Back home, Part I

Oisin, Chloe and Emelie (top); Oisin mowing the lawn for Auntie Stephanie.

So where is home? I was rather nervous leaving Provo that exactly what and where home was would get a little muddled. Fortunately, I was spared the confusion and know that home is very much Provo.

We left 3 weeks ago. First stop Toronto for a long overdue visit with my sister and her family. We were upgraded to Business Class on the Miami-Toronto leg....but only 2 of us so Osh got to play with the controls and the buttons and gadgets and free champagne (only joking) whilst I sat in coach class....hurrumph!

Oisin was delighted to see his cousins again and we had lots of fun visiting the Islands, the Eaton Centre, ToysRUs, having dinner during the most incredible rain storm, hanging with family and generally enjoying the deliciously cool weather. Oisin had saved hard and, having finally finished his 2nd reading book, earned a bonus which he spent in ToysRUs. Like a true and focussed shopper he entered the store, made a bee-line for the Bionicles section and chose 3 Bionciles in short order. At a price that would have bought him just 1 in Provo. One happy customer!

Too soon, we had to leave Toronto for London. We flew to Boston (what an incredibly beautiful city, on the water, surrounded by islands, definitely a place to explore in the future) which is a lovely small airport and a definite recommendation for anyone that has to transit in the US. From Boston we flew to London, arriving the following morning. Oisin, as usual, was a great travelling companion. He never moans, never whinges, sleeps all the way and is always helpful and cooperative at the other end when all the adults are strung out on lack of sleep and jet lag.

My faithful car gave up the ghost 3 miles outside Heathrow (a friend was collecting us) so we went home on the coach and the train which was relatively painless. Arriving back in Portsmouth was very odd. I had been worried in Canada that I'd get to Portsmouth and be hit with a huge wave of nostalgia and regret at leaving. But I have to say that the grey skies quickly dispensed with that thought and I was quietly grateful that I was leaving for the Windies again in 2 weeks. That said, it was just lovely to see old friends again and catch up on their news and have the chance to just natter with people again. I know a lot of people here in Provo, but I don't know that many that I can just natter to about inconsequential rubbish. Something that will improve over time, and definitely something that is important to the human condition (although not something I'd thought about much until I didn't have it!).

Osh was delivered to his dad the following morning without incident: although I had to wake him up to take him there. I can recall only 3 occasions when I've had to wake Osh up - this after some 14 hours sleep! Child free (although after 4 months with Osh, we both felt like we were missing a limb for a couple of days!) we went to the movies, met friends, ate too much tea and cake and curry and bought me a much needed new wardrobe.

And the new wardrobe? Nicky and I, much to our surprise and delight are expecting a baby in December and my rapidly expanding belly needed some room to breath. We had kept very quiet about the pregnancy up to this point because we were unable to have any testing done in Provo and didn't want to break the news until we knew that everything was OK. A short trip to London to see, as it turns out, the leading expert on fetal medicine (my OB/GYN here nearly fainted when she heard who had done the amnio!) reassured us that we are expecting a healthy baby boy. On that bomb shell, I'll sign off and tell you all about the trip to Cornwall which involved large amount of Tinners Ale, visiting crumbling family piles in Camborne and one too many cream teas.

Proper Job

Last night we were invited for an evening of pasties...and proper lovely they were too. Nicky was invited as the Cornishman, I slipped under the wire as a Devonian (the only one from north of the border mind!) and Osh and Daniel came along too (as hungry mouths!). We were the guests of Steve (works for a huge construction company here) and Tracey both of whom are proper Devonians. I've discovered, after years of thinking that Barnstaple was the back end of beyond that no-one had ever heard of, that in fact amongst those from the SouthWest it is an instant ticket to acceptance for those of us with a tenuous link to the county. Steve has worked on all sorts of construction jobs in North Devon before he came out here about 8 years ago, and we waxed lyrical about the new bridge at Bideford. Well, Steve waxed and I just nodded intelligently! Tracey had cooked some utterly MAGNIFICENT pasties....from scratch! She'd made the pastry by hand (no mean feat in these temperatures) and all the filling (she proudly told me she'd found the last swede in IGA and had stock piled OXO cubes when they appeared on the shelves the other week). Turns out that we'd met Tracey before by the sausage counter in IGA. Nothing like the appearance of waxed paper wrapped 'proper' sausages in IGA to have all the Brits flocking to the shelves and exchanging views on sausages with complete strangers. For those of you wondering what all the fuss is about, the general sausage fare in IGA (the local supermarket) is either Italian sausage (good, but not a banger by any stretch of the imagination) or American breakfast sausage (dreadful concoction of sugar and fat and colouring).

