son on this island, a generation later. So too are his children in their semi-rural Scandinavian setting. We have all learned to calculate the risk of any activity, and to act accordingly.

When Linda and I backpacked through the Middle East in our mid-20s, our mothers took comfort (well, some comfort…) in the knowledge that we probably could look after ourselves.

Surely, far too many middle-class children today are coddled – by parents, neighbourhoods, towns, provinces and nations. Toddlers whose parents leave them in cars for more than ten seconds run the risk of being abducted by social-services bureaucrats. Parents are publicly scolded for letting their kids find their own way home from schools and playgrounds. Indeed, for even letting them be at playgrounds without adult supervision. What’s next: certificates from City Hall for play-dates?

All parents know that at some stage children have to be capable of crossing streets without having their hands held. At some point car-drivers have to be trusted not to run them down, and ice-cream vendors not to rape them, and teachers not to turn comforting hugs into rabid molestation.

Sooner or later – children have to be trusted to look after themselves. Society just hasn’t got the resources to look after everybody. Already, “society” is looking after far more people than it ought to be – far more babies, far more children, far more incompetent adults, far more old folk.

Here in Cayman, half of all Civil Servants, half of all private-sector personnel-staff, and half of our Public Revenues, are assigned to protecting Caymanian citizens who aren’t even encouraged to look after themselves. Civil Servants and politicians all have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.

Like most other communities in the Western World, we are in danger of ending up with everybody being protected all of the time, by armies of bureaucrats whose wages are paid out of money borrowed against the taxes of future generations. In the end, everybody will have forgotten how to look after themselves.

That’s the socialist dream, isn’t it?

Entertaining the Norskies

We’ve just had our Norskies (son and granddaughters) here for a couple of weeks, and very nice too. The exit was not so pleasant, because of our local Airport Management’s policy of pissing all over people who schedule their departures on Saturdays and Sundays. What a shambles it was last weekend.

It reminded me of Athens airport in 1976 when I met my Mum off the plane from Australia. Poor Mum thought she’d died and gone to hell. Passengers and greeters and farewellers in mobs; cases and packages strewn around getting trampled underfoot by goats and camels and who knows what-all. It was like wandering in the wake of an earthquake. Being trapped in the middle of a thousand milling sheep back on the farm was much less dusty and disorganized, she reckoned.

It was like that on Saturday at our international airport. Two (count ‘em!) airline ground-staff were on hand to guide five or six hundred milling sheep (as it were…) to their respective check-in desks as well as the TSA security line that stretched the entire length of the building both inside and outside. For the record, the two ground-staff were employed by Jet Blue and Delta.

Nobody from American that I could see, nobody from United, nobody from Cayman Airways. Shame on the absentees: credit to the unflappable reps from the two good guys. What a slap in the face to all the tourists and businessmen whose last impression of Cayman was of Third World incompetence.

Except for the departure shambles, it was a super holiday for our family. Linda took time off from her part-time job, and swam with the girls every morning at the little cove down the road. Ross and I did it a couple of times with them, but we were poor substitutes. The girls adore their father, and tolerate me; but Mamma Linda is the main attraction in all circumstances. She cooks with them and takes them up to the Turtle Farm and the Dolphin place, and the Agricultural Fair, and even a tennis knock-around on a friend’s court on the south side.

She it was who dug out the Scrabble and the Boggle, and taught them all the English words and spellings. Ross and I gave an exhibition of Championship Monopoly (Ross’s World Championship appearance was the subject of my January 2013 blog Monopoly Money). Fortunately, the younger one is old enough now not to mind getting thrashed in table games.

The highlight of the vacation was a one-day “resort course” Scuba lesson. For one day back in 1993 Ross would have been the youngest PADI instructor in the world, and he has never lost his teaching skills. But after leaving Cayman he let his insurance lapse, and without a current card he can’t rent tanks and equipment for others. So he wore Linda’s gear and watched a young professional diver give the lesson.

