Stories from St Lucia: 1 - In The Footprints of Amy

The last thing we expected to find in our Caribbean holiday resort was a celebrity ghost.

We chose this place because it’s laid back and not remotely starry, though remote it most certainly is, and in this most northerly bay of St Lucia, the stars are so bright in the ink-black night you could almost touch them. But Cotton Bay Village, where we’ve come to escape the January cold, is nothing like the spa-laden hotels on the other side of the island. They lie on the west coast, protected from the Atlantic’s roar and the screams of toddlers; ours faces east, where it’s cooler and less manicured, making it infinitely more child friendly.

Which makes it an unlikely venue for Amy Winehouse, enfant terrible and childlike genius, who chose it as her refuge from the pain of her troubled last years.

Amy's (Wine)house

The villa she rented stands opposite ours. Right now we use her housekeeper, eat in the same little beach bar, stroke the same stray dogs and ride the horses she rode along the unspoiled beach.

We've befriended some of her neighbours, who paint a picture of a lifestyle far removed from one we were fed by some of our tabloid newspapers.

This place has none of the opulent seclusion of a typical rock star retreat. Izzy toddles up to all the other three-year-olds with a bold “What’s Your Name?” and then noisily fills and empties buckets with them in the toddler pool, their screams echoing round the villas and apartments.

Quite why the tattooed singer chose here, I don’t know, but by all accounts she is greatly missed. She had been scheduled to return just a week or so after her untimely death: her house was prepared and the staff were looking forward to seeing her. There are pictures of her in the restaurant and fond memories flow from everyone you meet.

Locals say the image of a permanently intoxicated, incoherent diva was simply wrong. Sure, she would hang in the shade of the tiny bar along the beach, but the owner, Majorie, a fiercely strong woman whose family has owned the collection of wooden shacks for the last 22 years, tells me proudly she never let Amy get drunk on her premises. "I kept my promise to her Father.  I always made her eat before she drank", she says.  Amy called her "Momma".

Jo meets "Momma" Majorie

Majorie's Shrimps with "Ground Provisions"

And such good food: succulent curried prawns, saltfish cakes and spicy creole chicken.

“She was never any trouble”, say Amy’s next-door neighbours, a retired English couple who spend three months every year in this sun-kissed hideaway.

“She was sweet, and very quiet”, says Melissa, our cleaner, wiping away a tear. “She’d sit like a child for hours with crayons and paper just drawing, like Izzy does. She always had nice words for me, although sometimes, when she drank, she went cuckoo”, she added. “What happened then?” I asked. “A few things got broken – nothing serious”.

One day Amy brought in a basket of tiny puppies from the beach. I can understand why. It was all I could do to dissuade Jo from popping one of their cousins, a friendly mutt with the sweetest eyes, into her own suitcase. But six untrained puppies would be a bit too much for the most tolerant housekeeper. “The fleas went everywhere so we banned them”, said Melissa.

Amy’s generosity was legendary. In Majorie’s, a man with eyes as dark as the rum and coke in front of him, sits wearing headphones. When I ask him what he’s listening to, he pops them over my ears. “I wish I could sing no regrets and no emotional debts”, Amy was chanting.

"Amy Winehouse Saved My Life"

“She saved my life,” he says. “She paid for my hernia operation. She was a saint”. Behind him, the Atlantic rollers accompany the lyrics: “So we are history, the shadow covers me, The sky above, a blaze that only lovers see.”

Sure, Amy Winehouse may have faced her demons with alcohol: but I think I can now understand why her favourite drug was this charming, impoverished island. It’s simple but bewitching, and about as far removed from cold, dark reality as you could possibly get.       

Oh dear, back to the real world next week.   

Happy Holidays

Nobody says Happy Christmas anymore in the United States. Instead they’ve cleverly swept up Christmas, Boxing Day, Hanukkah and New Year into a generic and optimistic “Happy Holidays”.

