27. Seasons

Time zones take a bit of getting used to.  There is no daylight saving in Cayman and so we were five hours behind the UK in the winter but six hours behind in the summer when the UK and North America put their clocks forward one hour. 

I received an e-mail from David this morning telling me that I hadn't told him of my new phone number.  At noon today, when it was early evening in the UK, I rang him from my new phone but he didn't answer.  

I don't know his cell phone number and I seriously doubt that he has one, as the technology is way beyond his level of competence but I do have Penny's, his wife's, number and so I rang that.

"Yes!" she said, sounding not the least bit welcoming.

"Hiya Pen," I said cheerily, "How are you doing?"

She hung up on me but not before managing to say, "We're in San Francisco and it's four in the morning."

********

We arrived back in England ten days ago with the temperature in London in the high twenties.  It felt rather like it had in Cayman the day before but it was much more pleasant – really!  I suppose that was due to the lower humidity levels.  

In Cayman surrounded by a hot sea, the relative humidity is always at least 80%. This means that when you sweat (and yes, I do, even though Caroline doesn’t) the moisture is slow to evaporate from your body and sweating does not cool you down as quickly as you would like. 

Today in London the temperature is 15°C and it is almost chilly.  Autumn is still some two or three months away.  Here, in maritime Western Europe, we experience daily fluctuations in temperature and importantly, we have seasons.

We had several fruit trees on the grounds of the complex where we lived in Cayman.  There were coconuts, mangoes, bananas, papaya, sour sap, breadfruit, almonds and others that I didn’t recognise.  

The land area there was common to all and even the rather splendid mango that grew only four feet from our kitchen window did not belong to us but to everybody. It’s true that if one of the other residents came and started harvesting ‘our’ tree, I would give him or her a look and might make some comment but they had as much right to the fruit as I did.

Huck and his friend tried to make money a couple of years ago by taking coconuts door-to-door and offering them at $2 each. 

“Two dollars?” I said.  “Why should I pay you two dollars?  They’re my coconuts.”

“Because they’re special,” said Huck.

I walked ten feet to where two coconuts lay on the ground having recently fallen from the tree.  

“As special as this one?” I asked, offering it to them.

Two palm trees, ten feet apart, might appear to be perfect for rigging up a hammock and spending a wonderfully relaxing afternoon, dozing in the shade with a cooling breeze making things idyllic.  Don’t ever do it!  A five-pound coconut falling twenty feet or more is literally lethal.  

One of our neighbours had a top of the range Lexus.  He loved that car and was seen polishing and caressing it most evenings and all of the weekends.  He never used his designated parking space which is forty yards from his door but he always parked overnight right outside his front door, six feet from a very tall palm tree.  One night the inevitable happened and a dent the size of a football appeared in his bonnet. 

Coconuts seem to be in season all year but other fruits are not.  Mango season is May/July and our almond tree began to drop its fruit in late September.  The Poinciana trees with the beautiful red flowers that line both sides of the main road eastward from our house for a couple of miles, begin their breathtaking display in late May and finish by September

All of this is very confusing for an ex-geography teacher who for nearly forty years, told generation after generation of students that there are no seasons in the tropics other than the wet and dry ones.  

Since living here, I have found that the different rainfall amounts are really just relative to each other.  A torrential thunderstorm can take place in any month.  Certainly, May to November is wetter than December to April but rainfall total differences are not as marked as the difference between winter and summer rain in Mediterranean regions.  

Temperatures only vary by about 3°C from the warmest to the coolest months so why then do some of the plants behave as if they are growing in Bournemouth?  

Mention of Bournemouth, reminds me of an occasion a few years ago when we were staying there while Caroline attended a conference.  One morning, when she got back from jogging (no further comment) she was almost incoherent; not because she was exhausted but because she was giggling so much.  On her run she had passed a signpost to, “The Lower Pleasure Gardens.”

I also used to tell the students that in the tropics, the ground was heated by the almost overhead sun; the air in contact with the ground was heated; the warm air expanded; the air was therefore less dense than the surrounding air; the warm air rose and as it rose, it expanded and became cooler; as it cooled the relative humidity became higher and once 100% humidity had been reached, further cooling resulted in condensation; clouds formed; rain fell. 

This meant that rain fell every afternoon at around 2 p.m.  What a load of bollocks!

Sure, it often rains in the early afternoon but it seems to be just as likely to rain in the early morning or even in the middle of the night.  Maybe things are different in Brazil.

One thing I did teach correctly was about the buttress roots that some of the trees have.  I had read about them, talked about them and drawn diagrams of them but I had never seen them until I came here.  They are wonderful, impressive and magnificent. 

A couple of years ago, I was talking to Bernard who unofficially acts as the Strata Manager for this complex and I suggested to him that we should consider harvesting all the fruits and nuts that we produce and sell them to the supermarkets. The income generated would keep our Strata fees down.  His response was non-committal and I assumed that he thought the idea wasn’t feasible.

I was delighted therefore when, a couple of weeks later, a truck pulled up next to our cottage and three men got out, put up a couple of ladders and began to harvest the mangoes.  “So, I was talking sense after all,” I thought. 

It was a swelteringly hot day and they worked hard, filling basket after basket. When they had stripped ‘our’ tree they moved on to the next one about fifteen feet away.  At about 12:30 as the day was getting even hotter, I made up a tray of ice cold drinks and took them out to them.  They were very grateful but they all asked if they could have a cold beer instead.

They tipped out the fruit squash and handed me their glasses.  I rinsed the glasses and poured them non-alcoholic beers. They didn’t realise what I’d given them and drank them without comment, although one of them did grumble that he’d have preferred it in the bottle.  The four of us sat in the shade, drinking and chatting for about ten minutes. I felt a little guilty delaying them and so after apologising for doing so, I collected the glasses and took them inside.  

They finished for the day at about four in the afternoon and their truck was laden down with mangoes and coconuts.  As they passed my window on their way home, they peeped on the horn, waved at me and went.

About a week later I saw Bernard again.

“How much did we make?” I asked him.

“What do you mean?” 

“The mangoes and the coconuts.  What did we get for them?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, looking at me as though I was a little disturbed.

THE THIEVING BASTARDS!