He (Ross) never seriously considered making a career as an instructor. Piloting our local tourist submarines was the closest he ever came to an underwater career. Above my chair as I write this is a head-on photograph he took of a turtle in the wild when he was thirteen. He’s quite proud of that, but only in a “been there, done that” kind of way. Linda and I would never part with it.

The girls take their father at face value, the way kids do. His exotic history is only half-listened-to, when we refer to it. Maybe it’s a bit too exotic to appreciate, for youngsters raised in the protective custody of a Scandinavian welfare-state. The older girl has had her own exotic adventures – Mayan minders in Guatemala and Peru, and the tropical diseases associated with a hippy lifestyle in those parts – but they are lost in the mists of toddlerhood.

There aren’t many opportunities for Scuba divers in Norway’s frozen waters besides the offshore oil wells. But - who knows? The lesson here in Cayman may have given our two the taste for more diving – and maybe, even, the taste for a life in places without frozen waters, one day.

Global Warming, Global Cooling

Ross and I agree on most things in life, but the fuss over the changing climate isn’t one of them. We’re not scientists or climatologists, so our opinions are based on what’s reported as being the opinions of those who are. The real question for us is: which of the two competing sets of scientists and climatologists do we believe is telling the truth.

Every thinking person in the world believes in “climate change”, of course. Who could not? Winters and summers are colder than they used to be, in places – and hotter than usual in other places. Droughts are dryer: floods are wetter. Hurricanes are fiercer but fewer, except when they’re not. Sea-ice at the Poles is shrinking, or it is expanding, depending which set of observers is telling the story.

Unless we lower our consumption of oil, the planet is doomed - also our consumption of spray deodorants and Windex. Yet politicians and their sponsors all fly off to faraway conferences in their private planes once or twice a year, staying in centrally heated luxury hotels, so perhaps it’s doomed anyway. Fuel saved by conscientious households is all diverted to Imperial armies and their suppliers; won’t that doom the planet anyway? Better (for the world) to deny the armies than the householders, wouldn’t you say? I would.

My son and I both distrust liars. We don’t tell lies ourselves, and become distressed when we encounter blatant liars. We’re never quite sure how to handle them. He has been a wonderfully forgiving person all his life, and tends to give second chances - sometimes even third chances. I’m not, and I don’t. For me, once is enough. Life’s too short to tolerate habitual liars.

I remember the manufactured panic over Saddam’s WMDs. We were 45 minutes away from a mushroom cloud over London, the liars told the Western press, and the press told us suckers. The politicians and bureaucrats thirsted after war and bloodshed, and had a vested interest in those things. The sheep didn’t doubt the mass media, and let the bloodshed proceed on the nod. A million civilians died; millions more were traumatized, physically or mentally or both, and most of them will never recover. The perpetrators shrugged, and have never felt remorse.

How can such a monstrous lie and its enablers be forgiven by anyone with any moral values? Hitler’s willing executioners (that was the title of a book about them) have as much claim to respect as those monsters.

The same monsters and the same obedient reporters are today pushing another Big Lie in respect of the world’s changing climate. Instead of WMD, today’s selected enemy is AGW. The pushers don’t care whether AGW is true or not; they only care that the sheep can be manipulated to the point of believing it.

 In October of 2013 I wrote a blog-post called SUM TING WONG. Google will lead you to it if you search for that title with my name in front. That was the name of the captain of a Korean passenger jet that clipped the perimeter-fence at San Francisco’s airport, announced to the nation in all solemnity by a TV network reporter on the day, reading from what was typed and shown on the screen. The other officers in the cockpit were solemnly reported as WI TU LO, HO LEE FUK, and BANG DING OW. I kid you not.

The same degree of diligence goes into all that they do. By and large, only the “alternative media” questions the official versions of events - from Saddam’s nuclear weapons and the names of Korean airline pilots, to the casual defeat of the world’s most sophisticated national defence-system in 2001, by nineteen barefoot Arab boys with a dozen fifty-cent box-cutters.

It is independent researchers who genuinely seek alternatives to suspicious narratives – the Malaysian Airlines planes, the Charlie Hebdo shootings, the Ukrainian civil war, the threat of Global Warming. Mind you, the independents’ conclusions aren’t always right. Sometimes – when it suits Big Brother – the official versions are right.

