The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

There are two preoccupations all old codgers have and love. First, marvelling at how things have changed since we were young; second, reminiscing about the things we did when we were young. This thread is for us.

Since we British Expats came to live in the Caribbean, our island-homes have changed – not much for recent immigrants, but hugely for old-timers. When my wife and I came to Cayman, the population was 15,000 – and now it’s four times that. Our son was two and is now 45, with three Norwegian children. We used to phone our mothers in Australia for $2.49 a minute (or was it $2.49 for three minutes?), now I can phone around the world for free on WhatsApp.

I had the foresight to record my personal thoughts and reminiscences on an online journal that I wrote between 2010 and 2016. It can serve as my obituary, at least for my grandchildren; they’re not interested in it yet, but maybe one day… My wife wrote her own obit (she died in 2019), but it was a two-page summary, and that’s way too brief. What about all the travels she and I shared before we settled down? I gave up on travelling at that point, but she never did. She left thousands of photos behind, but very few words. She got that wrong, I think.

This thread is not intended as a series of summaries of old codgers’ lives, but as a sort of prompt. Let’s see how it goes.

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Gosh Gordon, i'm not so sure, maybe, codgerdom - i definitely get it, and i have been seen occasionally to engage, but for me there are impediments.

1, My career is in IT. There is only one constant in IT, and thats change. I was hugely lucky in my career [or made that luck?] so i have mostly been at the bleeding edge and have reinvented/relearned new tech many many times. It has got to the stage where the actual tech is irrelevant to me, its about how its implemented and managed, my job is to make IT disappear so nobody has to consider or worry about it. Yes it amuses occasionally that my memory stick is 50 thousand times bigger than the entire memory of my first PC and that was 50 times bigger than my first machine, but its far too techy to amuse anyone else. I actually know how my iphone really works and how bogglingly complex it really is, but same - who cares. SO - old stuff, new stuff, same stuff different day.

2, Its said you are as old as the woman you feel. Well lets just say i'm pretty young at heart in that direction, and this remains a pleasant revelation of life, i'm actually more than i was at half my current age. I am more about current things than most people my physical age i suspect.

3, - My personal codger statement? Yes some things get easier, like whatsapp. I tell my lights to turn on, i never watch TV just download any movies or tv series i like, but this is ephemeral. How we live is far more about people. Eventually most hardware will disappear, we can expect to not have to use physical devices like phones much longer. We wont be driving cars ourselves in 10? years BUT we are the top few %, in Africa i suspect things wont be better, worse? Covid 22 will probably sort out the population numbers, maybe if we survive this is a good thing? Many may engage more in virtual worlds as they become more pervasive? Better than life? [This is actually a real sci fi book]

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

For twenty years here in Cayman I wrote weekly newspaper columns for a local audience. An anonymous "fan" then offered to set me up with an online presence as well, and I wrote stuff there for six years before giving it away. Mostly for a local audience again, but at some point I branched out into the field of reminiscences addressed to my Norwegian grandchildren. I began with short reports of my youthful travels in the 1960s with a girl I picked up outside a hostel in Greece. I'd like to share some of those here on this old codgers' thread, in the hope that other qualified persons will follow suit.

I don't think the BE mods will allow me to give a direct link, but if you type "clean sheets" (inverted commas and all) and Barlow's Cayman (which is the name of the site - inverted commas not needed for that), then you ought to arrive at my favourite story from our Middle East adventure, written in 2012. It will give you the flavour of how it was in those peaceful days for two low-budget backpackers in that part of the world.

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Here's another old-codger's reminiscence - this one not about youthful travels but along the lines of "things were better when I was a boy", which is very much a codger-ish topic. I'm disappointed that nobody besides my old chum uk_grenada has contributed to this thread. No youthful holidays worthy of mention from anybody? After 220 visits? Tchah!

One more time, then. To get to this one, Google Barlow's Cayman again and type in inverted commas "Where did all the bad people come from?" What that title meant was that there weren't (many) bad people when this old codger and his wife were kids, so where on earth did they all come from? A rhetorical question, by the way. If any mod would be kind enough to let me give the actual link, I'd be very grateful. It would make life easier for us all. It's not advertising, and I make no money from any clicks. It's an online personal journal, that's all, discontinued five years ago. Ta.

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Well, for what it's worth. My "international career" started at 15 with a school trip by train (& ferries) to Greece & Crete in 1970. Opened my eyes to there being a wider world out there!