What a misnomer: how could this time of year ever be described as a holiday? The word holds the promise of chestnuts and roaring fires, Santa and smiles; it suggests rejuvenation and reconciliation, the comfort and happy familiarity of close family; it conjures up images of carol singers and giant reindeer and polar bears lit up on neighbours’ homes, the scent of mulled wine and free mince pies in large, welcoming department stores. “Holiday” means grannies will be smiling as giggling children tear open their beautifully wrapped presents and scream with delight at thoughtful wooden toys and hand-knitted jumpers. Holiday is a time without dissent, politics or strife.

They’ve obviously never spent Christmas in our household. This year my wife actually got things incredibly well organised, and did most of the Christmas shopping in October. Despite this, we still managed to spend an entire December week stuck in traffic jams in Newcastle’s absurd “no car” driving lanes, and queuing in even longer lines for department store checkouts, with Izzy screaming for attention and home.

In our final few days of panic-buying, we turned to the internet for help, and consequently spent hours waiting in for courier companies to honour guaranteed next-day delivery, then more hours driving through industrial estates looking for courier company warehouses after their drivers put “sorry you were out” cards through our neighbour’s door.

Fearing a champagne drought, we carefully emptied all the local supermarket’s shelves of its half-price bottles, yet today, New Year’s Day, our wine rack is completely empty, and we still have a houseful of people. I’ve been scrambling hangover-curing eggs at the rate of two-dozen a morning. That’s over 300 broken eggshells since Christmas Eve.

The best thing about American holidays is that they are mercifully short. People work on Christmas Eve, Santa arrives on time, and everyone is safely back in the office by Boxing Day. Our celebrations started on the 21st, my eldest daugher’s birthday (“Just a few close friends, Dad, and I’m sure they’ll all bring sleeping bags”), and we still have a houseful of cousins. For two weeks we haven’t seen our sitting room floor for the piles of wrapping paper, bows and discarded cardboard. Our nice new sofa has been introduced to various vintages of red wine.

We had turkey, brisket (my wife is Jewish, so we celebrate Hanukkah as well as Christmas), roast lamb for 14 and giant stews for 30, and I’ve personally consumed so much chocolate I swear I’ve turned completely spherical. So far no one has ended in casualty, though at 3am on Christmas morning Izzy woke up and announced she was about to be sick. Her prediction proved completely accurate, so, instead of a present-filled stocking, Santa had to bring her clean sheets and pyjamas. Three times.

I can’t wait for Wednesday and the excitement of sending emails from my nice quiet office. So what did you get for Christmas? my team will ask. I will proudly point to my new watch, a perfectly timed gift from my wife. I will tell of a lovely book about Northumbrian gardens, a most thoughtful offering from my Mum. I will mention various useful gadgets for my kitchen and my own garden, without which I can’t imagine how I’ve survived the last few years.

However, I will certainly not refer to the Borat mankini, given to me as a joke by my nieces. They have dared me to wear it next week and send them a photo. Even without the effects of the chocolate I wouldn’t be seen dead in it. For next week this spherical columnist will be on the other side of the world, basking on a sun-kissed beach. I’m taking a holiday to recover from the holidays. And, boy do I need it.

Happy New Year, everyone.

Hunt's Folly

The entire audience was hushed: the play had reached its climax. Suddenly the silence was pierced by a lone shrill voice: “Daddy, I want a wee-wee”. Izzy was enjoying her first live theatre show.

Northern Stage’s slick, fun production of “Shhh…A Christmas Story” managed to hold an audience of toddlers spellbound for well over an hour. Izzy’s eyes lit up from the moment she saw the lights, moving scenery and jolly actors.

She sat transfixed, apart from one unscripted moment when, fascinated by some prop snowballs that had been flying around the stage, she ignored our pleas to sit down and strode onstage to retrieve one for herself. The actors merely paused, watched her walk round them, and then carried on. I’d love to have a video of that precious moment.

