TAG | Island Living
21
1st week on the remote farm continues – London life no more
2 Comments | Posted by Rosalyn in Bahamas, Island Living, Memoir, Travel Journal
Now it is cool at 7.15pm.
I’ve been for my beach walk with the dogs. I’m slurping a huge ripe mango as I walk down the beach (I am now covered in mango stains on my top and shorts). I can’t believe it is so utterly fantastic here. I feel too lucky and can’t start to tell people how amazing it is.
I felt quite the recluse when I went into town earlier, I can’t decide if I’m just rediscovering my true self or that really I am a recluse at heart. Weird thoughts as I ran a top London PR company and had an 8 bedroom house, nanny,driver etc. And now, after slipping down the ‘no status’ slippery pole in Nassau (i.e. I went to dinner parties where no one asked me what I do/did/think/thought and the men talked and the women share choc cake recipes - help me! Betty Crocker?) I start to put my ‘former life’ more and more into some contex. (more…)
Bunches of finger bananas on the trees
Eleuthera memories. Sunday August 22 2004.
Arriving in the Bahamas in 2001 after 21 years in London I could never understand it when family islanders referred to Nassau as ‘the big smoke’. Now I do. The city and all its stresses seems a lifetime away already. The most challenging thing I’ve had lately is keeping up with recipes for all the various fruits and saladings we grow. That, and making pints of jam and chutney with no scales to weigh anything and very few jam jars (luckily we found several on the beach. I hope that the boiling water got the salt and sand out, otherwise there will be an extra crunch to the mango chutney).
This farm really is a Garden of Eden. Along the with the rows of arugula, spinach, mixed salad leaves and watercress which Ian has planted for us and which is so plentiful we end up giving bags of it away we have so much more (one of my regular recipients just gave me (more) mangoes and a bag of key limes in return so the Key Lime Pie (non dairy version as I’ve given up dairy) is cooking as I type. We have fantastic fresh herbs, particularly basil, mint, rosemary and coriander. There are beds of garlic chives (like large spring onions), allspice bushes and hundreds of Noni trees (I’m drinking the juice daily, it is totally disgusting but it has had a noticeable improvement on my energy levels). (more…)
