Did Agatha Christie Drink Gin?

 

Joan Collins not Agatha Christie

 

On Tuesday morning with Earl Grey tea in bed I log on to Facebook 

grand dames I know are exploring exotic lands, one is floating down

the Nile on a river barge with men dressed in kaftans lifting striped

red sails and serving tea and cardamon cakes. The vessel looks

like the one used in the Agatha Christie film - Death on the Nile

I spy Hercule Poirot, famous Belgian detective on board.

The second is on a sun lounger at a villa beside a pool beside

The Tyrrhenian Sea on the tiny island of Cagliari, Sardinia, waving

at the camera wearing a Joan Collins wide straw hat.

I’m in Middle Shotover watching a hawk breakfast on rabbit kill in

the front paddock and the sun dry chilled green grasses through

my dusty windows where a lost bumble bee knocks asking to come

in and I start to wonder - which one of us is living the dream because

Agatha Christie was a teetotaller.

Jane Bloomfield

Collection 2023

The Land of the Long White Meat Search

I have a bitch resting face. I’ve had it all my life. Sometimes it’s to my advantage. Like the time I snagged my most excellent PA job at Fitch and Co, Design Consultancy, London. Aged 19. Camilla my interviewer could not believe how laid back and confident I was. Underneath that Naz-type veneer, I was perspiring with fear and experiencing my first ever case of Imposter Syndrome, thinking holy typing-speed how am I ever going to DO this job, I’m saying I can do.

I got the job.

The other day my BRF got me the X-ray … How to hack off an NZ Custom’s woman in one interrogation.

Broad woman in blue uniform: Have you got any nuts, seeds, plant materials?
Me: No
BWBU: Any honey?
Me: No.

BWBU: Any food of any kind?
Me: Yes chocolate, I declared it.

BWBU: Have you got any shellfish?
Me: No.

BWBU: Have you got any MEAT?
Me: … Nope …

MEAT! Do I look like your typical meat smuggler? I tried to contain my face. It has a mind of its own.

BWBU: Wrote a lot of officious looking ticks and squiggles and 603 with a pungent black marker and said -  Straight ahead, through the X-ray.

The guy before us had got - left, through boot inspection. He hadn’t used his boots in six months.

Couldn’t they just spray us with fly spray while still on-board like they used to? I actually doubt the efficiency of those fruit n veg and flesh machines. FYI a round soap looks like an orange. I’ve been scanned before.

Daughter 17 and I carried on after wearily heaving our bags on and off the conveyor belt. We’d been travelling ten hours and had another hour wait and a domestic hop between us and home. We got up at 5.45! 5.45! It was 2.35pm. Down the hallowed welcoming halls, past floor to ceiling murals of probably the only non-dairy pastoral scenes left in NZ, I pushed that lopsided trolley admiring the sheep.

We were greeted by a handsome middle-aged Maori man on the entrance to the duty-free hypermarket. He spoke on a corded microphone. He looked like he might break into song. Something big band. Cheryl Moana Marie. I hoped. He spoke in a deep and dulcet cheery tone. A comforting familiar tone you might expect to hear in a bingo hall in a rural town on a Tuesday night. Legs eleven. He was offering Toblerone minis.

‘Everyone loves free chocolate,’ he chided. ‘Chocolate anyone?’ He proffered his laden basket with a smile. I ditched the trolley and barged diagonally through the slow moving crowd and grabbed a handful. Two actually.

‘Thanks!’ I said. ‘Kia ora.’

What a pleasant welcome. This guy really perked things up in this speckled grey suit. His cheeky slightly bored smile and neatly combed hair. Dude was cool!

I thought of newcomers to the land of the long-white-meat-search and wondered what they made of it all.

Only one computer scanner photo machine was functioning. The Smart-gate locals queued. An official rebooted the machine while we waited. It still didn’t work. Those with exotic passports skipped through human-assisted booths. And got a stamp.

Just before the exit doors a friendly black labrador sniffed our baggage. Obvs he could not smell that leg-o-lamb nestled amongst my seed infested sneakers. His sensory checker must have been tuned to other import no-nos.

Welcome to New Zealand.

