Singapore, Satay and Sun

One of the greatest joys of a nomadic life has been the privilege of delving into other customs and cultures, including cuisines. That being said, there are times when any of those three C’s might leave a rancid taste, but therein lies the fascination of travel.

Memories of an early childhood in Nigeria are hazy – sometimes jogged by a photograph or a smell, and sometimes a dish. I do remember disliking ‘fufu’, which our Sudanese cook would make as an accompaniment to casseroles or soups. In most of West Africa fufu / foofoo / foufou is any pounded, or combination, of meal, such as cassava, plantains or yam, which is then rolled into balls and boiled. However, in Nigeria, only fermented cassava is used thereby producing a thicker consistency to their fufu, or akpu. It is a gluggy, stick-to-the-roof-of-your-mouth, kind of dish which probably accounts for my aversion to porridge. And communion wafers.

As childhood progressed Singapore and Malaysia became my playground, and with that came an introduction to Asian food—a cuisine that proved far more to my liking. As an adult, and by then with our own children, sitting on the roadside or beachfront in Singapore, memories became reawakened as we watched a stall-holder crouch over a brazier, alternating fanning the charcoal flames with turning sizzling sticks of satay. The aromatic scents rising in a swirl of smoke as he brushed more seasoned oil over the chicken or beef.

Now living in rural Cambridgeshire, those heady experiences seem a long way off and so, every now and then, I will try to recreate the warmth of both the place and flavours of my youth. Satay is not a complicated dish, although a quick skim of a recipe will, at first, appear daunting – a teaspoon of this, a teaspoon of that – but as I grind and mix cumin, coriander, turmeric, cinnamon and garlic with a handful of roasted peanuts, the aromas transport me back in time. Sometimes I will replace coriander leaves with the seed from the same plant. The smooshed leaves give up a citrusy scent, whilst the seeds smell toasty and sweet. Mixed with the aniseed fragrance of cumin, the fruity pepperyness of cinnamon and the pungency of garlic, the tantalising colours of Asia rise to merge with my memories. Adding vegetable and sesame oil, then sweet chilli sauce, to the spices and slathering it over slivers of chicken to be skewered onto bamboo sticks, the essence of childhood is complete as the kitchen is filled with scents of the Orient.

But the sensory delights of satay would not be complete without the traditional accompaniment of kuah kacang, or peanut sauce. This time it is a cup of this and cup of that, plus a smidge of galangal—that spice closely related to ginger, then lemon grass, the tanginess of tamarind and a couple of tablespoons of palm sugar. 

The latter is not always easy to find and, over the years, I have come to know that cane sugar is no substitute for the viscous sap of the palm tree. But, if I can be bothered, a mixture of brown sugar, molasses and date sugar comes close to the real thing. A Canadian friend once assured me that maple syrup is an adequate replacement for date sugar but I can’t attest to that. 

As I squeeze a little lime juice then dip my satay into the kuah kacang, stab a piece of cooling cucumber, again the flavours of Asia merge with snapshots of my past. All that’s missing is a Tiger beer, oh yes, and the sun!

Life Boxed Up

I’ve done this a lot. Moving.

The practicalities of relocating my life around the world hold little fear. It’s draining, of that there is no doubt. Moving with young children is physically trying, and with teenage children mental fatigue takes over as drama supplants drama, but as the end of middle age approaches a kind of ennui has taken over.

I watched our life fold into boxes to be shipped across an ocean when the packers arrived on Tuesday. Memories from around the world embedded in every piece of furniture and painting.

Relocation has always exhilarated me. The chance to try something different, to learn new cultures, new languages and customs. I should be feeling that sense of adventure now. Experience of living in England is sparse.

So, why this sense, not of dread, but lassitude?

Sadness, along with tears, wells because we have had to say goodbye to Stan, the dog who stole our hearts as we worked to steal his after a brutal start to his life. We brought him from St Croix to Houston so he could continue on to England to learn the manners of an English country dog. The vet on island stated he might be a Lab Mix. In our hearts we knew there lurked a smattering of Pitbull – a banned breed in the United Kingdom. Every website warns of the risk of importing a ‘dangerous’ breed dog to their shores. Immediate seizure by customs control, followed by immediate euthanasia. No ifs, no buts. A DNA test proved more than a smattering of Pittie in Stan’s genetic paw print. Staffordshire Terrier, American Bull Dog and Chihuahua – I struggled with that one – all make up the dog we love. Having saved Stan’s life once, we are not prepared to risk it now.

Stan now resides with dear friends who offered him a loving home along with their Pitbull Mix, Nala. We are fortunate to have people like this in our lives but it doesn’t lessen the tears of goodbye. However, Stan will be happy, will be loved, and will be alive.

