Sailing South

It was only in the year that my mother turned 60 that we both very belatedly realised that, since I was born two days before her thirtieth birthday, there was a very simple, round, three-decade gap between her age and mine. In 1997, I explained to her, she became bang on twice my age as of two days after I attained (to my slight surprise and considerable consternation) thirty years old. Neither of us had really had any excuse for failing to remember one another's age for about the preceding twenty-five years.

Three years after that, I fell in love with a Norwegian woman. Three years after that we separated – not amicably. It was therefore a surprise to return thence the next year, when I accompanied my mother on a Norwegian coastal cruise. I wrote about that in a chapbook called Sailing North. It was an emotional journey for me; for the first third of the new century's first decade, I had thought that my of my future lay in and around Norway, a country which I loved for reasons which were not much connected with its national geography (although it helps).

Eight years later, I am on another fortnight-long cruise with my mother. Again, emotions are running high. She is now seventy-five and in failing health, and she is repeatedly asserting that this will be her last big holiday. I hope that she is wrong, but with eyesight and heart deteriorating, worsening diabetes and serious arthritic problems in both legs, she is losing her mobility and independence and with those her will to live.

In the intervening years, she has had some adventures with her friend Audrey, a charming and granite-hard Yorkshirewoman who has strong genes – her grandson is Mark Cavendish, a Manx professional racing cyclist who has won more Tour de France stages than anyone else. Together, they have visited Madeira, the sunny coasts of both Spain and Portugal, Moscow, St Petersburg, Helsinki, cruised in the Mediterranean and taken a train across Canada to the Yukon.

But now, growing prematurely infirm, rather than another cold damp Yule on the Isle of Man, she felt that a gentle cruise in the tropic Caribbean seemed likely to be something that she could cope with and even enjoy. She has eschewed any inoculations or vaccinations and had not planned to go ashore, but she broke that resolution on the first day.

So in mid-December, I found myself flying from freezing London to sun-kissed Barbados, for me long a byword for exotic tropical luxury. Here we were to join the Ventura, an Italian-built P&O cruise liner: a nineteen-deck floating town, with multiple shops and bars, a cinema, a theatre, piano, tapas and ballroom dancing clubs, four free restaurants and as many more which cost extra, from burger and pizza joints all the way up to a Marco Pierre White designer boutique étoile, and no less than four swimming pools – one an "infinity pool". Not one of those posy ones one the edge of a high drop where the water goes right to the invisible edge in a rich man's home or a hotel for the moneyed; no, this is a small oblong pool enclosed on a high sun deck, but with its own integral flume, a high-pressure watery conveyor-belt allowing you to swim flat out in a six or seven metre long pool for as long as you can, in a sort of acquatic human-scale hamster-wheel.

(I've tried it. It is absolutely fantastic. I am a reasonable swimmer but not a fast one. I can just about stay in the same place, absolutely flat out, for half to three quarters of a minute against the current doing breaststroke or backstroke; with some warming up and massive effort, I can actually advance against the flow doing a racing crawl and touch the machine's guard bar. Somehow it is immensely more satisfying than trying to take 30sec off your time for a lap of the local pool, although to be fair this may be because my local pool is the unheated outdoor Tooting Bec Lido in south London and one of its lengths is a distinctly non-trivial eighth of a kilometer. Its widths are fairly serious in their own right and would be lengths of most indoor pools. But I am getting ahead of myself.)

Day 1 – Gatwick to Barbados (Liam's Caribbean travel diary, #2)

Barbados ain't what it's cracked up to be. Well,  not the bit that I saw in a hasty-by-Caribbean-standards airport-to-container-port transfer. Those booked on a complete P&O package need not concern themselves with mundanities such as luggage retrieval; they merely swan outside, board their air-conditioned coach and ride away. Those of us on independent travel itineraries do not have quite such an easy right.We had to get out own bags, then with my mother being propelled in a wheelchair by a keen if slightly imprecise Bajan porter, carry them through customs, out of the baking hot airport (NO CELLPHONE NO CAMERA NO PHOTOGRAPH) and through a bevy of vying taximen to the luggage van and thence to a slightly battered coach in a 1970s colour scheme.

Then we struggled through the early-Friday-evening traffic to the capital Bridgetown and thence to its ferry port, to be confronted by a vertical wall of white-painted iron and lime green balconies. My initial impression of the SS Ventura was that it was only marginally smaller in scale than one of Iain Banks' General System Vehicles and its crew was probably similarly supplied by its own onboard population growth.

Actually, they're mostly Philipino and Indian, I hear that they live six to each small room below the waterline and get paid slightly better than the going rates of pay in their home countries – which is to say that they're probably earning about as much a day as I'm spending on beer. And I'm on holiday with my mum, which means that I really am not drinking very much. Nonetheless, our chambermaid Imelda – no, really – is unfailingly cheerful, friendly and helpful, making up the cabin in the morning, dropping in to replenish supplies mid-afternoon and then in the early evening returning to turn down our beds and deposit a complimentary chocolate on each duvet. I think her shifts are roughly 6AM to 1AM but I am probably being very conservative in my estimation.

But back to Barbados, home of Sir Gary Sobers – my bus went round his roundabout – and the clothing-phobic self-groping popstrel Rihanna.

Between airport and Bridgetown was a blasted landscape of scrub, ruined post-colonial houses, rundown but occupied houses, brightly-painted new ones, construction sites and the occasional random and badly out-of-place glass-covered office or upmarket hotel, all in a fairly random medley.

To my jaundiced former-ecologist's eye, it looks like the ruins of a violated ecosystem, overexploited to collapse and then the corpse flogged. The palm trees that dot the landscape are the only large trees I saw in a forty-five minute journey, and town planning appears to be something that only foreigners in distant lands do.

It is a fairly flat landscape, often marshy and always messy. Not quite the Spice Island I'd half anticipated and certainly not living up to the claim that it is the "jewel of the Caribbean". If I may be forgiven for quoting Terry Pratchett:

Ankh-Morpork! Pearl among cities! Well, all right, in the interests of strict accuracy, it is not small, round and shiny. However, even its worst enemy could not deny the justice of comparing it to a piece of rubbish covered in the diseased secretions of a dying mollusc.

Of Bridgetown, I cannot really speak. We drove through in the rush-hour and I saw nothing much more than an IBM office and a KFC outlet. Despite the neocolonial architecture, it was mostly striking in how relatively un-exotic it was. Then we left to enter a large container port, with all the beauty, grace and excitement that that suggests.