| After having a week to reflect on my last journal entry I realise that it may have been unduly negative. If truth be told I was having visa problems with Uncle Sam which was making me somewhat melancholic thereby giving my Bermudian reflections a swarthy complexion. I therefore wanted to state for the record all the things that I love about this far-flung lump of rock. I�ll start each paragraph with �I love� and we�ll see how far I get. I love the sense of manners (among the older generation at any rate) and the quixotic acts of elderly gentlemen. Again this takes a bit of getting used to, but in this instance it is the expatriate that could learn from the local, not vice versa. For example, on greeting people one should commence the preliminaries with �Good morning/afternoon/evening�, as the time of day dictates. One evening, when I had been on the island less than a week, I was over at my friend Steve�s watching a bad movie on telly (for some reason I think it was Bird on a Wire but I may be wrong). The adverts come on and I offer to go to the nearby petrol station to purchase the mandatory ice-creams. Being male I naturally don�t listen to the directions- I mean I descended from hunter gatherers, I�ll hunt that petrol station down and gather the calorific treats and I don�t need anyone�s help to do it. Predictably I get lost when I come across a lady driving her car, waiting to turn at an intersection. This is no time for pride and I decide that I am sufficiently in-touch with my feminine side to ask for directions. I smile and beckon to the lady to wind down her window �Excuse me but can you tell me the way to the petrol station please?� �Good evening� and then a long pause was the response. I�m getting anxious, I mean by this time Goldie and Mel could have gotten themselves into a right pickle. �Yes hello, do you know where the petrol station is please?� �Good evening� came the response. By this stage I have decided that the lady is almost certainly deaf so I exclaim at the top of my (admittedly bombastic) voice, saying each word slowly and deliberately incase the lady is attempting to lip read: �H-I, P-L-E-A-S-E C-A-N Y-O-U T-E-L-L M-E W-H-E-R-E T-H-E P-E-T-R-O-L S-T-A-T-I-O-N I-S?� Again the response �Good evening� and a long pause. Then the revelation hits me and I grin widely and reply �Good evening to you to!� �Take the next right, go over the hill and it�s on your right�. My mother would like that lady, after all-manners are free. My dad on the other hand would still be there today trying to invent a form of sign language to communicate with this old dear. I love that I have so much time on my hands. The commute time being negligible means that, even if you work to 6:30 (an exceptionally late night), you can be home by 6:40 and on a tennis court at 7:15 having eaten dinner. In London I lived for 2 days of the week, being Saturday and Sunday, as the rest of the week, by the time I finished work, got home and made some food there was really only a chance to veg in front of the telly for an hour, iron a shirt and then it�s goodnight Vienna. Here however I can live for 7 days a week. I can write a journal every week if I want to, I can play sport every night and Bermuda has them all � badminton, squash, 5 aside football, cricket, golf, softball, tennis, volleyball, basketball. Recently I have been going to the beach a couple of nights each week with a bottle of wine and reading a book until the sun goes down. How many can say that? I love that in the workplace there is less of a sense of rigidity in one�s job description and deference to one�s superiors. Most companies employ less than a hundred people and so everyone has to be an all rounder as there is no clear demarcation of duties. In my last job I was employed by a brokerage company. What was the first job that I was given when I joined? Well I�ll tell you since you ask- I wrote the �Gym Waiver Declaration� so that if any of our employees decapitated themselves whilst bench pressing the company would not be liable. Our company�s President, in my second week on the job, dropped his trousers in front of everyone to show off his impressive thigh muscles as a result of his recent skiing expedition. I enjoyed the lack of formality in the workplace. I love the local media, they always make me chuckle. I heard a recent advertisement on the radio for Paget Pharmacy which informed that the listener that it was �open 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, including 10 �til 6 on Sunday�. The sleepy nature of this place was driven home to me on my fourth day here. On January 1, 1999 I was lying by the pool, nursing a killer hangover (as one might expect) when the news bulletin came on the radio. The headline was �Bermuda has a New Year�s Day Baby�. Stop the presses-I bet that created shock waves around the world. They then gave the weather forecast, which concluded with the lady announcer stating that �The high today will be 71 degrees. The weather in Hamilton is currently cloudy and 74 degrees�. I love going to traffic court. As you�ll have gathered from my last journal, I�ve had more than my fair share of traffic offences. It is almost worth paying the fine for the comedy that precedes it. The last time I was there, an elderly rastaman was in court listening to his walkman and letting out an involuntary �Jah Lives� when the spirit of Ras Tafari took over. He kept his mirrored shades on throughout and refused to take his hat of when the judge asked him to, on the grounds that his hat was �part of de culture�. When it was his turn to face the music the judge said �How do you plead?� His reply was �I�ll take me licks man�. That courtroom on a Thursday afternoon is the argument against Darwin. So cheerio Bermuda, it�s been nice knowing you. |