One day, Sum Ting Wong really will be the name of an airline pilot. One day, either Global Warming will be proven to be the fault of mankind, and all the billionaires’ private planes will be grounded for the common good; or, Global Cooling will be proven, and reckless fuel usage will be encouraged. Hasten the day.

The right to die

In a blog-post called The Gay Marriage Thing in March last year, I recognized that the legalization of same-sex marriages in effect dismissed procreation as the basic premise on which formal marriage has always been based. The premise dated from the days when love had nothing to do with marriage, and everything to do with family alliances.

When marriage is removed from the context of family alliances and children, why does a community – any community – need to be in the business of licensing marriages at all? Why can’t communities simply butt out altogether, and let marriages happen in the absence of any community acknowledgment?

By the same token: why does any community have to be in the business of legislating with regard to death?

In most Western societies – liberal democracies – individuals are already free (within reason) to bequeath their assets to whomever they want. Most societies do levy ad-valorem taxes on deceased estates, though. That’s a custom that began when relatively primitive communities or their rulers held actual legal title to all the land, and whose approval had to be granted for the transfer of occupancy on the death of their tenants. It’s not called “real estate” for nothing; the word “real” meant “royal”.

At all levels of society, it wasn’t just the land that belonged to a community or its lords and/or kings, it was also the people who lived on it. The rulers held the power of life and death over their subjects. It still is, if you think about it. Even in democracies, such actions as abduction, assault, murder and theft are forbidden to all but the authorized servants of the state.

Chief among those prohibitions is the termination of human life. Even the most lowly members of the proletariat are valuable, as spear-carriers and cannon-fodder in tribal wars. To deprive the community of prospective soldiers was tantamount to treason. Even today, the killer of a fellow-subject must be tried in the lawcourts of the relevant king or his agents. Private vengeance is forbidden. Vengeance is mine, saith the king: I will repay.

 Suicide deprives a community and its rulers of their property. Therefore, nobody can assist in a suicide, any more than in a private murder. In many nations, a suicide forfeited the privilege of being buried in a churchyard – as well as the privilege of God’s mercy in the afterlife.

Over centuries, individuals have gradually been allowed to gain some rights over their own lives. In Western societies, at least. Some simpler, pacifist, cultures have always been generous in recognizing individual rights in respect of death. Committing suicide has never been a shameful act, there, and nor has assisting it.

Logically, suicide is the final freedom. Indeed, it is irrefutable proof of individual freedom. Neither church canon nor civil statute ought to hold any veto over the basic human right to be free. The main clause of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights obliges all national government-signatories to recognize a right to life, and the right to life ends with death, surely, not a split-second earlier.

Human Rights advocates and supporters claim that human rights exist ab initio, so to speak. They can’t be granted, only recognized: they can’t be withdrawn or cancelled, only not recognized. Communities who endorse the basic principle have no moral option but to recognize the logic of the statement in the paragraph above this one. The right to life ends with death, and not a moment earlier. Suicide is the act of a free man. Preventing it is the act of an unfree society.

Give a Kid Breakfast

One of Cayman’s most emotive charity-appeals is for children who arrive at school without having been fed any breakfast. A newspaper report from two years ago spoke of 1000 children in this situation, and the website of the (separate) children’s charity that gives schoolkids free lunches estimates that 1200 “families” regularly need food. The figures are probably a lot higher now than when they were reported. In every case, the parent or parents either don’t have the time to feed the children or can’t afford to feed them, or can’t be bothered to feed them.

Those who know of Cayman’s wealth (its per-capita Public Revenue is huge, by regional standards) must wonder if these charities aren’t a bit of a racket. Would 20% of Caymanian schoolchildren really starve without private charities’ efforts? I don’t believe it. I can easily believe that the 20% turn up at school without breakfast inside them or lunch in hand; but I don’t believe all their parents can’t afford the food. A simple breakfast of cold cereal and milk costs fifty cents, and nobody in Cayman is too poor to afford that.