I guess that’s the sort of home video that will be the mainstay of Jeremy Hunt’s new local television plans. I can’t imagine what else we’ll be watching. Last week the Secretary of State announced that Newcastle had been chosen as one of the first “pioneer” cities to be awarded licences for local stations. Quite why he thinks there’s any demand for this in Newcastle is beyond me. None of the people who are capable of making local television work have agreed to get involved. Perhaps some wannabes have been seduced by the lure of showbusiness. They are about to get a rude awakening.

Jeremy Hunt’s plans are based on his mistaken belief that if cities like Birmingham, Alabama have their own thriving local television stations, then so should Birmingham, West Midlands. And Newcastle, Tyne and Wear. Evidently our Secretary of State doesn’t know how American television actually works. Over there all the successful local stations, which do have strong local news outputs, are owned by or affiliated to the main networks, which supply them with expensive and highly profitable primetime programming. Every big city has at least 5 local stations, carrying shows like Dancing With the Stars and the X-Factor. They transmit network daytime shows and high budget “syndicated” talk shows. They also carry local news in the morning, early evening and late night.

Sounds familiar? We’ve actually had that system in the UK since the 1950s. It’s called ITV. Until it was systematically ruined by Thatcher’s disastrous reforms, we had good local programmes through our own Tyne Tees Television, which also carried all the hits of the ITV network. Sure, it was regional, not local, but at least it gave our area a sense of identity, was independently owned, and supplied us with quality regional news.

In 2010 the Labour government tried to turn regional into local, by creating a local news pilot scheme. The concept was simple, and probably economically sound: give the ITV regional news to new local providers to create an integrated operation working on a regional, local and hyper-local level. In the North East, the licence was won by a consortium that included the daily newspaper I write a column for: The Journal. The newspaper’s newsroom would have become multi-media, enabling users to enjoy not only better regional news on ITV, but also enjoyed layers of information in print, on the web and on your mobile phone – you could even type your postcode into a computer and find information about your own community.

It was a 21st century solution that would also have been sustainable. As in America, network shows would have driven audiences to the regional output; just two commercial breaks around the regional news would have funded most of the cost and the service would have been built around a proven and profitable newsgathering operation. Good journalism requires investment, training, rigour and professionalism. You are reading the proof of this right now. Sadly, Jeremy Hunt stubbornly axed this bold experiment and replaced it with his own harebrained, old-fashioned plan for local stations.

I can’t imagine a single advertiser supporting an amateur station with cheap low-quality videos. Shots of Izzy running onstage to collect snowballs may be fun viewing for me, but it’s hardly going to compete with Strictly Come Dancing, is it? Without expertise, viewers or advertisers, Hunt’s Folly is bound to fail.

Visiting Santa

Just as we were passing through Doncaster, Jo’s phone began to vibrate. “Oh no, it’s the child minder. Something terrible has happened” she winced. As she read the text on her mobile, the panic in her eyes dissolved. “She’s on the Metro and she loves it”.

The Metro? We both felt more than a tinge of jealousy. We’d never taken Izzy on a train, and here we were, speeding at 108 miles an hour (the East Coast internet tells you precisely how fast you’re travelling) to spend our first weekend without her in London. In truth, we’d rather have been with her on the Metro. Apparently she was loving the experience so much she steadfastly refused to get off at Haymarket and would have happily spent the whole afternoon going round the big circle to Tynemouth and back, loudly singing The Wheels on the Train Go Round and Round to all the passengers.

The purpose of our trip was a carol service at my youngest son’s school, but, thanks to East Coast’s amazing new frequent traveller scheme, our first class train tickets were absolutely free, so we decided to celebrate by making a weekend of it. However, as anyone with a wife (or, in my case, several ex-wives) will know, this is a false economy.

There is no such thing as a free weekend in London, particularly a fortnight before Christmas, with the stores offering 50% discounts in a desperate attempt to drum up custom. Shops were offering customers free mugs of hot chocolate with marshmallows and the streets were full of brass bands and Frank Sinatra lookalikes crooning White Christmas. I’d have quite happily spent a day wandering around looking at the Christmas lights and eating free mince pies – not so a credit-card bearing wife. That’s why I had rather sneakily booked an afternoon train: it severely restricts the spending hours. I’d forgotten about late night closing.

