Yesterday the All England Club at Wimbledon was taking a hard line, but by this morning the policy of hiring marksmen to shoot pigeons above the courts was abandoned.

Wimbledon started today without me.  I wasn’t sure it could do that. 

My mother says her tele doesn’t get sports channels (so I won’t break my no TV since 17 April record).  The BBC has a player that allows you to watch it through your computer but only if you are in the UK, and it seems to know I am not – which makes it a lot smarter than Google or Match.com, because no matter how hard I try I can’t convince either of them that I have moved 8000 miles.

At home, Wimbledon fortnight was the only time of the year when I managed to seize control of the television: kids always cave in when they know you are implacable.  At work I would cheer for afternoon rain (because then I might get a chance to see some of the biggest match), then race home, mix a gin and tonic and paint my toes in between points.  No one was getting dinner until doubles came on.

The children just about fitted in with this deprivation.  Anyway, it’s more or less obligatory for Brits to be passionate about Wimbledon – the BBC devotes 50% of its afternoon and evening air time for the whole two weeks to cover it.  My youngest took her patriotic duty seriously, although, as ever, she had her limits.  When she was three and a bit she informed me as she watched a particularly energetic match that when she grew up and played tennis she was never, ever going to play with – I cannot now remember whom, but my sons will – Pat Rafferty?  She said, “I’m going to refuse to play with him, mummy, because he smells.  I can smell the smell of him right through the tele.” 

I’m not, on the whole, very interested in sport, though I did get a bit worked up about cricket a couple of years ago when we won the Ashes, and, according to some, cricket is also an important test of patriotism.  About a decade earlier, when I found myself rooting for the home team against the Yank in a Davis Cup tie, I realised with surprise that I had become at least a little bit Brit.

I never watched tennis at all before I went to the UK.  But, from my first summer, I was fascinated by the Englishness of Wimbledon.  Players in regulation white competing on manicured green courts in between hours of rain delays which the commentators filled in with chit chat about strawberries and cream and who was in the Royal Box, and, whenever there was any tennis played, charming understatement from genteel commentators with perfect, now very old fashioned, RP.  I never went to Wimbledon, but it was great fun watching it in the graduate common room at college on the summer afternoons and evenings of the Long Vac.

But I really fell in love with tennis when my first baby was only a few weeks old and England was having a heat wave.  For days the baby was dressed only in a tiny nappy (cloth!), and, not wearing a lot more myself, I lolled skin to skin with him in the “master” bedroom – so small you couldn’t walk all the way around the bed – in my little British house.  On the black and white tele, with a dial you had to tune like a radio, fuzzy athletes darted around the grey court – in real life it was toasted brown.  My son and I dozed off to the thwap, thwap of the ball back and forth, back and forth, he waking to suckle just a little when the applause was particularly loud, and me to smile as I heard again, “Oh, well played!”

Today still feels like my grandmother’s birthday, though she died a little over two years ago, aged 100 and some. Her life spanned most of the 20th century and on into the 21st.

I’d like to spend a long time bragging about her. I’d never get bored, though I know you might, so I’ll just say that she was born British in 1905 and her parents emigrated to New Zealand when she was a toddler. She grew up and won a scholarship to study at the London School of Economics. It took six weeks by sea to get back to England (which they still called “home”). She didn’t see her family again for almost twenty years.

At the L.S.E. she met and married my grandfather (an American) in a civil ceremony in London in 1929. The bride’s father, a clergyman in New Zealand, was too far away to protect her virtue, but the groom’s father, a clergyman closer to hand, insisted that they travel that same day to Paris to be joined together in his church (where he ministered to American expatriots). He was particularly concerned that the religious ceremony should be immediate – before they went to bed – which amused them both. They each told me separately, more than half a century later, that they had long since consummated their relationship, my grandmother having read Marie Stopes’s Married Love and later, posing as an honest woman, visiting the first family planning clinic in London.

When her first child (my mother!) was nine, my grandmother was awarded her PhD in economics from the University of Chicago. That was 1941. By the sheer force of her character and intellect she forged a life remarkably unrestrained by the conventions of her time. She married two husbands, raised two daughters and was stepmother to two sons.

Her progeny were a motley crew if ever there was one, and we gathered in La Jolla, California to bury her ashes and celebrate her life. The ashes burying followed a church service with glorious music, laughter and tears, and then a solemn Rite of the Dead ceremony where each of us, in order of degree, touched the earth that finally covered her.