The two main charities are Give a Kid Breakfast and Feed our Future. Between them they feed a reported 25% of all the Caymanian children in primary and secondary schools in the Islands. No expat children are included in these programs, because a) the children of well-paid expats must by law attend fee-paying private schools, and b) low-paid expat parents aren’t permitted to have their children with them in Cayman.

Are any of the charity-parents means-tested? Supposedly, yes, though I wonder how thorough the testing is. If I were to do the testing, how many would I find driving new cars and spending their wages on beauty salons or alcohol or huge flat-screen TVs? Those charities could hire me to do the means-testing (free of charge, I promise), and to publish my findings, with names. Huh. That's not going to happen.

Back in 1988, as a member of the government High School’s PTA sub-committee looking into the drugs problem at the School, I persuaded my colleagues to call for convicted drugs-dealers to be banned from the campus, even if they were parents or guardians of pupils, and for their photos to be posted on the Notice Board. The day after our report went forward, word came down from the Education Department to the Headmaster to close down the sub-committee immediately. Even drugs dealers had the vote, after all… It’s the same thing with charity-cheats. Ach, what can you do?

Even more important than the cheating, is the deliberate grooming of the unfortunate children to a lifetime of cosseting. Free meals at their primary and secondary schools, free scholarships for their college education, full protection by the Immigration system during their working lives, and free Meals on Wheels when they retire. From kindergarten to the grave, the community will protect them from the burdens of character-building and financial responsibility.

I have left out the pre-schoolers, because I don’t know what happens to them. I suppose that if they don’t get free food there, they are fed at home by relatives or friends. I’ve never heard of a new pupil turning up at a primary school malnourished, on his or her first day.

The other thing to say about the free meals is that a lot of careful thought has gone into the sample menus. I wonder if the whole program isn’t rather over-egged, so to speak. For my four years at the local bush primary-school, between home-schooling and boarding-school, Mum gave me Marmite sandwiches every day for lunch, and my brother peanut-butter sandwiches – plus an apple or orange. At break-times we drank water out of the school’s storage-tank, warm from the hot sun. If we were lucky! (Monty Python joke; video accessible via Google.)

We never swapped lunches. There were only a dozen of us, and our parents all knew each other. It would have been disloyal to spurn the lunch we were given. Anyway, I liked Marmite, and Doug liked peanut butter; it never occurred to us to expect variety, or a choice.

How times have changed.

Hobson’s Choice (eating well)

When I was a boy… [Surely one of the benefits of becoming an old codger is that you can get away with reminiscences beginning with “When I was a boy”.] So. When I was a boy, life was simpler for children than it is now.

For one thing, the food was simpler. In the 1940s and ‘50s, shops didn’t carry pre-cooked meals, at least in Queensland. McDonald’s and KFC hadn’t come to us yet. Prepared food in general? Heck, even sandwich-shops created their goodies while we watched. Nothing was prepared ahead of time. We office-workers lined up at midday and gave our orders one by one to sweaty-handed lads living dangerously with razor-sharp knives. There was no air-conditioning, and the fans couldn’t really cope with the heat.

Hygienic gloves hadn’t come into fashion, then, but we hardly ever discovered any blood in our fillings. The sandwich-makers were skilled at their job.

We didn’t have allergies, because allergies are immune-deficiencies caused by the excessive avoidance of germs. Frankie Gardiner was the only kid with asthma that anybody ever knew, out at Hannaford; and he was from Melbourne, a thousand miles or more to the south. Maybe he had led too sheltered a life; he was a delicate boy, who tended to hang back when the rest of us were messing around in the dirt.

Kitchen-cleansers that remove 99% of all household germs are bad for young children. It’s the 99% of household germs that build up kids’ immunities. What doesn’t kill children makes them stronger – just like our Grandmas said.

When I was a boy, not only was food simpler than it is now: so were menus. Our mothers’ menus at every mealtime were quintessentially simple – namely, what was on the plate. The choice was Hobson’s choice: eat it or don’t eat it. Actually: eat it all or don’t bother turning up for the next meal.