Our train had reached Peterborough by the time another text told us Izzy had been persuaded to leave the Metro for Fenwicks’ Toy Department. I groaned: we’d already bought her Christmas presents – what if she latches onto some new doll? We needn’t have worried: Michelle is the best surrogate mum any child could have: our daughter was firmly under control. By the time we reached King’s Cross, they had watched Fenwicks animated window display 14 times. Now they were off to see Father Christmas.

We did the same. Actually, you couldn’t avoid him. As we arrived at Oxford Circus, we walked straight into an army of Santas. More than a thousand of them had assembled in the centre of town, all determined to get blind drunk.

Santacon is an annual flash mob in Central London. They assemble at a secret destination that’s only advertised on the internet the afternoon before (in this case a pub at Victoria Station: sleigh parking free), and head to the centre of town singing carols and smiling at everyone. It’s really an extended pub crawl and the only rules are that you have to dress as Santa (apart from those who come as reindeer) and you mustn’t scare the tourists. A group of girls had come as lingerie Santas, shivering rather miserably in their bodices.

By mid-afternoon the sea of red, bearded drunks had vacated Trafalgar Square, where they’d been handing out Brussels sprouts to the Japanese, and congregated around Jo and me.

We were glad Izzy wasn’t with us: it had been hard enough trying to explain how Santa was going to get his fat tummy (“Just like Daddy’s,” Izzy had said disloyally) down the blocked off chimney in her bedroom, let alone justify a thousand of them, clutching pints of beer and singing strange new words to her beloved Jingle Bells.

Later on our taxi passed another assembly: scores of riot and mounted police were lined up, waiting to clear the streets of Christmas spirit. A final text arrived: Izzy was fast asleep, dreaming of Santa Claus. If only she could see him now.

Off With Their Heads

[Jeremy Clarkson put his foot in it on BBC1's The One Show by calling for striking public sector workers to be taken outside and shot in front of their families]

 If Jeremy Clarkson had called for strikers to be beheaded, rather than shot in front of their families, he would have provided a perfect link to my story of how I nearly decapitated him. During the first series of Robot Wars, an errant blade flew off a robot at hundreds of miles an hour and embedded itself in a concrete wall directly behind Clarkson’s enormous head. The slow motion replay showed it missed his scalp by inches.

Had my robot been a little more accurate, there would have been nothing for 21,000 people to complain about to the BBC last week. Nor would the massed ranks of ramblers, health and safety executives, lorry drivers, Mexicans, families of train suicides and other Clarkson targets have had to suffer his ill-considered outbursts over the years. So to them I sincerely apologise. Given another chance, I will try harder next time. And I’ll make sure his family is watching.

The argument over public service pensions has produced lots of misinformed rants. If I hear one more outraged private sector employee complaining that they resent paying for the gold-plated rewards of our nurses and teachers I shall scream. Most people in the private sector, which, statistically, is most people, don’t understand the issues, because the majority of them have never made a pension contribution in their life. They’ve paid their national insurance contributions, of course, but that isn’t the point. This is about saving for your retirement, which most people have never bothered to do. Now it’s catching up with them and they’re looking for a scapegoat.

Here are a few statistics to get your Weetabix spluttering. 29 million people make up Britain’s workforce. Of these, only 6 million work in the “public sector”. 87% of these have been doggedly paying some of their salary into a pension scheme. Their employer has been contributing too: it’s in their contract of employment. Now they’re being asked to pay more and get less. Their employer is reneging on the deal. So they’re cross. I would be too.

Why there’s such a fuss is because that employer is me and most of you, and all the public sector workers themselves: all of us are taxpayers.

Of the 23 million workers not in the public sector, just 3 million or so pay some of their wages into a pension scheme to which the employer also contributes. These are good employers that care about their staff, like the employers in the public sector. Most companies don’t bother anymore. They treat their workers as temporary residents in the business, generating wealth for the owners in good times, before being thrown onto the scrapheap of redundancy when times are tough or when they are too old to continue. It’s the way the world was in Victorian times and it’s become the norm in our 21st century.

