‘But don’t you ever go back to England?’
When visitors ask me that, I wonder what they have sensed about me that strikes them as odd. Why should I go back to England? I am content in my cottage in a coconut and papaya garden overlooking the Indian Ocean but they seem uncertain. ‘Don’t you miss anything?’
I tighten my sarong and shake my head. I tell them that I can get whatever I want quite easily in Sri Lanka, and the local produce – fish, meat, vegetables – is far superior to that of the supermarket supplies of the West. I get all the culture I want from books, films and CDs ordered through the Internet. My old friends from England visit me from time to time, and my new friends are Sri Lankans. Perhaps it is my serenity as I relax on my veranda with legs hooked over the extended arms of a planter’s chair, a cup of real, freshly brewed tea to hand and a smile of bliss as I watch the sun set, that worries them.
I can’t believe I’ve been having an affair with islands for over half a century. Looking back, I realise it was inevitable. When I was six years old I looked forward to a holiday in Clacton because I was told that the sea, which I had never seen, would be ‘on the doorstep’. When I arrived with my parents at the boarding house I rushed to the back door and flung it open, only to see a garden of runner beans at the doorstep – no sea!
It was then I decided islands, where I could always see the sea, were my destiny. I travelled from the tiny Channel island of Jethou (where I was one of only four inhabitants) to live in Las Palmas, El Hierro and other Canary Islands. Then Jost Van Dyke, in the British Virgin Islands, became home until I built a log cabin on a hillside overlooking the Caribbean in Dominica. When that was blown away in a hurricane, I settled in Sri Lanka and spent weeks discovering fascinating Indian Ocean destinations like Borneo, Mauritius, Rodrigues, Reunion, the Seychelles and the Maldives.
Sometimes visitors think that my living in the tropics is somehow disreputable, or perhaps they are simply envious and wonder how they could adapt too. In my guidebooks I try to introduce countries so that travellers can understand more than tourists, and so that every reader’s dream of the tropics becomes a blissful reality.
