Gordon Barlow

Thirty years is pretty solid going, anyway, Grenada!

I've always been fascinated by the theme of the old movie (1955) "The Seven-year Itch", which was based on the statistic of the time that most divorces came after seven years of marriage. At that point, husbands began looking around for new playmates. At that time - back in the day - most marriages had produced two or three children by then, standing and pulling and shouting and distracting and generally F-WORDing up the arrangement of the two adult partners. And, the fathers always had a lot more time and opportunities to look around than the mothers...

My personal belief - suspicion, perhaps - has long been that men in general don't really want children. They say they do, but they don't. Given their druthers, they'd rather not have them. When they do get them, of course, they love them, and it's too late.

Some genius once said or wrote, "Women need a reason to make love; men just need a place." What do you reckon?

uk_grenada

I think men and women are remarkably similar generally but individual variation is wide. In other words women are as horny and love sex as much as men do, but men and women individually vary a lot so compatibility in bed is important. As individuals our experience is limited and we easily consider this experience to be ‘normal.’

when you have concurrent girlfriends, and see hugely varying sexual appetites, well needs, and responses it is educational.

uk_grenada

Men love the concept of children but not so much the work, expense even. I remember a report saying a child by majority costs the same as a high end Porsche.

This man prefers to love his lovers, I could never use a working girl (actually it’s the man being used) and while the one night concept is not impossible, its only because it may lead to more.

Gordon Barlow

And yet, and yet... My son and I have always had the warmest of relationships. When I took him aged five, to meet up with my Mum in Hereford, she asked him "Who's your best friend at home?" He replied, "My Dad, of course." A year or two later, I retired from paid employment and became a house-husband - what I called "the parent of first resort". I was the one watched out for his welfare, and took care of all things to do with school; it worked extremely well for us. That arrangement lasted for five years, until I went back to work. (The saga of my management of the local Chamber of Commerce, is briefly told in my Maple Leaf thread in the Canada section, for anybody interested.)

When my family and I came under imminent threat of deportation, it was I who took him round (at age 14) to various private schools in England to choose one somewhere close to where Linda and I might get jobs. After we'd chosen one, he asked "When we come to live in England, will we go back to Cayman on school holidays?" And when I explained that we wouldn't be able to afford that, he said he'd really, really, rather keep Cayman as his home, even if it meant becoming a boarder at the school. So the decision to stay in Cayman and fight it out, was his. (Mine was a Pyrrhic victory, but I'm still here!)

Now he has three children in Norway (one inherited), and is thinking of moving back to Latin America. Thanks to the miracle of modern telephones, we're in regular touch. If my Mum were alive to ask me "Who's your best friend?" I'd say, "my son, of course."

Gordon Barlow

Linda wrote her own obituary, and I included it in the official program I had printed for her Memorial Service. (No formal funeral; I don't like those things.) I found that I didn't know many of the details of her childhood in Melbourne back in the 1940s and '50s, which surprised me. I found the whole thing very interesting.

I've tried to write my own obit, but gave it up as a bad job. I was writing way too much, and it was boring. How embarrassing, if people started nodding off at my memorial service! Cripes. So what I've done is tell my grandchildren to read all the stuff I've put online. Including these BE threads. Taken all together, those contents cover the ground well enough: Back in the Day, Life's Turning Points, Shrimps on the Barbie, and a few smaller ones that died an early death...

Mine has been a reasonably interesting life. Not as interesting as some people's - uk_grenada's for one - but most emigrants/immigrants lead interesting lives, if you think about it. Even their opinions on this, that, or the other, and life in general. Well, that's the theory.

uk_grenada

Love to meet up one day, here or there?

we all have an interesting story, but never get maudlin, there is more always.

this is penned to use an obsolete word on Ariapita ave in port of Spain (party central in Trinidad) where I am visiting my gf here. Never slow down. Always continue to enjoy what makes you smile - imho?

Gordon Barlow

Grenada is prettier than Cayman. I visited once, back in the day, for a few days' conference arranged by the employers' section of the ILO (International Labour Organisation). That would have been about 1990, maybe a bit earlier. I went as representative of the Cayman Chamber of Commerce, of which I had been Manager for two years - and maybe still was. It was a long time ago!

We delegates all stayed at a hotel overlooking the Grand Anse. St George's I remember as a lovely little town. Nice people, too.

Gordon Barlow

I don't suppose every place has the same kind of service at funerals or memorial services, but in Cayman printed programs are not uncommon. To accompany Linda's obit, I added some photos of her at various stages of her life as I knew it, and those were very well received. The first was a head-and-shoulders of us both in Arab dress, taken in the studio of a professional photographer in Palestine whom we stayed with for a night in 1965 during our "big adventure". Then one outside the church in Toronto after our wedding in '67; then one with Ross (aged one-and-a-bit) in the camping ground in Corfu in '76, beside the Kombi van. Next, us two sitting at an outdoor table up at Rum Point here in Cayman in 1978, newly arrived. I can't remember all the others. Oh, one of her crossing the finish line of the Miami Marathon in 1981; I can't recall her finishing place exactly, somewhere around 6,000th, I think. Yes, there are three noughts in that, not just two! And one of her and two friends sitting on what was left of our verandah after the big hurricane in 2004. And - late thought - one of her with a group of Cayman and Jamaica women tennis players.

