Low life
Vodka and water
Jeffrey Bernard
Barbados
havehave never known a sunshine break to equal this one. It has rained solidly — if that's possible — for eight days. A freak tropical rainstorm has given the island its worst weather since 1938. After the first two days of it I grew to accept it and ever since then I have been sitting in the bar counting my blessings. You have to count very slowly to stretch them out for eight days.
Nevertheless even a flooded Barbados holds great charm for me. There are worse things than sitting on the verandah outside my room and looking at the strip of tropi- cal garden that separates me from the beach only 30 yards beyond. The rain falling on the broad leaves of the plants here sounds like the rolling of side drums but I can wallow in the warmth.
On one of my few excursions in a taxi, this one to lunch at the Cobbler's Cove restaurant, I was greeted by a voice asking, So how's the Coach and Horses, then?' Is there no escape? They say that cockroach- es will survive a holocaust and that is prob- ably true of the denizens of Greek Street too. Most annoying is that twice this week, lunching and drinking in the Bamboo Beach Bar, I have had to move tables so as to avoid overhearing English and American advertising executives talking shop. Soho Must have been deserted this past week.
But without my old friend Bill Marshall, the racehorse trainer, life would have been a damn sight duller. We have had two lunches, two sessions and one dinner of rare roast beef and Yorkshire pudding in a thunderstorm. I also fell in with one of his ex-English owners, a genial and rich farmer over here for a while, who has been filling me up with Absolut vodka. Excellent stuff. Racing's rich rough diamonds glide through life like steamrollers. We also had lunch at the Bridgetown Yacht Club, a strangely English place, as is the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi. It is even a here odd to have scones and jam for tea the on the verandah as dusk falls and as me tree frogs begin their awful night-long ,squeaking. Yesterday, a woman journalist !roll) the Bridgetown Journal came here to Interview me and I think I failed miserably to explain to her the meaning of the phrase low life'. Bajans are strangely prudish and a waiter in the Fisherman's Pub in aPeightstown told me today that what you
make of your life is your gift to God.
Anyway, I looked at her column on Sun- day to see what she was all about and she had written a piece saying that people are like mangoes in so far as they come in all shapes and sizes. A cracker-barrel philoso- pher if ever there was one. Shades of Will Rogers for those of you old enough to remember him.
And now the waiters are hovering like so many Incredible Hulks. The service is near- ly over the top here. At breakfast this morning I was attended by no less than four waitresses, all concerned about the temperature of my toast and the strength of the tea. A pity Norman doesn't employ a Bajan. What a strange fate it has turned out to be. Trapped in a bar by rain and not chronic inertia. Excuses, excuses.
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