I See Red - How Not to Be a Travel Writer

Setting yourself the task of writing an award winning  travel article complete with a stunning photo essay while on a five day romantic child free SURPRISE holiday on a remote island in the middle of the Bali Sea is nigh on near impossible. I’ve discovered. I only wanted to earn my keep. Bank a few bob, so’s I could skive off and write some fiction. It wasn’t MY fault some small human person flicked a switch on my camera and set the photos to SQUARE. Ratio 1:1. Photographer credit: 0.

I gathered 6,000 words of research, experience and wonder. Trying to turn it into a compelling 1200 word magazine story that would catch they eye of bored women drinking gin and tonics while flicking through its glossy pages as the spuds boiled and the other half watched the TV News, was like writing a thesis on snail poo. Boring, got stuck a lot and I couldn’t find any. Story angles that is. That worked. Over six (I really hate to admit, six, I repeat) WEEKS, I hacked about with numerous dead end versions.Non cliched, tropical island paradise essay with a twist. No worries.

I’ve wanted to be a travel writer since my dad took me on safari in the Masai Mara, Kenya circa 1990. Upon my return, broke but incredibly enthusiastic, I sat at my sunny kitchen table in Milford, Auckland and enrolled in a correspondence Travel Writing course. For which I paid over one hundred bucks. What a waste of money. My tutor was half hearted. I learnt FA and I quickly realized I would not be selling any travel tales nor my grainy shots of rhinos in the distance anytime soon.

Upon my blog, undeterred by previous failures I write happily about holiday weekends and the like. So why this task I’d set myself was so painstakingly impossible I do not know. I even started to wonder, as I sat at my blank screen and learned a lot more than I needed to about tropical bird life, the island's nutty Cat Lady and how Bio Rock systems are improving damaged coral reefs, whether it was time? Time to go along for the do-I-have-THE-menopause blood test? Just to see IF there was a reason my brain had left its normal habitat. Between my ears.

My first attempts sounded like a Holiday Shoppe brochure. Stiff. Factual. PR ridden. Write this article in the free and easy, informative upbeat way you write your blog posts, but with normal GRAMMAR, I chastised myself, as I perspired over my keyboard. Lady writers do not sweat.I like reading of first hand experiences offered an author friend.

Here is my first Title and opening paragraph:

Destination Unknown – Bring Your Bikini

It was a magical mystery tour, a 50th birthday long haul surprise printed on a faux boarding pass – “Destination unknown, bring your bikini”. I covered all bases during the three month build up and bought five.

Here’s my second:

My Treasure Island: Gili Trewangan

 We cruised onto the brilliant-cut aquamarine welcome mat of Gili Trewangan, on a sun kissed day in June. Gili T (as the locals call it) is one of three tiny coral atolls, dotted ellipsis like in the temperate Bali Sea, on the northwestern tip of Lombok.

Yada yada.

I wrote descriptive scenes of arriving at our luxury accommodation. How the bathroom was actually a walled garden and offered a birdwatcher and bathers paradise in one. How the only taxis were hauled by pint sized ponies. How I was massaged in the garden beside a giggling french woman. How the surprises kept unfolding and our hosts kept delighting.

 I had conversations with locals. And studied the wildlife.

Girlfriends arrived from the other side of the world.(Yeah try writing a concise sentence about that!).

I had an amazing time.I have a digital album of photos.

Before I started (my article) I contacted my journalist mate Steve B and asked for his favourite travel writers. I would become them via reading-osmosis (it’s a new thing DA). I hoofed it to the library. And read weighty tomes in the bath. I left the ones that bored me and tried to absorb the ones that delighted. At the same time I read every travel article I could find. In newspapers. Magazines. Online. I read ‘tips for travel writers’. ‘Do’s and Don’ts’. You name it I read it.

I was prepared. Yet I wasn't.

I had an amazing time. I repeat. I just wanted to write about it. In a saleable format. No matter, I will go back to it. One day. And you’ll read it here. Love letters are like that. They turn up in odd places. And often they’re free.

I Tested The Best Infinity Pools of South East Asia, so you don't have to

I love a fly-n-flop holiday mid winter like the next person. This year I got one with secrets and bells on. Yee ha. Sifting by the pool enjoying warm-time is divine. And like any travel writer worth their carbon footprint, I'm passing on some tips to add to your Must-do-Venue-Menu. Here goes.

I loved the Marina Bay Sands, Singapore, at first, in-a-size-can-matter kind of way. But we were the wrong guests. We’d turn up with only one key-card, after travelling several floors and towers only to find we needed TWO, one each, in order to get IN to the roof top pool, the roof top bar, the roof top restaurant. Pretty much anywhere really. There were special clubs too. Members only.

