![]() I had to get them home to make a rock garden. I went crazy, leaping recklessly from one wet, slimy boulder to the next, oohing and ahhing. Some were boulders, gigantic enough for a couple to lie on and daydream comfortably for hours others were tiny fragments broken off from their monster-sized mothers. ![]() Light-green, dark-green, maroon, pearly cream, dark red, shiny, matte - they were piled on top of each other like huge marbles. Kent pulled over sharply and drove up the embankment.īefore us lay hundreds, perhaps thousands, of rocks. The sea was on our right, blocked from view by an embankment that ran for miles until you reached the roundabout that could take you to St Thomas on the east coast or into Kingston to the west. The airport was on our left, the runway ending almost, it seemed, at the edge of the highway. It was around five o’clock and the sun was on its way home. We were driving along the Palisadoes highway, on our way back from Port Royal. They are two sides of the same coin, a powerful currency whose value can only be judged by those with open minds. I cannot separate the two Jamaicas, romanticise one and demonise the other. Knowing that only made me more determined to see, hear, feel, touch and taste every possible experience Jamaica offered. I straddled both worlds, never fully understanding why I was not accepted by either, and realising that only Jamaicans can ever truly understand “yard”. The nuances of the place began to soak in: the subtle but irrefutable differences between uptown and downtown, town and country, browning and blacka. I was not a “sufferer”, though not by any stretch of the downtown imagination. ![]() So when I first went to Jamaica, it was the sessions, the stage shows, the rugged excitement of the ghettos and the blunt brashness of the people that I fell in love with.īut when I went back in 1997 (I was totally hooked, you see), I set about the task of settling down and becoming one of the “sufferers”. Such was our fascination with “The Rock”, the biggest brother in the extended family of West Indian islands. Before the summer of 1995, all I knew of Jamaica was Bob Marley, Blue Mountain coffee and dancehall songs on Trinidad’s radio stations.
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