There is excitement ahead. A grandson, soon to be born, who will be living with his parents half an hour away from our chosen location. Pure joy, and a novelty as I have only ever flown in and out of our granddaughters’ lives. A reminder of my most recent visit to them in Trinidad is on my wrist. A bracelet made from beads reminding me of my name. Precious.

I don’t often go in for introspection. I am more of a get-on-with-it kind of woman, but I have been trying to understand why this move, probably our last international one, is filling me with a suitcase full of anxiety.

To understand, I let my mind wander back to a wonderful woman I met many year ago. Ruth Van Reken, co-founder of Families in Global Transition, and co-author, with David C Pollock, of a book called Third Culture Kids: Growing up Among Worlds. For those unsure of the definition, a third culture kid (TCK) is, “a person who has spent a significant part of his or her developmental years outside the parents’ culture. The TCK frequently builds relationships to all of the cultures, while not having full ownership in any. Although elements from each culture may be assimilated into the TCK’s life experience, the sense of belonging is in the relationship to others of similar background.”

Here I am, an adult TCK, about to relocate for the umpteenth time, suffering a severe dose of dragging feetitis. It is, I have decided, because I shall henceforth be a ‘hidden immigrant’ – another definition coined by Van Reken. As I settle into English country life I shall look like an Englishwoman, sound like an Englishwoman – most of the time – but have no real knowledge of how to be an Englishwoman. I will no longer be a foreigner, a hat I wear with comfort.

I am not alone. John, too, has qualms. England now is not the England he knew when he left as a young man of 23 but, he reminds me, everywhere we’ve lived we’ve called home. This will be no different. The trick will be to retain the curiosity which has been my companion through so many countries. To remember, as Robert Louis Stevenson said in Travels with a Donkey, that “the great affair is to move, to feel the needs and hitches of life….”

Travel has been a driving factor in our decision to cross the Atlantic – the ease and opportunity to see more of Europe. So, no, we are not hanging up our nomadic boots. I feel the lassitude lessening. We will unpack our life in England, and explore a new place – even if we don’t have to learn a new language.

And I will find my tribe. I always do!

The Littlest Bookstore

I am not a shopper. Unless you count stationery shops and bookstores. But in my lexicon they don’t count as shops – they’re necessities.

One of the tragedies of our digital life is the disappearance of those wonderful bookshops tucked into a high street – you know the one, down the road from the butcher and wedged between the greengrocer and ironmonger. I, like most, have been known to use that convenient monolith that sends consumer products anywhere, anytime. However, each time I do a twinge of guilt shivers down my back for the bookseller who knows not only books but his or her customer. It is an art, a calling, and so much more pleasant than a nameless, faceless transaction or click.

That wonderful sense of new worlds and new words lining the shelves is missing. Hours spent browsing, then the excitement of finding the perfect book, or books.

Like most readers I have a pile next to the bed of ‘to be reads’ – it might take me a few months to get to them but get to them I do. Sometimes one just has to be in the right frame of mind for a book. During COVID I have strayed from books that would make me yearn to travel again – so stories from places never visited have been kept at bay. It made me sad.

Now the world, well most of it, is learning to live with the scourge of COVID and countries are starting to lift barriers, my curiosity is resurfacing. I want to read about Bhutan, about Poland, about Mali, as well as learn more about places I have been fortunate enough to visit.

I was in Trinidad last week – a place I once lived – but this time staying with my daughter, Kate, and her family. One Sunday we drove to places old and new to me.

From the capital, Port of Spain we headed east to where Trinidad’s coast stops the Atlantic Ocean in a thunder of waves, and the beach is lined with miles and miles of coconut trees. More than a thousand one of my granddaughters assured me. Mayaro, back in 1984, was my first foray away from San Fernando where we lived, and the first time Kate wriggled her toes in sand. Back then there was an occasional hut selling watermelon or pineapples. Now along the Manzanilla / Mayaro road there are many more, and nestled between them is the littlest bookshop in the country, perhaps in the Caribbean.

Started by Mr Ishmael Samad, The Book Junkie is one of those wonderful whimsical surprises that we come across every now and then. Philosophy and fiction jostle for space on rickety shelves. Literature and beach reads reach precariously for the corrugated roof. Leaning against each other on a low shelf are Enid Blyton and Carolyn Keene, the pseudonym used by the collective authors of the Nancy Drew detective stories, and which tempt younger readers, including my granddaughters.

On the outside shelf under Graham Greene and Clive Cussler, in somewhat faded glory, was Bruce Chatwin’s Photographs and Notebooks, published after his death in 1989. A wonderful reminder of the joy of travel, of curiosity for new customs and cultures and, for a Nowherian like me – a phrase coined by the St Lucian poet, Derek Walcott – a reminder of Chatwin’s telling essay, Anatomy of Restlessness. A feeling to which most global nomads fall prey.