It was a good idea to have the pictures. People liked the idea of having something to talk about while waiting for the actual service.

Gordon Barlow

Over in my Life's Turning Point thread in the Maple Leaf forum in the Canada section, the conversation has turned to the topic of offshore tax-havens. Back in the day (early 1970s), the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) was a budding tax-haven. One of the offshore world's major trust companies at the time was Bahamas International Trust Company, based in Nassau, which already had an affiliate in Cayman called Cayman International Trust Company. It then decided to set up another affiliate, in the New Hebs, for the convenience of clients in that region.

So BITCO in Bahamas and CITCO in Cayman were to have a sister company in the region called - well, uh, let's see ... Hmm. A week before the Southern Hemisphere International Trust Company's booklets and brochures were to be sent to the printers, some sharp-eyed executive twigged that the company's abbreviation would make it a world-wide laughing stock. So the name was changed to Melanesia International Trust Company - Melitco for short. Much better!

Gordon Barlow

Back in the day, we wrote letters by hand. No email, no texting. Telephones, yes, but they were expensive. So correspondence was pretty basic, though some aspects of it were very efficient. Envelopes posted in foreign places always made it to the correct addresses back home. During our Big Adventure in the mid-1960s, Linda and I wrote home regularly, confident that our letters would arrive safely, even from countries that didn't use the Western script. We reckoned that our envelopes from the Arab countries and places like Russia and Greece, must have been sent to a central office somewhere, where some genius recognised the script and put them in the bag marked ENGLAND - and in England they were put in the bag marked AUSTRALIA.

There must have been some mistakes made in the process. I remember one time in Turkey, when a man explained to his friends that we were Australian and not Austrian. In Turkish, he told them "not Avusturiya - Avusturaliya!". Accompanied by that little wave of the hand that indicates "a long way away"! Come to think of it, maybe he worked in the Central Post Office.

Gordon Barlow

Yeah, back in the day...! We old codgers - I passed 84 a couple of weeks ago - spend a lot of time recalling incidents of long ago. It's a "What if? exercise.

What if we'd married our first loves? What if we hadn't had kids? What if we hadn't left our parents' homes when we did? Those aren't the same things as Life's Turning Points (which is my thread in the Canada Maple Leaf forum). They're just "What if?" For myself: what if I'd pushed on to Crete in the Kombi with Linda and Ross, and lived with the hippies in the caves there? That was a genuine possibility at one point. I had just enough sense to turn back.

In an alternate universe, I will have done the deed. One of my granddaughters "hears voices" in her head; maybe one of those voices is mine from that other life... Who knows?

morpeth

I remember studying in Switzerland when my parents were in Indonesia- I had to make a 'reservation; for a time to make the call-and at times there would be a double-echo : so I spoke,would hear the echo my parents heard, and then I would hear their echoed comments,and vice versa.Surprisingly for Indonesia mail usually did arrive- there are countries today where mail more often than not might never arrive.

People also kept many letters , so for some plus even a diary, a written record of events and people.My beloved aunt died in 2008 at 108 years old- in her room she had a bundle of reference letters from the 1920s and 1930s, and WWII letters from my uncles.

As a stamp collector as a child, establishing penpals around e world, I received letters regularly.

Gordon Barlow

My mother kept every letter I ever wrote her. Well, maybe not every letter. Maybe just letters from my more exciting travels. When she died, there was a red carry-bag full of my letters, which I brought home here to Cayman but have never opened. The bag is there in my clothes closet now, ten feet away. I suppose when I die my son will read them, or give them to his children to read, or just toss them out. He'll be with me in a couple of weeks, so I'll ask him. Of course he won't admit he'd ever throw them out... Oh dear, I've painted myself into a corner here. Now I'll have to read the damn things!

What did you do with your aunt's letters?

morpeth

I have them in storage, and plan to sir my daughter down to read when she is a bit older- in particular the reference letters.

I have become more interested in genealogy in recent years- reading the actual letters were very instructive and interesting. My mother kept my letters which I read,not sure whether anyone has interest, I will ask my son.I think as one gets older one has more interest in such things.

Gordon Barlow

We childhood stamp collectors...! I was very good at arithmetic as a little boy, and proclaimed an ambition to become a hugely successful accountant with seventeen (I think it was) offices around the world including one in Liberia. Always Liberia, because I had some stamps from there, and was fascinated by African geography.

Forward forty years or so to 1989, in Cayman on the local politicians' list for deportation, when I actually applied for a job in Liberia. At that time the country was a CIA-run tax-haven and looking for a Registrar of Companies. They flew me up to Langley for an interview, but no dice. Years later I met the chap who got the job - Hamish Somebody, a Scot working in Jamaica - and asked him how it had been for him. "It was okay," he said carefully. "Except for the civil war." Well yes... I guess!