My Mum would bend the rules a bit, in a good cause; but she never broke them. I hated pumpkin, so she kindly served me only a token amount; and in the spirit of fair play I ate all of that. It was easier at boarding school. There I could give my pumpkin away, and fill up with the stale bread that usually went begging.

In the bush, most of our food was mutton, home-raised at a marginal cost that was close to zero. In town, too, our only meat was mutton, out of residual loyalty to the sheep-farming industry. During my working years in Brisbane my landladies often served up roast beef on Sundays, but it was many years before I could eat it without feeling guilty.

I was left with a lifelong aversion to choice, with regard to foods. Even today I never feel completely comfortable in restaurants, for that reason. I love eating at friends’ houses, because they don’t give me a choice. Occasionally a hostess will say, “I hope you like this”, but she doesn’t really care. There’s never an alternative on offer. “Sorry, Wendy, I’m a vegetarian.” “Oh dear, George; let me scrape the meat off your plate and give you a few more potatoes. There you go.”

When courtesy requires, I will eat anything at all. In Tehran, I was once offered a sheep’s eye. As it happens – and fortunately – our host had lived in the West. As I steeled myself, the eye glaring at me defiantly, he took pity. (The host, not the eye. The eye was pitiless.) “I know it’s not a western thing”, he said, “and I won’t be offended if you’d rather not choke it down. But for us it’s a delicacy. Why not let me eat it?” I settled for the tender eyelid-meat that surrounded the organ. That saved me a little bit of “face”. Linda wouldn’t even eat that.

Somebody once told me of a British couple who discovered a restaurant in Madrid whose specialty was bulls’ testicles. Animals killed in the bull-fights are sold at the markets, and no part of the beast is wasted. One night the serving was meagre – tasty, but much smaller than usual – and the couple asked why. The waiter shrugged. “Senor, Senora… You know, the bull doesn't always lose. Very occasionally, he wins, and it is the matador who dies.” Shrug.

It – uhhh – it may not be a true story, but it’s worth the telling.

Standards in Public Life (in Cayman)

Having Cayman as a colony is not all fun and games for the British Government. The poor old FCO (Foreign & Commonwealth Office) goes to all the trouble of designing a framework to contain bad behavior by our local rulers, only for the framework to be ignored or subverted.

Bad behavior is supposed to be monitored – and, ideally, curtailed – by three politically appointed Commissions, as well as by the FCO-appointed Public Auditor. A couple of other public officers are supposed to keep the Civil Service in line – an ombudsman (Complaints Commissioner) and a Freedom of Information Officer.

Nothing works the way it was intended. Each member of the Commissions was chosen because he or she was reckoned to be “a safe pair of hands”. The Anti-Corruption Commission has uncovered two or three of the most blatant of thousands of daily illegalities within the Immigration Department, but any trials will have to wait two or three years. After all, why hurry? There’s plenty of cash in the kitty to keep the suspects’ salaries and perks paid in full while they sit at home and attend to their private businesses.

The Human Rights Commission wastes its time on legal technicalities, and avoids taking official notice of the longtime exploitation of unskilled migrants, indentured (without the slightest supervision) to their employers. “Near slavery”, the Jamaicans call it, sometimes with good reason. The HRC also ignores Cayman’s treatment of our boat-people – Cuban refugees, many of whom die on the way from Cuba to Honduras via Cayman waters. The HRC doesn’t seem to regard refugees or poor migrants as human, within the terms of its responsibility.

The Standards in Public Life Commission does nothing at all, as far as we can tell.

Last week one of our Cabinet Ministers, responsible for Health, Culture, Youth and Gender Affairs, lost his rag when invited by his Chief Officer (the most senior Civil Servant in any Ministry) to provide evidence to support a dubious expense-claim before submitting it for reimbursement. The Minister – an arrogant bully at any time; he “has form”, as the English say – cursed out the unfortunate CO in the hearing of the entire staff. "How dare you!! I am a born Caymanian and you are just a piece of fucking driftwood! Get the fuck out of my office! Go on - fuck off!" Or words to that effect.

