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What Sets You Free
Episode 27
Thursday, November 6, 2025 • Duration 09:35
The 2nd of May 2025.
Yesterday, of course, was the 1st of May, the day when people celebrate the start of spring.
Or at least they used to until most of them moved into town and cities and forget the countryside.
In Oxford, of course, they do it in a particularly old-fashioned and bafflingly erudite way. They sing Latin hymns and dance fifteenth century dance numbers beneath Magdalen Tower, built in the year Henry VIII came to the throne.
Although the king was to mature into the terrifying opposite of a spring chicken, the festival to celebrate this part of the calendar continued through all his troubled marriages, and the centuries of war, wealth, regret and change that were to follow.
Yesterday was no different. Watched by hundreds of townsfolk, the festival was carried out, the tower bells rung and the students flung themselves drunkenly into the freezing river. Spring was welcomed in.
Writing about this kind of May in June, Philip Larkin said:
The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread,
Their greenness is a kind of grief.
Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.
Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.
But by the first of May of course, spring has long since sprung - and things are already afresh - so it really ought to be summer that is welcomed in.
Maybe it's a hinge thing, a bit of both.
But whatever it really it, it is a matter of great and monstrous marvel that a festival about growth, freedom and life should have been highjacked by the arms industry, generals, and war mongering political leaders as the best time to show off their arms – their tanks, rockets and other expensive military equipment.
An optimist might say this is getting a bit better.
In the old days, not so long since passed, the star of the international stage was the Kremlin. It was noted for its interminable drive-pasts of tanks and guns and fly-pasts of military jets.
Most countries have a moment for similar shows of force – though none so cold blooded.
Here in Sri Lanka Independence Day – the 4th of February – is the day designated for its show of force.
Special wooden stalls are built facing the sea all down Galle Face Green with white clothed chairs set out for the dignitaries.
And then under shade with the hot sun all around them, they all sit down, and watch Sri Lanka's military walk past.
Flags are hosted - here and at Sri Lankan embassies abroad, priests of all sorts murmur their blessings, and the navy offer a 21-gun salute.
They are part of a quite formidable military, over 150,000 personnel – half what it was the height of civil war and reducing still. And a third larger than the British Amry – or just 10% of the size of the Indian army.
Not that Sri Lanka has any external enemies bent on invading its shores.
It takes a while for politicians to learn how to wind down over extended armies, so they don't become the people in charge like they did in Turkey, or like they still are in Egypt. But compared to most of its near neighbours – in the Maldives, Pakistan and Bangladesh, the army here in Sri Lanka plays a remarkably back seat role in politics and has avoided making any significant direct interventions to influence or redirect elections.
But nowadays May has to share its moment of symbolism with all sorts of other things. The month is much borrowed by counties and organisations to commemorate martyrs, medical cures, national heroes, flowers, truculent dictators, pizzas – even military spouses, smiles and the statehood of Minnesota.
But really, and most of all though May is the moment to forsake madness and put aside its main promoter - the bleak winter, darkness, circumscribed dreams, cold and thick pyjamas.
Nothing that was too hard, too impossible too ungraspable is any longer out of reach. With spring under your belt, you can go about your life with some degree of optimistic serenity, certain that for some months to come, the sun will shine, even if only metaphorically.
And with that simple, critical readjustment, you feel free. Perhaps the most telling of all May day celebrations was that one back on 4th May 1961 when Bayard Rustin led the first freedom ride to challenge the racist segregation in practice on the buses of the American South.
I hang on to this thought of freedom, even though such memories of winter austerity are rather wasted here in tropical Sri Lanka where the weather is either dry or wet, hot or warm.
May on this island is traditionally wet, and on the cool side of warmer. Every tree and spice bush, rambling jungle creeper and fallen seed puts aside the dozy dry drought and gets growing again.
You can smell it as much as see it. Having only just woken, I sit here looking at my valley from my sometimes -accustomed seat, and the air smells green; the land below me, once patchy brown is now rampantly crawling with plants that defy regulation.
My dogs are scattered around me coming in and out as I watch the parakeets and blue kingfishers flitting between tufty arecanut and colossal jack trees – and the almost countless variety of other trees on the mountains and hills beyond.