The ding, ding, ding, ding of the night trains passing through level crossings, the mountains & streams of the Tyrol seen from the train, soldiers lined up along the tracks when crossing the border into Yugoslavia at Jesenice at midnight. Chickens, etc on the train south out of Belgrade. On that train having just enough US $ to pay the group's dinner bill because they would not accept the local currency. Sleeping on the deck of a ferry out of Piraeus because the heat & smell below decks was just too bad , Baklava & Ouzo in Athens, sitting by the Parthenon in the evening listening to an open air concert from below, the Corinth canal, a group of Israelis singing & dancing to Hava Nagila on the boat from Patras to Ancona...

Nothing particularly remarkable but, looking back, that's when I became a European - 50 years on the memories so clear.

PS: I had been abroad once before, by car air freighter to Brittany but that didn't count!

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Good stuff, Patrick. Those are excellent old-codgers memories, and exactly the kind of post I was hoping for. your adventures are what made you a European, you said. My adventures made me a permanent expat. Cayman has been my home for 43 years now, but/and I am still an expat, with feelings of loyalty to the world of expats.

My youthful travels are still fresh in my mind. Well, not all of them, but enough. I used to report some of them on an online journal, ready for the day when my grandchildren might enjoy reading them. My first time "on the road" was hitching around Scandinavia in 1963. I put that story into my journal in January 2013; if you can find your way to that month via the signature below this post, it's the second-last of the six items for that month - under the unimaginative title "The Summer of '63". (You might have to copy and paste; clicking the link doesn't lead to the journal, for some reason.)

Sometimes - as I'm sure you've found - the memories can be socially useful. Last year I was able to ask a Hungarian friend-of-a-friend, "Do they still have a public-bath-house on the river between Buda and Pest?" The memory was from travels through eastern Europe in 1965 in my 1958 Beetle. I think we paid a shilling each, but I may be wrong about that. What's your guess? (I'm also guessing the year of my Beetle. It had a crash-gearbox: when did they stop making those?)

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Aha, the baths! Believe it or not we have yet to make visit (you know the syndrome, when it's on your doorstep...). We made a new year resolution 2020 to visit, then covid interfered. They are about to reopen for those with Vax certificates.

Anyway, most of them are in Buda, very near the waterfront, if you were in Buda then you may have tried the large bath / hotel Gellért as it is very promibent. In Pest the main one is the Széchenyi complex near Városliget (city Park) about 4 Kms east of the river. This is very busy, we have been recommended a much smaller one in Buda, which is alsó more convenient.

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Gellért hotel and baths

https://cimg1.ibsrv.net/gimg/british...401b84fb84.jpg

By the way your one shilling is about €15 now!

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Hey, we were foreigners on a budget! We didn't know the difference between Buda and Pest; and we were staying at a cheapo place we stumbled across somewhere. I've no recollection of it. Somebody we met, took us to "the baths" - whichever one he was most familiar with, I guess; we didn't know there was a choice!

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Well, it was a long time ago! However, maybe, just maybe, you might remember if the area was dead flat (in which case you were in Pest) or VERY hilly (in which case you were in Buda)!

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

I don't remember any hills, so it must have been Pest. That's on the eastern side, right? Could "our" baths have been in the middle of the river - maybe on an island?

From memory - a desperately weak and unreliable memory! - we came into Budapest from Timisoara. Then we would have gone south to Balaton, then north to Gyor and out to Bratislava. We didn't have a planned itinerary, but just wandered about wherever looked interesting. We wouldn't have been in Hungary more than four or five days, and as budget tourists, I have to say we weren't all that impressed with the country. Sorry! We just didn't stumble across anywhere exciting. Sigh...

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Now we know! You must have been on Margit Sziget (Island). Two sets of baths there, one a proper Spa, the other, what I call "the people's" swimming pools (typical Soviet complex). Unfortunately you missed the best bits. Never mind, we're still here!

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

OK. Well done! We would have been in the cheapo place - the public pool(s). The young fellow who took us there didn't have money for anywhere fancy. I've just checked the Island on Google - lots of lovely pictures, but nothing rings a bell. We wouldn't have known it was a tourist attraction - and maybe it wasn't one, in 1965! We didn't "do" tourist attractions anyway. Our standard method was to drift around observing the culture of the places we visited, and we missed out on a lot of beautiful places. Only occasionally did we go out of our way to see one of "the sights".

We had come up from Turkey and were headed for Poland and Russia, but got diverted in CZ because they wouldn't let us enter East Germany without a visa - miserable buggers! - so we had to semi-backtrack to Vienna and decided to go the long way round, to Russia (USSR) via Scandinavia.

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Margit has changed a heck of a lot in the last 50 years! Very popular attraction now.

Re: The old codgers' thread - Caribbean
 

Just a thought. If you asked the mods to move the thread to one of the more mainstream areas you might get more responses?