That restlessness is what stopped me reading about far-flung places these last couple of years. Why research into my next historical novel has floundered. The knowledge I could not travel to unknown places to experience different smells, sounds, sights and tastes. To feel the fabrics, not just made in a country but of the society itself.

Back at The Book Junkie, the young woman presiding over the shelves, maybe one of Mr Samad’s granddaughters, suggested titles and showed us where, in the welter of books, we could find Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Paulo Coelho and then smilingly waved us on our way.

On the drive home, a granddaughter leaning against me sound asleep, I began to think about books with the word bookshop in the title. Books like The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George and
The Last Bookshop in London by Madeline Martin. The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Annie Barrows and Mary Ann Shaffer drifted into my thoughts, then The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles. All stories about allowing words to teach, to arouse curiosity, to entertain.

The power of the written word, and reading, has over time been feared by dictators and anarchists alike – think of Hitler’s Kristallnacht in 1938, and more recently in 2013 the Islamist rebels of Ansar Dine who torched the library in Timbuktu.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine this week brought to mind Geraldine Brooks’ sweeping novel, People of the Book based on real events which tells of the famed Sarajevo Haggadah – one of the earliest Jewish books to be illuminated with images – being saved from Serb shelling during the Bosnian war. Brooks follows the book’s journey back to its creation and tells a story of how people regardless of faith have risked their lives to save a book.

Lives come and go. But the written word must never be lost.

That’s why The Book Junkie on the wild side of Trinidad’s coast is so important.

Begging your pardon, sir,

but phuck you!

My respect for the office of president is intact. There have been presidents since I was honoured to become an American citizen who might not have been my choice, who might not have believed as strongly as I on certain issues but they have garnered my respect if not my approbation. My respect for the man who currently holds the presidency has never been lower.

I am a hybrid. The product of an English father and an Australian mother. My parents met in Malaya and my childhood did nothing to stop their wanderlust. Thank goodness. Dad had stayed in Pakistan after Partition in 1947, one of a handful of British army officers charged with helping form a new army for a new country. Mum was a pragmatic woman, a nurse who experienced the horrors of World War II in both Singapore and Papua New Guinea. I was their only child. 

Discipline for minor infractions was meted out by my mother – after extreme provocation a slap across the thigh with a floppy slipper would be forthcoming. I remember it being red silk with delicate embroidery, beautiful and gave a decent sting.

Rarely can I remember my father being involved in non-compliance issues. And he never slapped me. But nearly sixty years after the event I vividly recall being sat down at the dining table and given one of the sternest lectures of my life. We lived in Nigeria which means I would have been no older than six.

The reason? I had cheeked Ali. I don’t remember how, or why but I have never forgotten the lesson I learnt that evening before my bedtime story.

Ali was our cook. Originally from Sudan and proud, whenever guests or a camera came into view, to change into white trousers and tunic over which he tied a broad red cummerbund. He would also don a red fez with a black tassel and, lastly, he would pin his medals across his chest attesting to his service in the East Africa Campaign whilst in the Sudan Defence Force. 

Any man who visited out home and who he deemed worthy was saluted. He knew to keep my father’s glass topped up. If Ali didn’t like a guest he would, to my mother’s chagrin, ignore an empty glass and parched throat. He was though a gentle man who adored my mother despite her propensity to gather orphan animals, and for whom he would cut up papaya and pineapple each morning. Something I’m sure wasn’t in his original job description. And Ali loved me, and I him.

It was a long time ago so I can’t remember the exact words my father used after my transgression and he would not have raised his voice but I do still remember the shame. His words would have been measured and along the lines of, “Ali is a dignified man who works to make our lives easier. Particularly yours. Who are you, a child, to dare speak to him in such a manner?”

I do remember being dismissed. I ran to Ali’s domain where I sat on the kitchen step with his arm around me and, crying, gave him my apology. It was probably the first truly sincere apology I had given. 

It is people like Ali, and Sam, our houseboy and others in other countries who worked for my parents, and later others who worked for me and my own family who have made our lives infinitely happier. Without a doubt easier and, once I reached the age of employing people myself, have given me insights into different cultures and countries that I might not have had without their kind guidance. A true privilege.

So why the title of this little story? Because the president of the United States has proven with his craven behaviours toward those who work to make his life easier, and certainly safer, that there is no moral line he will not cross.

I’m not talking about the political animals who serve in his administration – those in front of the cameras, those used to speaking the words people want to hear, those scrabbling to pacify the man’s every perceived slight, to temper his tantrums. I couldn’t care less about them. 

I am thinking of men and women who have worked in the White House, some I’m sure for many years and through many administrations. The men and women who change the sheets, who cook the meals, who dust the furniture and hoover the carpets. The men and women in the background who make sure the wheels of arguably the best-known home in America turn without a single crunch of a pebble. And while I’m at it, the men and women charged with literally taking a bullet for the president. What right does he have to disregard their health?