Making this 963 roomed hotel so massive has required the owners to open it to joe-public-day-trippers to make ends meet. It kind of detracts from the experience. However, the 200m infinity pool spanning the very edge of - Floor 57 will blow your mind. 24/7. 

The pool attendants wore black t-shirts and pantyhose in American tan. They served pretty alcoholic beverages with haste and a smile. Lime Dacquiri anyone?

Next stop was, The InterContinental, Jambaran Bay, Denpasar. No infinity pool but no matter, the Balinese sculptures watching over the huge selection of water ways were mystical.

Then there was this pool outside Pondok Santi Resort, Gili Trewangan, Lombok. Its crumbly reef bottom required winter feet to wear jandals but its briny 29 degrees made morning dippers buoyant. We sculled like seals, lying on our backs, toes out of the water like only middle aged swimmers can. Sucks to be young. And sink.

One sunny day we boated over to Tugu Resort, Sire Beach, Lombok. Its green tiled, almost infinity pool edged in purple shrubs, beckoned like an ancient tropical lagoon. We entered and bobbed like fat languid catfish. Sublime.

We ate sushi and drank lime juice in transit with old friends, alongside this suspended pond, Jimbaran Bay, Denpasar, Bali. It was a longish lunch and a man, with two wives in white bandeau bikinis drank cocktails semi-submerged for the duration.

Finally, our last hotel night of eight. Swisshotel, Singapore. We got to bed at 2.30am. The mini bar was empty. Bereft of a single morsel. I could have sucked on a sachet of Coffee-mate but that was about it. I’d thought - nightcap you know to help us nod off.

The next day, after our morning sightseeing, I put on my bikini for the last time and went to checkout the pool.

‘I’ll get in with you or I won’t get there at all.’ A conference looking attendee with a Canadian accent had said on our way to breakfast. ‘The lifts don’t work in this hotel.’

I got there eventually. There was no infinity. No ever after. The towels were beige. The sun - radiant. I lay with my head shaded by the beige umbrella. Beads of sweat formed all over me. A tropical sauna. I spied on the pool goers. Why not.

Two middle eastern men entered the pool. They could have been brothers. Or lovers. Both wearing black y-fronts and tight white singlets. Sheer. A wet t-shirt competition began. The Twins, I called them. A pool attendant marched round from the bamboo thatched bar and spoke to them. Perhaps she wasn't fooled by their swim suits du jour either.

An oven-baked women walked over to the lounger beside me. It wasn’t a come on. She was the arm of the sundial. Worshiping. The lasagna woman, I called her. Layers of deep deep colour etched into her skin. Her face aubergine. The triangle where her Adams apple would have been béchamel cream. All highlighted by her beige and chocolate brown string bikini. Obviously she would never be brown enough. She wore no glasses. And looked impatient.

Yet we were tanners side by side. Only she was headed for the tannery. Tan-anorexic. 

On my other side, a man put down his things. Early sixties. Fat unlit Cuban cigar. Book. Striped Bermuda shorts. Handsome. Craggy. Slight paunch. No yacht. But I called him, The Captain.

His perfect match, a women in a red bikini with boobs that could have been half blown balloons at a kids party. Worn with a swagger to the water's edge. Miss Scarlet, I called her, dipped her toes in and arched her neck sky scraper-wards.

The H arrived, we drank our last virgin Mojito. Fresh lime, mint soda, brown sugar.  Lime me up. He departed. He hates pools. I took a dip. All eyes on me. Their turn. Kidney shaped, turquoise tiles. Tepid water up to my knees. Finite. Boring. No- one was taking selfies. Not even the swarthy lads in their wet undies.

A small boy and his mum swam. The lad took a humungous gulp of water. Half in his lungs and half in his stomach. His coughs resonated off the wall of concrete towers. So deep was his cough you could hear his stomach turning inside out. His mother led him from the pool.

Time to go. Walking past the pool-rules-board my eyes were drawn to his puke. Phlegmy. Yuk. I away and spied our first night hotel, The Marina Sands, with the submarine on top over the bay. 

They had a complimentary towel and robe bar there, you could help yourself to lime-y iced water. Their willing attendants would have noticed that puke. Noticed it and cleaned it up. That’s what you get with double key cards…..