6 million other people, including self-employed workers like Jeremy Clarkson, are building a safety net with a personal pension scheme. Anyone over the age of 21 would be mad not to contribute something to one, however little they earn, but very few do. My children refuse to, much to my frustration. In this consumerist world, saving for retirement is considered a pointless dilution of scarce funds. Most people would rather have an iPhone 4S now than worry about the electricity bill in their old age.

Well under half the people in the private sector have no pension at all, preferring to spend all their income now with no thought to the future. It is many of these who are now complaining about the nurses and teachers.

They’ll be the ones badgering for an increase in the old age pension when they’re 70. And, without consideration for those who’ll be paying tax on income from their private and public sector pensions till they die, some of these people will selfishly carry on living till they’re 110. Just imagine what Jeremy Clarkson will be saying about them then.

Missing The Ball

“Once upon a time”, declaimed Izzy, “there was a little girl called Cinderella and she was very very sad.” She paused, thought hard, and then remembered: “So the fairy godmother said ‘You shall go to the football’.”

The three of us were sitting in a candlelit sitting room, Jo and I dressed rather ludicrously in black tie and finery. We should have been at a glamorous ball ourselves, but the wicked wind had other ideas. We’d been invited to a friend’s 40th birthday party, but an hour before we had been due to leave the storm, even wilder than predicted, had blown away all our power. I was in the bath when the lights went out.

I lay soaking in the darkness until I realised it was no short term outage, then stumbled out, stubbed my toe on the dresser and slowly dripped to the bedroom door. Outside in the corridor I heard Izzy’s voice, then saw a glimmer of candle. “We’re coming to rescue you, Daddy”, she squeaked with excitement.

We couldn’t have left the new babysitter alone with Izzy: the house is a barn of a place even in daylight, but in the pitch black, with just a few candles and a torch for company, she’d have been petrified. Anyway the baby monitor wasn’t working, so we paid the girl off, opened a bottle of good wine, and decided to live as they did in the olden days. No lights, central heating or telephones; and certainly no television.

“I want Peppa Pig”, said Izzy. Clearly it was time for her first science lesson. I don’t know if you’ve tried to teach the concept of electricity to a two-year-old: it’s well nigh impossible.

“Electricity makes the television and lights go on, and the wind has blown down the wire that brings it from the…” My voice trailed as her eyes glazed over. “It died”, suggested Jo. Still no response.

So I tried: “the TV and lights need new batteries” and Izzy’s face it up. “Silly Daddy, put some more in straight away”, she commanded, and pulled me towards the battery drawer. I love the simplicity of a child’s logic. “We haven’t any: the wind blew them all away” seemed to satisfy her. That and a chocolate biscuit.

For a short while Jo and I sipped wine and stared at the blank TV. In some distant land a group of wannabes were trying to win the X-Factor. Later on, there’d be Match of the Day, which I’d set to record on Sky Plus. But the room, shimmering with a dozen candles, looked enchanting. Our house is 350 years old, and for most of its life, this was how its residents must have spent every evening. I threw another log on the fire.

“Let’s sing,” suggested Jo. So we did. And we told stories. Cinderella went to the football more than a dozen times and we acted all the parts in Goldilocks. Finally Izzy put her dolly to bed, gently explaining why it was dark: “Silly old Daddy ran out of batteries, so you have to go to sleep with a torch”. Meanwhile Jo and I cracked open the Boggle.

We have never enjoyed an evening as much. We picnicked on sandwiches, wine and chocolate milk and laughed together as a family. After two hours the 21st century pinged back. “Hurray,” shouted Izzy, “new batteries”.

Jo and I looked at each other. Some vacuous fake blonde was screaching on the X-Factor and the bright light exposed the crumbs on the sofa. So I switched everything off again. “Much better”, said Jo.