The whole rest of the time we got to know people we had barely, or never, met, but were part of her, and we played together. The families of the two stepsons (one dead) had fallen out and weren’t speaking, and because they weren’t speaking they had accidentally booked rooms in the same hotel. Both stepsons had stayed in touch with their stepsister, my mother (the grand Vizier of all family gatherings), and when she and I went to greet the family of one stepbrother we had to jump into the bushes because the other stepbrother was just arriving to check in.

My elder brother and sister in law were also staying at that hotel because he suspected cooties at the one our mother had chosen, the cheapest in town, where I was sharing a room with her. Anyway, Elder Brother and Sister in Law are generally the floor show wherever they go. He’s about five foot eight, white, stocky, carries a physics or math book at all times, can’t sit still, needs the bathroom every five minutes and shouts very loudly whenever he doesn’t get exactly what he wants. She’s six feet tall, athletic and slim, black, from Barbados, with perfect manners, and perfectly in control of her very difficult husband.

Baby Brother, eighteen years my junior, and his wife and toddler were in a room next door to my mother’s and mine. He can only aspire (but does) to the kind of tantrums Elder Brother pulls off. My big son, a young but grown man, peaceful, British and tantrum free, had a room on the second floor (and paid for it too).

My younger sister, the Killer one, was being a guy in those days and was at our hotel with her partner who was a guy being a girl. I hope you have that straight, because it is going to shift.

The Lawyer Sis somehow got muddled and booked a hotel a whole freeway drive away.

The first day we all agreed to meet at the zoo, which, on the whole, seemed appropriate, only in those days the Lawyer Sis didn’t carry a cell phone so she – and we – had to call her assistant from a phone booth to relay messages, as in “She says she is at the Monkey House” or “Your family will meet you in the Aviary”.

We did finally all find each other at the gift shop on the way out, but meanwhile everyone needed the loo and I was really curious how we were going to divide. I had been in big trouble at Baby Brother’s wedding (you’ll just have to wait for that post) and I was lying low. It was clear to me which restroom I was headed for and that’s all I cared about. The Killer sister (the woman man) followed me into the Ladies, as did her partner (the man woman).

For three days the grandchildren and great grandchildren hung together. We didn’t care what kind of feuds our elders were nursing, and we were just a La Jolla gang, arriving on mass at whatever bar had space for us, and ordering drinks for eighteen.

It’s a small city and let’s just say that what with being so many, not to mention the transvestites and the mixed marriage and the Brits, all there to bury that really old lady from New Zealand with the PhD, we didn’t go unnoticed.

I spent much of tonight with G who was angry because the Firefighter Builder wasn’t home and hadn’t called her (a fair cop in my book).  Her house is on my walk from work and I stopped by to say hello.  When her husband hadn’t answered his cell phone a few times I said I would go with her to check out where he might be.

So we got in her car with my small dog and her forty pound puppy and a large senile mutt she’s kind of inherited.  We cruised by a few usual haunts while she got it into her head that she saw his pickup truck where it shouldn’t have been.  Back at my house she made calls to friends, and friends of friends, and husbands of friends, and husbands of friends of friends, and friends of husbands of friends, to ask them to drive their own trucks by where any husband’s truck shouldn’t be, to see if her husband’s truck was there. 

After a while the guys stopped returning her calls. And her husband definitely wasn’t responding, even to my one pound sterling a minute United Kingdom cell phone that I obligingly lent her because it was a particularly good disguise.

G suspected that the Firefighter Builder was at the house of a woman who sleeps with married men and wants sympathy from other married men when she feels neglected. G didn’t believe her husband was in the first group, but was furious at the possibility he might be in the second. Also, besides being an adulterer the woman used to be a department store decorator and now her home looks exactly like a three bedroom Neiman Marcus.

G’s other complaint was that even if he wasn’t at Neiman Marcus with the Adulterer, at the very least the Firefighter Builder preferred drinking beer to doing the family taxes which had been her suggested activity for the evening.

Just as I was about to throw G out, her husband and a friend (male — not the Adulterer) showed up here. I didn’t wait for explanations and pretty unceremoniously told all three of them, plus the puppy and the senile mutt, that it was time to go home. G had drunk most of a bottle of wine, and the puppy and the senile dog had eaten all of Eloise’s cat food, and meanwhile I really, really wanted to get into the bath and read Trollope.

But I should not exaggerate the drama of the evening. How unlike the home life of our own dear queen was one perspicacious late Victorian’s response to seeing the play Antony and Cleopatra. And I would like to confirm that not once this whole evening was anyone bitten by an asp.

