It rained heavily and without let up for two nights and two days. When the water finally stopped coming down from the sky, it rose up again from the ground, and the air was full of mist. As I walked the dog I had to step carefully to avoid the dozens of slugs (and one snake) sliming along the roadside. And I thought England was wet.

Returning home, I met a visitor on motorbike, a potter friend of my mother and of G. The potter is a woman in her early sixties, tall and still striking with the strong features of Minnesota immigrant stock. She came to the Island thirty some years ago as a young woman with her potter lover.

When she had borne him two children, first her lover took other lovers and then he took himself away. She knew he wouldn’t stay after the children came. He’d left three to be with her. Living on what she could earn from her pots as she raised her son and daughter she finally found she couldn’t pay the mortgage and her father took it on. He owns the house and six acres where she now lives with a toothless headstone carver.

The headstone carving business isn’t so good, apparently, what with recession and cremation, and in her late fifties she decided that she was going to have to find a way to earn more money. Her elderly father agreed to pay her fees and she studied the offerings of the local technical college on the mainland, though for months she could hardly think of it without tears. Retraining was final proof that she had failed as a potter. But she found going back to “school” as the Americans call anything from kindergarten to PhD, was exciting and fun, and a couple of years later she graduated with two degrees, one in civil engineering and the other in surveying. There was a lot of overlap in courses, she explained, so she might as well get both at the same time.

Now she rides about the highways on her motorbike inspecting sewer pipelines and road building projects. “I’m the Permit Queen” she tells me, so I guess I should call her that.

Last summer, after sixteen years together, the Permit Queen and the Headstone Carver were married. She wasn’t quite sure why then, except that he needed looking after, given the down turn in the burying business. Besides, once they were married she could get him on her medical insurance. “He’s not in good shape,” she explained unnecessarily, though he is ten years younger than she. At the wedding he and a friend of her son brawled outside the diner; her son moved out, and now, after the way of kids, isn’t speaking to his mother.

As she took off her helmet the Permit Queen said apologetically that she had brought me some wine – islanders often pick up shopping for each other – only she’d missed a ferry and had opened one of the bottles.

I invited her in to carry on drinking the open bottle with me.

We fell to talking of politics a little, and I asked her about the peculiar American practice of caucusing. Voters registered for the party gather in a central place – on this island it was held in the Grange – and try to win over their neighbours. I have never taken part in a caucus – they are only held in a few states – and I was curious to know how it worked.

The Permit Queen said that everyone was told to go stand in a particular part of the room, depending on which candidate they backed. The confused McCain enthusiast was sent away, and then the number of caucasers for each candidate was counted before they regrouped and the supporters for the stronger candidates tried to win over those of the weaker ones.

When the first division was called she went to the Edwards part of the room. I asked her did people then try to change her mind?

“Oh yes,” she said, “After a while G— offered me a bottle of gin. So then I caucased for Hillary.”