To flaunt his power by belittling those who are cognisant of the dangers of a virus that is devouring the country with rampant disregard to who it infects. To flout the mandates of mask wearing and spew his vitriol over those nearby. His braggadocio knows no bounds.

By all accounts his arrogance and hubris, his complete disregard for others are behaviours learnt from his father.

My father has been dead for ten years but his words and his actions as I grew up have never left me. Don’t ever forget it is the people, often behind the scenes, who make our lives easier, safer, more pleasant who deserve our utmost and unbridled respect.

So mr president, I repeat, phuck you!

Power to the People!

Not long ago, but which in what COVID times seems a far-off galaxy, I lived in a small despotic West African country. It is a country run under harsh measures, with even harsher punishments for those who dare to question the ultimate authority – the president. He, it should be noted, came to rule through murderous machinations that removed his uncle from power.

And power is one way in which he exerted control. Switch the electricity off as the blanket of night falls and it is harder for the ‘common’ people to meet, to plot, to demand greater freedoms. It is a ploy used by many over the years – the plantations worked by the enslaved also used the tactic to lessen the chance of rebellion.

But even if the power was on many did not have the luxury of being able to afford it.

We had moved into an as-yet unfinished apartment. We had doors and windows, a floor and a roof, plumbing and power…. sometimes. I had been promised a generator but that was months away. Days after moving in, I watched the sun drift behind the hills beside us to leave the jungle a jumble of dark greens and greys as the frogs began their nightly chorale.

A movement caught my eye and I saw a flicker from a flashlight and what looked like a very tall man dressed in very little. In the half light of a brief equatorial dusk, it took me a moment to realise his height was unnaturally elongated by the fact he had clambered onto the roof of a dilapidated car that graced the entrance to our mud-baked and overgrown road. He looked to be hanging.

“Stephen!” I called down to our guard, a delightful Ghanaian who had about as much chance of saving us from anything as my dead grandfather, “Stephen, there’s a man on a car by the electricity pole.”

“Oh, madam, he is stealing your power.”

It took a moment to digest this information. And another moment to shrug. This was WAWA at work. West Africa Wins Again. The chap had no chance of getting electricity to his shack, so why not nick it from the house down the road? Good luck to him, I thought as our power winked off, on, then off again. It could have been deliberate, it could have been a malfunction.

Not long ago, but before these COVID times, we were fortunate enough to find another ‘in-need-of-work’ place on St Croix, the largest of the US Virgin Islands. We fell to renovating with a vengeance with the immeasurable assistance of Barry Allaire and his duo of merry men, Mingo and Easy. They made a somewhat daunting task very much easier. 

The plumbing wasn’t too bad but, oh my, the electrics were not good. I spent a lot of time on island by myself and as darkness drifted across the bay silhouetting yacht masts in a melange of pinks and mauves, I would turn on a light only when absolutely necessary, and never more than one at a time. Oftentimes a fizz would accompany the action. We rewired – thank you, Leroy – and my confidence grew.

However my new found belief in power was short lived. I came to understand another acronym, although not nearly as catchy as WAWA. WAPA is our Water and Power Authority. After nearly eight years of intermittent power or brown-outs – those rolling, blinking outages that cause permanent damage to electronics and white appliances despite having surge protection – the phrase “We’ve been WAPAed” has entered the family lexicon.

I fully understand the fragility of power services during hurricanes that are hurled our way at, sadly, more and more regular intervals. What I do not understand is why a power company in America is allowed to function badly, with seeming impunity, through continuing performance failures, compromises to payment and billing systems including the, almost, unbelievable loss of $2.7 million when invoices were paid to a purportedly legitimate vendor. A scam referred to by WAPA as a ‘Business Email Compromise’. I wonder if that scam will be found by the FBI to have been initiated in West Africa. In which case WAPA and WAWA are not so far apart.   

Why are heads not rolling at the continued farrago of an “autonomous agency of the Virgin Island Government” that does not deliver power? To the idle bystander it could be construed that local accountability has gone the way of federal accountability.  

Not too long ago and in these COVID times, in frustration, I posted a comment on social media. It read, “I have lived in 12 countries, a number of them considered 3rd world developing countries. Never, ever, have I had such a poor power service as I get here in the US Virgin Islands”. Comments flooded in. From those known and unknown. Comments like, “Have you lived in Nigeria?” Yes, I have. “Knowing that you’ve lived here in Thailand that is really saying something.” Yup! Closer to home people said, “And at such a high cost” and “The worst”. There were many more such helpful insights.

What they all failed to mention is that I do not now live in a developing country. This is the United States of America. 

Please, WAPA, power to the people!