31 December 2006

Its not a good day to be reflective of the year just past as my mood is overwhelmingly upbeat about the whole situation.

It was New Best Friends’ birthday, well the female half anyway, so we spent a long lazy morning under the shade of a palm on Longbay, with a tab running in one of the beachside bars. The waves were up, so myself and Little Madam spent a few hours getting tossed about like driftwood, no mean feat given my considerable heft. My aging joints eventually said enough, and a long recuperative lounge in the sand was called for with numerous medicinal Red Stripes.

As the day lengthened, the beach began to get maddeningly crowded. In actual fact there may have only been a few dozen others, but after the bliss of owning the beach in the morning and with the hawkers creeping out of the woodwork in the early afternoon, we decided that the pleasure had gone, so we all scooped up the kids and headed back, stopping for Jerk in Boston for a bite of lunch.

Mickey’s Jerk hut is fast becoming a family institution. We all have our order, though mine is pork while the others take chicken. Lady of Leisure is coming round to the pork which is the more traditional meat and much tastier, but certainly more spiced. If you want a recommendation, take a half pound of pork with some scotch ends. You can take it away, but if the speaker stacks are going up, hang around to eat on one of the walls and quench the fir on you lips with lashings of ridiculously cheap Red Stripe and coconut water. The place would be shut down but health and safety in the blink of an eye at home, but the carcasses are barbequed on boughs of all spice wood and the flavours are certainly worth the initial leap of faith in the first order.

Back at Goblin Hill, ours and NBF’s housekeepers had prepared a huge buffet for us, and the entire population of Portland apparently. Goblin Hill being a sociable little venue and given the size of the expatriate community in Kingston we were right to assume we would know most of the guests there. We got together and saw in the new year in fine style with Champagne for the ladies and rum and Cohibas for the boys.

At some point during the evening, it seemed perfectly reasonable to decide that it was an insult to our housekeepers in particular and Jamaicans in general, that we had not finished the beautifully prepared buffet. Indeed, we had barely made a noticeable dent in the vast quantities of food. We recruited our fellow revelers and systematically dispatched teams to dump platefuls of food in the farthest corners of the grounds around Goblin Hill. How obvious this would be in the morning did not concern a single one of us a jot.
Job done we settled down to the serious business of entertaining ourselves for the ensuring few hours. By 4am I was signing from the Oasis songbook with a senior work colleague accompanying me on acoustic guitar. The remainder of our party kept quiet and I am unsure whether they were awestruck or more likely dumbstruck. Actually too drunk to talk may also play a part.