And I feel grateful to my army of small supporting gods that help me. Calm. Sane even. Ready to grow in my trifling excited way; and planning - today anyway - a day of finessing my HTML coding skills; my database construction techniques, and all the other solutions and squiggles I have dreamed up overnight to refine and remake a raft of websites, eBooks, podcasts, and content management systems.
It is ever still a wonder to me that despite being in so remote a place, everything that I might ever need – for design for digital, for writing, recording, distributing: it is all as easily available here in the middle of the jungle as it would ever be at my flat in Notting Hill, with central London buzzing all around.
Grateful too for also being the lucky recipient of a structure that allows me to enjoy and occupy my space in so unimpeded a way. Routine, far from being a constraint, is also a liberator, giving you the time and structure you need to do all the other things you want to.
Here I can just get on with it. There is no A4 sized officer from HR waving a monstrous 360 Degree, Myers-Briggs or Leadership blind spot assessment form at me, determined to nail my strengths and weakness to the corporate mask.
From Zoom to Slack, Working Genius to Jung Type Indicators, I am free of the ropes that tie the tent; that makes sure it doesn't get flappy in the breeze and float away.
Today I can hatch ...
The Art of Hermiting
Episode 16
Friday, May 9, 2025 • Duration 11:00
“It's love,” my music teacher assured us, “that makes the world go round.” He was trying to enforce some degree of harmony in the class at the time, burdened by having to learn yet another Mikado song. He might have cheered us all up had he shared W. S. Gilbert’s other great insight: “Man is nature's sole mistake”.
But this he failed to do and so, aged 12, I was left wondering just how on earth the world would motor itself forward, and go round and round, given the unhelpful existence of such hermits as myself. Of course, hermits often love, but given their predictably sequestered impact, the effect is like being licked by a gerbil. Not enough to really help the world go round and round. And round.
Quite how I got away with it, being brought up in a country then so explosively fecund that the Prime Minister’s younger son set about furtively and forcibly sterilizing any male within sight, was itself a miracle. Of course, he failed. Utterly. In the ten years from my arriving in India and then leaving it, the population jumped 100 million. And not just there. Everywhere. More and more people, making the world go round, with love.
The battalions of shrinks who spent so much effect making me into the balanced, burnished, and pleasing figure that I am today, never really explained what happened when or why to make me so. But hermiting, to coin verb, is a very pleasing occupation. And I am certainly getting better at it.
It was a challenge to do well in India, at boarding school, university or in any of the vortex-inducing publishing houses that greedily besotted me during an early career enthusiasm. But here, in the jungles of central Sri Lanka, it works much better.
The path of a hermit is rarely straightforward, especially if you are the sort that prefers looking upon caves, lighthouses, and abandoned windswept islands, rather than living in them. Why, after all, should hermitting be shorn of books, champagne, a good chef, or opera? Not everyone is St Paul, content with dates and bread, or likes dining off leather shoes, like the Siberian hermit Agafia Lykova.
Clearly there are degrees in hermiting, as in any condition or occupation - though my friends still chuckle and snigger at my career choice to run a hotel. That, they claim, is merely a perverse attempt to have ones cake and eat it. For, of course, you can’t hermit 24/7 in a hotel. In a hotel hermitting is intermittent. Like the building of Rome, it cannot be achieved in a full day. There are guests to greet, help, welcome and part with. Suppliers of everything from diesel to devilled cashews to meet. An unending parade of plumbers, electricians, garbage collectors, Wi-Fi repairers, gar deliverers dancing up the estate road in duets with government agents, tuk tuks, lost policemen, cinnamon peelers, monkeys and falling mangos.
A Little Bit of Expert
Episode 15
Friday, May 2, 2025 • Duration 13:53
A Little Bit of Expert, 14th February 2024
There is the BBC of course. CNN. Reuters. The New York Times. All News, if you will.
And then there is real news.
Recently, I have taken to walking the dogs up Singing Civet Hill, down the Coconut Gove, through the jungle path and out onto the newly planted Chocolate Walk that links back to the Spice Garden and the estate entrance.
As subjects go, dog walking routes are way up there - with global warming, or the Oscars, choices of totemic influence, able to steer the whole day this way or that. And where the day goes, the week, the year, the millennia follows.