Our Premier backed his crony, the bully. The Chief Officer was transferred to another Portfolio. The Minister lost a couple of responsibilities, but retained Culture – which gives us lots of hope for the future…

Never mind the cursing. The word "driftwood" – and its tolerance by our Premier – is what will cost his Party the next election. That the Chief Officer was a highly respected immigrant of longstanding (foreign-born, but with bloodline-Caymanian children by her bloodline-Caymanian ex-husband) indicates the profound contempt for expats that flourishes in the leadership of our ruling party.

Ever since I began this blog in 2010, I have bewailed the anti-expat attitudes of many bloodline-Caymanians. Not all of them: probably not even a majority: but many. And most of the “many” voted for this present ruling party, which has always had a bit of a name for being anti-expatriate. This latest incident removes all doubt, and it is way too much for any of our expat communities to accept.

Our votes are gone, and they won’t be coming back. British and other European, North American, Latino, Jamaican, Asian, African… we’re all well represented on the voting lists these days, and we will probably vote as a bloc next time. Come back, McKeeva – all is forgiven!

Where does Cayman go from here? Into further tribal divisiveness, unfortunately. And further corruption. When Linda and I came here in 1978, Caymanian Status (citizenship, in effect) could be bought for $30,000, paid under the counter to the right person in high office. The “marl road” – our grapevine – reports that it has been available for only $20,000 recently. Ah well: it’s good to know some prices have escaped inflation.

X is for Xmas (the A-Z of blogging)

I came across a website the other day that challenged readers to write a series of 26 essays, within a selected theme, each essay to be identified with a different letter of the alphabet. Mentally flipping through my blog’s archives I found I could handle the assignment only if I used X for Xmas – or, X for Xnty, which is my private shorthand for Christianity.

Q & Z were easy: they could stand for Queensland and Zorba, respectively. Zorba the Greek was a movie that was showing at a cinema in Thessaloniki, Greece, one night in 1964; a gang of us from the Youth Hostel went and watched it – dubbed in Greek, with English sub-titles. I was reminded of the event by a Canadian chap we came across in what is now Vanuatu eight years later; I blogged about that meeting in January 2012, and it’s in the Archives under the name of the movie.

It’s nice to have a legitimate “Z for …” in my bag. My cousin Arthur was Secretary to the Bishop of Zambia in the 1950s, but I’ve never written about that; and nothing memorable has ever happened to me at a zoo. So it was Zorba or nothing. It’s much the same with Queensland. I’ve hitched to and through Queenstown in New Zealand and Qum in Iran, and I once took in a day’s polo at Windsor Great Park in the company of a Duke named Quentin. But Qs are slim pickings in any context.

This month I’m reading “The Atheists’ Guide to Christmas” – which to my surprise uses the C-word and not the X-abbreviation. That’s weird. I myself always write Xmas, unless to a known or suspected Christian whom I don’t want to offend. (My shorthand for “Christian” is Xn, naturally enough. Among some of my US acquaintances, Xian is a code word for Zionist, which is interesting; maybe they use it to throw the censors off the scent.)

X was and is the letter of the Greek alphabet whose sound was and is similar to our English hard-C. When Christianity began as a religion, Greek commentators translated the Semitic title “Messiah” [“the anointed”] as Christos – in Greek lettering which was later transliterated into Christ. Christos meant “anointed” (smeared with ointment) in a general religious context, and was conveniently close in sound to Horus, the Egyptian sky-god widely respected (and sometimes worshipped) in the Greek culture of the time. And who was born of a virgin, and whose holy day was 25th December. What a coincidence!

Happily, too, Jesus/Iesus was conveniently close in sound to Isis, that same virgin mother. Thus: Jesus Christ = Iesus Horus, as though the “Christ” part was a surname and not a title. There is another Greek word (probably related), that transliterates as kharis, meaning “grace”, which is used in their “thanks” – efkharisto, from which we got our English Eucharist.

Christianity is a largely synthetic religion, absorbing rituals, traditions, legends and names from just about every belief-system it encountered. It pinched the whole of the Old Testament from Judaism – and, more recently, the Christmas Tree and Santa Claus from the Germans.