When I got out of the shower the other day there was a message on the answerphone to say that my uncle Jonathan, my mother’s half brother, had died.  I didn’t even know he was sick.  That is, I knew he was sick – he had been for 25 years – but I didn’t know he was dying sick. 

Jonathan was a haemophiliac.  As a child he was confined to a wheel chair, the result of constant bleeding into his joints.  He struggled to walk on crutches and then finally to walk unaided.  As a young man he worked to register voters, mainly poor and black, in his home state of Virginia, and marched – with his pronounced limp –against the war in Vietnam.

In the early 80s, like the majority of severe haemophiliacs, Jonathan contracted the HIV virus.  The product haemophiliacs needed was made by mixing the blood of up to 30,000 people.  If you needed the stuff a couple of times a month or more – and Jonathan did – you were pretty lucky not to get HIV.

Another of my uncles, also a severe haemophiliac, must have been infected at about the same time and died of AIDs within only a few years.  It was a particularly ugly death.  The virus laid waste to his body and burrowed into his brain.

We thought it was inevitable that Jonathan would share the fate of his brother soon.  Early on there were no treatments, though he could track his T cell count as his immune system crumbled. 

Around then the British ran a stunning series of tele adverts with the slogan, “Don’t die of ignorance”.  There’s a good description here, though unfortunately the video clips are not available unless you are accessing the site from a UK school or university.  The ads are still rated number 49 in the top 100 scariest moments on British television.  Meanwhile headlines screamed of the bravery of the Princess of Wales when she shook hands with AIDs patients without gloves on.  The disease carried a terrible stigma.  I told no one but my closest friends that my family was affected.

HIV was new, terrible and always fatal.  Despite the ad’s warnings we were almost completely ignorant, because there was very little real information beyond the sensational press.  On a long ago balmy evening I sat with my brother, my mother, various cousins, and Jonathan in a New England kitchen, with the usual summer annoyance of a lone mosquito humming in the air.  Only it wasn’t usual because as we were chit chatting away we were all silently trying to remember whether the news had ever mentioned this method of transmission – hell, it’s how you get malaria, and what did we know?  Finally Jonathan slapped the mosquito on my mother’s arm and it splatted red.  “Your blood, Anne,” he said, and then he smiled.

Jonathan survived until AZT, and he carried on surviving until the HIV Cocktail.  We began to think of him as indestructible.  He was angry about what happened to him, and, always an activist, founded the Committee of the Ten Thousand, a group that fought for justice for haemophiliacs infected with HIV.

Ironically in the end it was probably the drugs he took to keep the virus at bay that got  him, or the hepatitis infection, which was also a constant risk in blood transfusions.  Jonathan died of liver cancer last week, aged 62.

Years ago he and my mother fought over the care of their dying father and over their father’s will, and they had not seen each other in a very long time.  My mother telephoned every now and again and Jonathan was always charming, but he never called her and they never again became loving brother and sister.

When he died his widow phoned my number in England – I am the only one who hasn’t moved in decades – before she tracked me down here.  She said she hadn’t really noticed how estranged Jonathan had become from his family. 

I am too far away and won’t go to the funeral, nor will my mother who is even further away and cannot muster the energy, though I think it will be hard on her to miss it. Although they had quarrelled, he was her father’s son and the last of her three brothers.

I thought of him today as he was buried.  He was a brave man.  His work for justice for haemophiliac victims of AIDs made a difference.  The Boston Globe ran a full obituary here. 

Yesterday morning I looked out the glass front door and there was a big black cow staring back at me.  Behind her was a brown one.  I grabbed the camera and opened the door to take a pic (damn! dead battery) and they both ran off up the road.

Later I went outside to find there were great big cow footprints (double damn) all over the newly sprouted grass I have been nurturing for weeks.

And I have to ride the ferry to get more grass seed.  And it is raining again.  And cold enough to be March.  Kvetch kvetch. I know it doesn’t often get hot here, but right now it barely touches 50 most days. 

I am told this weather is probably the result of global warming, and when I make what I intend to be a dry remark suggesting that au contraire it is not warm but COLD, exactly one hundred per cent of the time someone very patiently explains to me that global warming is just a general term, and that, in fact, some places will actually get cooler and the sea levels are predicted to rise and… 

And then I have to remember all over again that, on the whole, Americans don’t do irony.  (For any American following this, when I write dry remark I do not mean a not raining remark.  And I do know global warming predicts more rain in some areas and drought in others, okay?)