So, along with Steve and Tracey, we also met Chris and Sarah who own another construction company out here and Tim (out and proud Exeter boy) and Marie-Claude (his Quebecois girlfriend) were also there. It was a great night - boosted by Osh chomping his way through the best part of my pasty! He's always turned his nose up at them before (too many vegetable traps and peppery) but, because it was dark outside and he fell for the 'that's the meat end, mim will eat the vegetable end' ruse he ate a whole massive helping of pasty, chips and beans (real HP beans at $1.89 a can - different from the 44p advertised on the label, and a whole different beast to American baked beans).

Also on a culinary note and very much not in the 'proper job' category I have miserable news on the veggie front. The courgettes have been stripped NAKED by caterpillars....hatched from the millions of eggs laid by the flocks (seriously!) of butterflies that have been everywhere for the past couple of weeks. Stupidly, I didn't leave any plants in the shade house as a control, but we are sure that the caterpillars, plus the baking heat and the black plant pots have all done for the crop. The chillies are thriving in the heat, the melons look a little sad and the tomatoes are hanging on in there. So before we leave for Canada on Monday, we are going to move all the plants back into the comparative cool of the shade house and leave Saturnino (our genius plantsman) with watering instructions.

The problem really is, when to plant? In the summer (ie now) when the temperatures hit 40 Centigrade at the height of the day BUT when there is a reasonable chance of rain or plant in the autumn when the temperatures are considerably lower (but still a plant loving 28 centigrade or so) but there is zip rainfall and less light (about 12 hours a day rather than the 14 at the moment). The other problem we have is that there is precious little top soil on the island, so digging a vegetable garden involves not spades but jack hammers and, as you can imagine, that is not only back breaking work, but not as urgent as completing other(paid) landscaping jobs. We now have a number of coconut trenches (dug with a back hoe and backfilled with rich compost and soil) which have coconuts in at the moment, but a large number of these are due to be sold soon, so we are thinking we'll try another crop of courgette at least in the trenches come the autumn.

It suddenly becomes apparent why there is no thriving market garden industry in this country and virtually all our food is imported! Nil desperandum, at least our family's food supplies for the winter were not dependent upon my ability to grow courgette!

In other news, I have been approved for a residence certificate but the certificate itself won't be ready for a month so in order to leave the country and get back in again, I need a travel letter: that is, confirmation from Immigration that I have 'status'. Now, you'd think that the easy thing would be for the woman in Immigration with 'the book' listing all those approved at June's board meeting to copy the page with my name on it and stamp it and sign it. But of course no civil service anywhere in the world ever functioned by making things easy. Here is no different. In order to get a travel letter I had to write a letter and submit it, along with 2 certified photos and a copy of my passport to Immigration for another office to issue me with the magic letter (each of which is signed by the Dir. of Immigration). That was last Thursday. Come back tomorrow, he told me. Yeah, right, I thought....but I went back Friday and the young woman told me that it wasn't ready (I was not the least bit surprised). Try Monday she told me. Same story. This morning.....come back tomorrow they told me. Tomorrow is the last working day before we leave Monday so I'm rather hoping that it is ready. However, the fall back position is that I have an Irish passport and if needs be I'll have to enter the country at the end of July on my Irish passport (which is conveniently not in the name Turner) and then try and get the magic certificate. But you didn't hear any of this from me.....!

And finally, the weather. If you click on the 'Provo weather' link on the right hand side of this page and then click on the tropical/hurricane tab just to the right of the 'sign up' tab at the top of the resulting page, you can begin to track TS (tropical storm) Bertha and Invest 93. The geographers amongst you will know instantly the significance of these and, more to the point, the significance of whether they pass to the north or south of us (different from right over the top of us which is hopefully pretty obvious to everyone!). For everyone else, I'll do the geography of tropical storms in the next post....when I've mugged up on it so I'm one step ahead of you (once a lecturer, always a lecturer!).