Our English name for God is Germanic – Gott from the Goths and Scots, both of which peoples took their names from the same ancient tribal god. In contrast, southern European tribes mostly stuck with the name of Zeus in its several forms, inherited from the even more ancient tribal god of Sumer in southern Iraq. I blogged about The Names of God in March 2012.

For centuries the name “damn” was considered a blasphemy, after Christianity had commandeered the general sound of it for its own god. (“Damn/domine” in Latin meant “master” or “lord”; its origin – as far as can be speculated – was the ancestor of the Aramaic god Tammuz, whose name endures in England’s River Thames. And in the word democracy – as explained in a blog-post of November 2011.

Gods’ names are the very devil to shake off.

Cousin Harry and the Branson girl (India 1905)

Several cousins and ancestors on my Barlow side were involved (to a greater or lesser degree) in the maintenance of the British Empire’s Indian branch-offices. My grandfather’s cousin Arthur was the last of them; he retired in 1947 after twenty years in the Indian Civil Service as a Political Officer and Agent. The Political Office was an informal sub-agency of MI5, Britain’s domestic intelligence agency – British India being regarded as “domestic” – so Arthur was a spy of some sort.

(Flipping through an old address-book of his after he died, I came across the name Anthony Blunt, who also joined MI5, and who notoriously spied for the Soviets in the 1930s and ‘40s. Arthur couldn’t have spied for them, or he wouldn’t have been buried inside the grounds of Wells Cathedral! Only for his Queen and country.)

The first head of MI5, in 1909, was a British Army Officer from the South Staffordshire Regiment. From that same regiment had also come, in 1905, Arthur’s (and my grandfather’s) cousin Harry Barlow. In that year, Harry was appointed the Official Tutor of the son and heir of the Raja of Sirmur – one of the nominally independent Princely States of the Punjab, in the north-west of what is now the nation of India Bharat.

I have no access to the records of whichever agency preceded MI5, but it seems reasonable to suppose that Harry was instructed to teach the boy how to further the interests of the Empire. His pupil generously contributed the lives of some hundreds of his soldiers to Britain’s war effort against the Germans in the European theatre of the War of 1914-18. Besides coaching the boy, Harry probably had a hand in training The Sirmur Rifles, a regiment of Gurkhas based in the Protectorate.

He had been a Captain in the South African War of 1899-1902, and the Military Administrator of an Afrikaner town after the War. His parents had died young, and he had been raised in the household of his uncle, a former Private Secretary to Cabinet Ministers in London. So he would have been considered “the right sort of chap” to represent British interests abroad – at least at the modest level required.

There was one blot on his escutcheon, though it wasn’t fatal to his career. In 1902 his wife divorced him for adultery, naming as the co-respondent an actress daughter of the house of Branson & Branson, English barristers in Madras for at least three generations, and in Bombay for at least one. He married the girl immediately afterwards. (Not so much a girl, by then, but I always think of her as a girl.) As a professional actress, she was probably reckoned to have “married up”, in England; but in India it would have been Harry who married up.

Branson is not all that common a name, and Google has links to the ancestry of Sir Richard-of-the-Virgins, whose grandfather was a cousin of hers. Her side of the family may not have been as successful at lawyering as his side, because her deceased estate amounted to only 647 pounds when she died in 1954, aged 90. 647 pounds wasn’t much, in 1954. Maybe she received a monthly remittance from back home; I hope so.

Harry died of cholera during one of the region’s regular epidemics, in 1909 – on the train down to Delhi, on his way to stay with Ada in Bombay. He was buried where he fell, more or less – in the Nicholson Cemetery in Delhi; I even have the grave number (#800F in Pukka Plot 15 #25), although I doubt it’s still there. As far as I can tell, Ada lived the rest of her life in London, where she must have had relatives. Her mother had been buried in Golders Green.

