or even yesterday?

I was in Katie Martin’s (that’s a bar a block back from the waterfront) drinking a beer and this whole selection of power ballads came on the radio. Crackly little bugger, that radio, tuned to Radio Koiha which is five blokes and girls up a hill. But ‘I want to know what love is’? ‘Miles away’? ‘Don’t want to miss a thing’? Had us all crying in our beer and / or playing air guitar.

What do you need for a power ballad? Regretful lyrics (not regrettable!); a slow tempo; a drum intro to the chorus (possibly); and a crashing guitar solo about two thirds of the way through.

Katie thought it was hot but it’s her era (the eighties). Some things really needed to be acceptable in the eighties.

Now ’scuse me, I’m going to write a definitive power ballad. Probably call it ‘Tracy’. Not that she broke my heart or anything. Not really. Honest.

Today everyone is eating rocks. That’s what they say, around here, during those times when the world  gets too damn funked-out to live with.

I have been living on this miserable archipelago for fifteen years since my husband brought me here as a fourteen-year-old child (don’t ask) and I have worn my feet down to my ankles traipsing about the hills, of which there are many. There are only so many stunning seascapes, lines of fluffy white clouds and wheeling frigate birds, stands of palm trees waving in the wind, sudden gusts of exotic plant smells, that you can take.

Then there are the carvings. Whoever came up with some of these had a seriously bad sense of humour or had been partaking of one of the islands’ many herbal remedies, if you follow my meaning. It’s bad enough to be walking through a forested hillside and happen upon a tiny half-eroded statue of an island godlet making a very rude gesture; it’s quite another thing to shelter in the lee of what you think is just a rock, when the winds pick up, only to look up and find the thing has sharp stone teeth and oval eyes staring out to sea blindly and pitilessly. And to think that, as the archaeologists now believe, those nightmarish things, which make the Easter Island statues look like a child’s toy, were once painted in realistic colours, though what is realistic for a twenty-foot-high shark-demon, I cannot say.

If it were not for the island funk I would have an affair with someone. But the bad winds are upon us and nobody even wants to do that at the moment. We just stay indoors and drink tea or rum and do not much else but look out at the trees moving in the wind. It isn’t like the weather is bad; there are no storms this time of year. It is winter, sure, but even winters are generally clement. It’s just that every so often something pulls the freshness out of the air and everyone wanders around gloomily and depressedly.

Arse. I’ve been here before, though. And we got through it before.