Oh well, at least our version of global warming is good grass growing weather. Meanwhile, I have thought up a get rich slow scheme.

The geniuses at the County have changed the ferry prices.  There are 29 different tariffs depending on whether you have a ticket or pay with cash and what size vehicle you’ve got.  No one seemed to have noticed that it is cheaper to be a walk on passenger with a bike than a walk on passenger without a bike.

So I am thinking I could go on over to the res and round up some rusty old bicycles then rent them out to tourists to take with them on the ferry.  I figure I could make a profit of at least 50 cents a bike.

See what a cheerful, proactive person I have become?

Friday I applied for a job as a waitress at the island version of a diner.  The plan was G and I would wander down after the lunch rush, have a beer at the bar and fill out an application.

Getting ready in the morning I showered and kind of scrunched my hair.  A couple of years ago my British hairdresser was so shocked at the very idea of more significant intervention that he stopped cutting, scissors poised in the air, and said, “You don’t actually use a brush or comb do you?” 

I sometimes, guiltily, still brush my hair, but, frankly, I always regret it.  It only makes matters worse.

I put on my tightest shirt and the pedal pushers that show my ankles but not too much of the rarely touched by sun or razor parts of my legs.  I went as far as lipstick, and I thought I looked quite fetching in an over 50 sort of way, but when I saw the lissome young things already working at the diner my heart sank and I asked G why on earth they would hire us.

“Because we’re smart,” said G, “and we won’t give away free food to our friends. You’ve got waitress experience, right?”

Well, yes I have.  About three decades ago in college vacations.  The best was an old fashioned steak house in rural Florida where I worked several summers.  The owner was a widow, a tiny, painfully thin woman who always had a cigarette (on a long black holder) hanging from her lips.  Getting summoned to her quarters above the restaurant was like getting an invitation into Miss Havisham’s house.

The other waitress was Billie, a middle aged woman who hinted at many ailments, all of which she darkly ascribed to the fact that her husband wouldn’t have anything to do with her in the Right Kind of Way, which even now puzzles me.  I thought I knew what she was talking about but I didn’t think it made you sick.

There were two cooks, Rosie and Maud, large, kind, black women with many children and more grandchildren.  They worked seven days a week and all day long. In the afternoons between shifts they lay down on the cool, concrete kitchen floor to rest, and Rosie read the Bible to Maud, because Maud couldn’t read.  After awhile they fell asleep, and the sounds of their snores came through to the dining room, quiet before the evening rush. No one was getting paid.

The butchering was done by Miss Havisham’s son, who hadn’t a clue how to do it properly, and, as Billie said, kept cutting the meat leaving “big old spoon bones”.  It is true we sometimes got complaints. Miss Havisham was always unmoved.

The restaurant had what now seems to me the most extraordinary system.  We took orders, and then we went into the kitchen refrigerators and chose the raw steak for each customer ourselves.  We grabbed the meat, slapped it down on a long stainless steel table and announced how it was to be cooked.

Then, I am sorry to say, we went straight out to the restaurant again (and I don’t remember any intervening handwashing), or picked up the plates of cooked food from the serving hatch.  (“That one’s yours, Baby,” Rosie would shout to me; she always knew.)

Rosie and Maud hardly ever got the orders muddled and I did learn a lot about how to choose the best steak (and get the best tips).  Far as I know I didn’t actually poison anyone.

At closing time the customers at the bar ordered their drinks with wheels on (in a takeaway cup).  If someone local was really drunk the barmaid, who ran a tight ship, would ask me to give him a lift home on my way. 

I liked being a waitress then, and I think I would like it again now.  I can’t quite afford not to work at all (and besides I need to pay into Social Security – I’ve been gone a long time and I haven’t got my 40 quarters), but I want to spend more time writing, and thinking about writing, and that means trying to keep away from work that takes up my mental energy – at least the creative part.  Memorizing who ordered what is just fine. 

There’s good research that says even elderly rats who get problems to solve can grow new neurons (and I’m thinking I could use a few), but you are going to have to google the research yourself because I haven’t got the job yet and my neurons aren’t up to it.  Try me again later.

There’s a book of advice on blogging called, “No one cares what you had for lunch,”   I don’t own this book, but unfortunately I recalled its title just as I happened to be writing about that very subject, so I got discouraged and went out and weeded the garden instead.

But, honest, it was more interesting than it sounds.  My stories always require patience and I began by explaining how I had gone from burning up 45 litres of petrol a week (= about 10 gallons costing more than £45) to using less than half a tank in a month.