 She (Ada) had been married before the affair with Harry, and presumably her husband divorced her about the same time as Harry divorced his wife and two children. A few years ago I had to track down one of Harry’s granddaughters (by the first wife), when she and I inherited a few quid on the death of cousin Arthur’s widow. She (the granddaughter) had never heard of Ada Branson; I expect the name was taboo in that household.

I once asked Arthur how Harry came to be employed in the Palace of Sirmur, only to be brushed off with the suggestion that he had probably answered an advertisement in The Times. A typically MI5 lie, it seems to me now.

Tough as old boots (local foods)

We have become local-food fanatics in our old age. It’s taken us a long time to see the light, but what can I tell you? We’re slow learners.

Cayman doesn’t produce much food – at least, food that we both like. I’m notorious (in my family) for disliking all vegetables except the staples – potatoes, tomatoes (yes, yes, I know…), beans, peas and carrots. I will eat lettuce and chick peas in salads, and fried rice with little unidentifiable bits and pieces mixed in, but I don’t seek those things out.

Cayman grows only tomatoes, of my staples, and those only in the season, whenever that is. Linda tries to grow them, but they ripen too quickly in the tropical sun, before they have time to reach a decent size. The farmers grow a lot of other veges that sell well, though not to me: callaloo and ackees and yams, breadfruit and plantain and cassava. And pumpkins. Linda makes super pumpkin scones, but there's not much pumpkin-taste to them, fortunately.

Plenty of local fruit, as it happens. In their respective seasons, we’re never short of local bananas, mangoes, papaya, limes, oranges of a sort, sweetsop (which is what we called “custard apple” when I was a boy), and the ever-present coconut. That’s quite a variety. We’re spoilt for choice, pretty much.

I don’t think any of those are organically farmed. Our small farmers use chemical weedkillers by the barrel, and some of the chemicals are wildly toxic. The local favourite is Paraquat, which is deathly, and the weapon of choice for the neighbours of dogs that bark all night. I wouldn’t want any of that on Linda’s tomatoes.

Local jams are occasionally sold at the farmers’ market up at Camana Bay every Wednesday, and at the main farmers’ market out Bodden Town way. There’s local honey again, now that Otto Watler is back in the game. All his bees died a couple of years ago, and had to be replaced. $15 is quite a high price – but they are big jars, and hold about a pint. About a pint: Mr Watler’s labels don’t tell us exactly how much; but we buy anyway. What the heck. Two tuppennies.

For meats and the like, we limit ourselves to local pork, beef and eggs, Jamaican chicken, and fish caught by local fishermen off the coasts of South America or on the reefs between there and here. All of that is more or less pure. Jamaican chickens aren’t free-range, but we trust the factories there not to pump them full of hormones like more sophisticated farmers do.

For the first fifteen years of my life I was brought up on home-grown mutton, and raw milk that Dad coaxed out of his Jersey cows first thing in the morning, every morning. We never drank sheep’s milk, for some reason; and Dad never kept goats. I’ll have to ask my brother; he will know why. Our meat always came from the skinniest old wether Dad could find. Tough as old boots, it was; all the fat and tender sheep went off to the markets in Toowoomba, to be sold at auction to the butchers.

We had a low-tech separator machine that separated the cream from the milk. Dad or Mum (I forget) churned some of the cream into butter – with more salt than was good for us, I’m sure. All that full-fat cream we guzzled… I wonder we three boys are still alive to remember it.

Actually, it’s not nostalgia that drove Linda and me back to locally produced food, but the artificial additives in today’s mass-produced food. American veges are dosed with Agent Orange to keep the bugs at bay, and American animals are injected with steroids and hormones to make them mature faster. This much is true: my man-boobs began shrinking the minute I stopped eating USDA meats.

During our backpacking days in the Middle East in the ‘60s, not being able to understand the languages of the region, and travelling poor, Linda and I used to inspect the pots bubbling away in the slum restaurants’ filthy kitchens. As a rule of thumb, and all else being equal, we would choose from the pot furthest away from the cockroaches and rat-droppings. Looking back now, we suspect that what we ate then was probably healthier than the food the agri-businesses palm off on the world today. What a sad judgment that is, on the modern way of life.