There are times when it’s good to step back. We spend so much of our harassed lives rushing along with whatever new technology brings us; sometimes it’s calming to escape to the past with just our loved ones for company. I hope we have more storms this winter.

Mind you, I confess I did eventually go to the football. Well, I saw the highlights on Match of the Day, anyway. After all, it’s not every day Newcastle draws with Manchester United. I’m sure it was a fairy godmother dressed as a linesman who gifted us that penalty, but we all love a happy ending, don’t we?

The Royal Windbag and the White Elephants

[The Duke of Edinburgh has made a fierce attack on wind farms, describing them as “absolutely useless” - Sunday Telegraph 20th November 2011]







I never thought I’d see the day. They say that you get more reactionary when you get older. But agreeing with Prince Philip? Everyone knows he has the views of a 140-year-old. I thought I’d be safe for at least another decade.

Yesterday we all found out that he’s been sounding off about the iniquity of onshore wind farms to a man that’s trying to build them all over the UK, Esbjorn Wilmar, of Infinergy. Apparently the Duke told Mr Wilmar that wind turbines were “absolutely useless”. Spot on, your royal brain. From now on I’ll take what you say more seriously.

Mr Wilmar is Dutch, of course. Two thirds of the country’s windfarm manufacturers are based overseas. You and I are paying them to put these white elephants into our prettiest landscapes. Last year about £90 of your annual electricity bill went off in big cheques to these and other generators of renewable energy.

Nobody asked us: we just watch our electricity bills rise because we’re giving people like Mr Wilmar our £90 cheques, and they don’t even say thank you. Instead they build these monstrous objects across our most serene scenery.

Mr Wilmar doesn’t have any hills in his own country – it’s flat and dull as a Dutch pancake. You could cover the place with turbines and no one would mind. Instead he’s doing it here. His company is Infinergy, which is owned by KDE Energy, whose holding company is called Koop Group, whose owner is a man called Henk Koop, who, together with his pal Mr Boonstra, is retiring this year. These two old Dutchmen are cashing in and have put their windfarm empire up for sale. Personally, I think we should all claim a stake, we’re investing so much into it.

In 2009 Infinergy applied for planning permission for 17 turbines in one of the most beautiful parts of Scotland (“the windiest country in Europe”, their website says; “a unique and unspoilt destination” says the landowner, the Cawdor Estate). Except that, lured by the huge windfall generated by our subsidies, the Cawdor Estate has conspired with Mr Wilmar’s company to bespoil a chunk of its own unspoilt destination.

The Highland Council quite sensibly turned them down flat. So, of course, they are appealing, and, as these things go, what with the government ultimately making the decision, it’ll probably go ahead. Europe says we have to build thousands of these things, so yet another bit of national heritage will be ruined forever.

Prince Philip is right: wind farms are “absolutely useless”. They contribute a pathetically tiny amount of power, they don’t work in winter (as we found out in 2010), they’re noisy, intrusive and worse than useless when the wind stops blowing (which in Northumberland is far more often than my Californian wife claims).

He also said that they’re a bad idea because they rely on subsidies. He’s right: without our cheques, Mr Wilmar would be out of a job. His machines wouldn’t make economic sense, for they’re expensive to build, costly to run, and don’t work at all for much of the year. In short, they’re useless and not a good idea at all.

The Duke could have added that they’re dangerous. There are some remarkable pieces of research coming to light about blades flying off and ending up in nearby walls and buildings. Ice throw is also a problem: great chunks of it flying hundreds of feet. Then there are the birds: in Germany 32 protected white tailed eagles were killed by turbines: our poor old golden eagles may as well give up.

Let’s be frank, we’re only doing this because the EEC is telling us to. Because we’re too timid to admit that the 2000 or so of these wind turbines we’ve already built at a cost of billions hasn’t matched a single Chinese coal-fired station. Too naïve to spot that the benefits aren’t remotely worth the outrageous subsidy. Too blind to see we could satisfy our energy needs by using other much more efficient green technology. Technology that would generate cleaner power, not royal rage.