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!).