Dare I mention the weather again in this month’s editorial? I have yet another hole in my roof thanks to my very old Palm tree and have just received a horrendous quote to have the thing trimmed. It’s unbelievable that a tree trimming exercise can run into lots of zeros, I am sure it would be cheaper for me to fly a Jamaican coconut cutter over to climb up the thing and hack away at those enormously dangerous branches, but unfortunately I don’t have any contacts in the Caribbean!
This month I flew back to dear old Blighty for a week, the first time I have set foot on British soil in three and half years. As was expected it was pouring with rain when I got there and Gatwick airport seemed to have grown as I traipsed for a mile (or so it seemed) before I hit passport control. It was very weird being back after so long away from what I used to call home and the first of couple of days I felt like I was in a foreign country.
After mastering the knack of driving on the wrong side of the road and negotiating another growing addition of roundabouts in the wrong direction, I wondered why people were so worried when they got to Madeira about driving on our roads here. Night time driving anywhere on the island is a doddle as nearly every road has street lighting. In my area of Surrey you have narrow and very dark winding lanes and only street lighting once you hit a built up area.
My trip to England was blessed with the warmest day in October for over 150 years and after the first couple of days of rain, the weather became very sunny and pleasantly warm. Seeing family and friends was a delight after so much time had passed, but as you can guess most of my spare time was spent shopping or wandering around looking at all the new gimmicky gadgets that us Brits have seemed to become so fond of.
My first visit to the supermarket took 2 hours as I marveled at the extent of convenience foods, something we don’t see much of in our supermarkets here. But I still filled my trolley with rubbish and stuffed my face all week with sausage rolls, pasties, pork sausages, packaged potato salad and coleslaw. English chocolate biscuits like penguin bars, wagon wheels and Oxo cubes that now come in a variety of different flavours.
Clothes shops were definitely on the itinerary during the week as I find it difficult finding clothes here that fit properly. With most of the shops holding sales and some with as much as 70% discounts I was able to pick up quite a few bargains.
But putting consumables to one side and reflecting on what I enjoyed and had missed about my old home apart from my family and friends was to be able to walk with bare feet on warm and bouncy carpets and to wake up to the birds singing in the mornings. To watch the plump little bunny rabbits that were grazing in the garden and the delight of watching a fox sitting in the grass and basking in the early morning sunshine. Friendly squirrels foraging for their winter store of nuts and acorns quite ignorant of me sitting and watching while they went about their work.
After an emotional goodbye to everyone at the airport and a 3 and a half hour flight back to Madeira, driving home in the car confirmed how I felt about my life here on the island. Fantastic weather (most of the time), lovely people, healthy fresh air and natural food, amazing scenery and an un-commercialised consumable lifestyle with the odd treat of whale watching thrown in. And as the song says, this is where I laid my hat and this is most definitely what I call home.
Enjoy your holiday!
Sam

This entry was posted on Friday, November 18th, 2005 at 6:26 pm and is filed under Message from the Editor. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.