Instead of taking the car, I wrote, I walk.  This is apparently unusual enough that even strangers are noticing.  Yesterday a driver pulled up beside me and called through her window, “Do you like live here?  Because I keep seeing you walking all over the island.”  The island is only about nine miles long and two miles wide, so that might be true, though I don’t hang out a lot on the mountainous south side.

In my meandering way, having started the subject of walking, the lunch post would have mentioned that as I strolled up the road that divides the north side of the island in half, I heard some heavy breathing behind me, and since I haven’t heard any of that sort of thing in a while I was naturally interested.

When I looked to my left I saw

which surprised me rather, and I swear they weren’t there the last time I took this road, because I definitely would have noticed.  I’m not really a country girl, but I didn’t think those were your run of the mill cows – I’m telling you they don’t moo, they groan – and until I know otherwise I’m calling them water buffalo.

The water buffalo incident was on the way to the office where I work hopelessly for a group of good people who badly need an economics lesson – that is another, maybe never, post, but it could have been an aside, I suppose, to the lunch post.

In fact that whole bit with the water buffalo and the job was something of a digression because all that walk chit chat was leading up to the mailbox where, on a good day, I can trade $3 left in a tin for a dozen fresh eggs, some of them blue (which is quite cool).  If I take the last carton I am invited to turn over the sign so that instead of “eggs” it says, “sorry sold out”. 

And frankly, it wasn’t even strictly relevant to the lunch post because I eat the eggs for breakfast but I am betting what I had for breakfast is a banned topic too.

Finally, I was going to write about the Saturday market where the hot gossip was the cameras recently installed so that you can turn on the tele and check out the line at the ferry in case you need to hurry on down and join the queue.  Apparently one camera shows someone’s bedroom window and the market view was They Should Be Told.

A common complaint amongst women when the cameras first went in was that all the men on the island spent the whole day stuck to the television watching the line at the ferry.  So when our informant mentioned the bedroom angle there was some speculation that perhaps this was the reason, though when I checked, even when I looked hard, I couldn’t see a damn thing.  So I think we are stuck with the original theory that men are plain weird.

And, then, in my lunch post, I had thought I would mention, just in passing, and just so you can get a sense of my life here, that the ferry line is the only tele I have looked at in seven weeks (not that I watched much before) and I don’t miss it at all.

Finally, and back to the Saturday market, I was going to get to the point, which was that having not been driving and so not getting off the island for a couple of weeks now, I am running short of fresh food – though the Survivalists’ stocks mean I could go for months on the freezer and cupboards.  My Sunday lunch was limited to, besides the freezer stock, what was on sale at the Saturday market.

This week it was arugula (rocket) and radishes.  That’s it.  It has been a cold spring.  As luck would have it, though, arugula turns out to be its own niche topic ever since Barack Obama mentioned the price of arugula nowadays early in his campaign.  The NY Times and the Washington Post wrote about it, and I am thinking I may have stumbled on the only acceptable luncheon item for blogging.

This was my Sunday lunch:

Whole wheat bread grilled with sliced sweet Georgia onions, topped with shaved parmesan, garnished with arugula and a side of radishes, drizzled with olive oil and served with a glass of chilled white wine.

It was quite nice, really.   Though apparently you lot couldn’t give a toss.

It was a holiday weekend in the US as well as in the UK – I think this is the only holiday besides Christmas and New Year where the dates coincide.

In England the festivities were originally Whitsun (Pentacost) but it doesn’t have any special significance now except that in certain rural areas (like where I used to live) there is altogether too much Morris Dancing, fiddle playing and beer drinking.  The holiday no longer even has a name – which confuses Americans.  They want to know what it’s for and are puzzled by the answer that it is just a bank holiday. 

In America, the last Monday in May is a patriotic day – like many holidays here. On this one fallen soldiers are remembered.  When I walked past the churchyard yesterday I saw that many of the graves, newly tended, had little American flags stuck into the ground beside fresh flowers. If there was some ceremony to mark this private duty I missed it.

The weekend, also the unofficial start to summer, was the first of the seasonal farmers’ markets on the island, and the artists’ studio tour.  The market was pretty low key – I suppose the cold spring means not much produce is ready yet.  The fire department sponsored a stall for the “Disaster Preparation Committee” with their motto, “Preparation Prevents Panicky Poor Performance”.  A note in this month’s community newsletter says the Committee is “getting out of the Winter Blahs”, which I guess is comforting to know.

I didn’t visit as many of the artists’ studios (there were 15) as I planned, but I did see a demonstration of raku pottery and dropped in on a display of computer generated art with wine tasting from the Island winery (no prizes for which of the two was a stronger draw). 

Sadly, I couldn’t find the place where they were offering to spin your dog or cat’s hair while you wait, but anyway, Fluffy recently had a haircut and didn’t have any to spare (if only I had known about this opportunity sooner) and Eloise already thinks I am the enemy without any attempts to harvest her fur.

I finished up my tour at the Permit Queen’s studio where she and the Headstone Carver were showing their work along with a young woman who made wooden earrings, boxes, lamps and wine stoppers.  It was late in the day by then and there weren’t a lot of customers, so when the Headstone Carver wandered off the three of us fell to chatting about creative energy – or, to put it more simply, the urge to make things.  Since, though our ages ranged thirty years or more, we are all mothers, that pretty quickly led to talking about making the most important thing we had made – babies – which led to a change of subject altogether.

The young artist has one child, a normal healthy little girl of four, who was delivered at 23 weeks.  Doctors gave the baby about a three per cent chance of survival.  Because the mother was really poor – instead of moderately poor and uninsured – the state covered about a million dollars worth of medical care, from the emergency helicopter ride to get her off the island for delivery to paying for gas and overnight expenses so she could visit her baby during the four months she spent in hospital.  If they hadn’t been on that program, she said, they would have been paying that debt their whole life and then passing it on to their daughter.

The artist mentioned that she was half Indian, from the Makah Tribe.  I asked whether that was why she got on the health program, but she said no, it had nothing to do with it, she got on simply because she had no money.

She only ever noticed one piece of special treatment on account of being half Native American, and when I asked her what that was, she replied that every year on Thanksgiving the federal government sends her a turkey.

I guess it doesn’t quite make up for mass murder and grand theft real estate, but it is an interesting idea.  I’m trying to imagine the Committee that set this up, and what its motto might be: Festive Fowl Fosters Fillial Feeling?

Meanwhile, summer rules until Labor Day. 

To get the low down on what’s happening on the Island, my advice is, take a walk with a fireman.  Actually I am beginning to think it might be hard to take a walk without a fireman since all the men seem to have signed up.  Anyway, after my walk I know about the controversy surrounding children of the feckless poor playing in the fire pond, and that the guy who called 911 (999) the other night is just fine, and the sad reason for the power outage on Sunday morning.

This is America where, it seems, walks start with drives, and on the drive to the walk we swung by the fire pond next to the low income housing to see if kids’ toys were still there. We parked in front of the sign that said, “Fire Lane: NO Parking”.

“So you are going to park here?” asked the firefighter’s wife. (Not the firefighter who got me into my locked house. Different firefighter, different wife.)

“We are the fire department,” said her husband, which wasn’t strictly true, but the spot was conveniently close – clearly we weren’t going to waste any walking on the driving part of this walk.

On the walking part of the walk he mentioned he’d driven the driving part of the walk the night before, responding to a call out.

If you dial 911 the firefighters will come right over.  In the old days they were called out by a siren from the fire station.  Nowadays they all have pagers, but the siren still blows, waking the whole island along with the firefighters.  The next day everyone goes around asking everyone else what happened until everyone knows. 

If you ask a firefighter he won’t tell you, on account of the Vow of Silence or something, but their wives are good sources of at least the outline details, like, “Oh somebody just took their medicine and then got worried when it worked.”

I used to think this was a remarkably accident prone island since the siren blows a lot, but it turns out it always blows on Thursday evenings to summon the firefighters to their regular meeting.  Or when they go out on manoeuvres, which they do pretty often, boys being boys.

The previous night’s emergency was a guy feeling dizzy, apparently.  The paramedics came, said he was okay and everyone went home.

The dizzy man was the fire department’s second call out in 24 hours and that’s when I learned that the reason we had no electricity was because an eagle brought down a power line on the shore road.  The poor bird lay – I guess this is the right moment, if ever, to say spread-eagled – dead on the ground, its wing span as long as a tall man.  The firefighters closed off the road and, as my firefighter friend put it, “secured the scene” until the power department came to fix the cable and the county took the eagle away.

Except for my next door neighbour, the Fire Chief, these guys are volunteers with other jobs  – or in the case of my walking companion, retired.  And judging by the way he huffed and puffed up the hill, I would say this really is a land of opportunity, where every little boy can grow up to be a fireman.