Bertie is still gated so cries in the office or has a private garden-only walk with Ranjan. I take the other four into great, occasionally tamed, wilderness. There are wild boar prints to smell, the track of a mouse deer, porcupine a plenty, wild dogs, and of course, monkeys. For Archie, Bianca, Coco and Nestor, the stroll is akin to entering naked into a cream cake shop and letting rip.
A golden sun filters through jungle trees. Dry leaves shift underfoot. A vast blue sky implies itself from above. Apart from the excited sniffs and scratches of the dogs in their virtual cream cake shop, it is silent. Meditation silent. Soul silent. The sort of silence impossible to image within a yard of asphalt.
Even so, there are traces of human activities. In this case, young Mr Goonetilleke’s attempt to keep wild animals off his plants.
Thin strips of steel wire had been stretched on boundaries and anchored to electrical forces so strong as to give me a nasty jolt when I walked in to one. It certainly deterred me. But not the animals, who hopped across, or simply waited for a coconut leaf to fall on the wire and short it.
Occasionally Mr Goonetilleke attempted to revise his technical masterpiece, but in the end, he refocused his ubiquitous expertise into solving other problems, leaving him, and us, a little wiser than before about the uses of electricity.
Experts, like love bombs, are everywhere on this island. It is one of its principal human features; one of Sri Lanka’s many little bits of lovely. Not for these shores, the remote and gifted expert, given to Deus ex Machina pronouncements, rare as Burmese rubies, on what should be done in this instance, or that case.
My Missing Sapphire Tiara
Episode 14
Wednesday, February 21, 2024 • Duration 11:53
My Missing Sapphire Tiara, Friday, 10th December
It was Mr Wijeratne from the Water Board who brought the missing tiara to mind when he called on us this morning, his beaming presence foretelling progress in our fixed line water connection.
He is a generous, positive fellow, little given to jewellery – except for this fingers. These more than make up for any deficit. They carry a rich selection of rings, the most impressive the size of a small calculator, its flat square surface a golden field on which are displayed, in neat rows, nine precious and semi-precious stones.
As he waved his arms about, explaining what pipe would go where and how our deep well water provision would now be enriched by his fixed line water, the sun glinted on his fingers, and the trickle of gloom that I had started to feel at my total lack of commitment to personal jewellery, become a flood.
Some people are born with voices that will carry them deep into the world of opera, or a figure on which rags or rich silk outfits can be placed with equal grace. Others are born with no instinct for jewels.
I have just sufficient levels of self-awareness to know that toe or finger rings, and necklaces do little for my truculent beauty. But I also know, albeit from school, that tiaras can improve me.
Whether it was a tiara or a small gold crown much garnished with glass rubies, I cannot now remember. But it did the trick.
My blonde hair appeared more golden, my complexion a more prosperous pink, my head longer - as if the brain beneath my temples had given an atypical opportunity to just smile, and be blessed, and take time off from thinking. Sadly the tiara disappeared once the play we were performing came to an end.
I sensed later that earrings would have also done well on me; sapphire or gold nuggets, giving my overlooked lobes something special to hug. This emotional deficit does not stop me appreciating jewellery on others, through here in the jungle, Mr Wijeratne excepted, it is a rare sight. But when it does appear, it makes the sort of glorious waves that Moses must have done as he trekked down from the mountain waving his tablets.
Chinta
Episode 13
Wednesday, February 21, 2024 • Duration 08:28
Chinta, 13th of November, 2023
Today is the saddest of days, for Chinta has died.
The inexorable world will not stop its spin around the sun, nor Sri Lanka pause to knows this. Even in our little town of Galagedera the news will affect just a few. But here on the estate, we all stop, deeply shocked, barely knowing how to react, or what to do next.
Chinta had been away from work for a day, complaining of being a little tired and dizzy, a state that was too easily put down to the occasional colds that come at this monsoon time of the year. It little warned us that this was a far more significant symptom.
But whatever the cause of her death, it is her life that I – and everyone else here – stops to really give thanks for. As ever, I am at a loss to know exactly who to thank for it, but whoever it was who put her together – thank you. Her life so effortlessly and so gladly enriched mine, and all of us here at The Flame Tree Estate & Hotel.
Barely could Chinta look at someone else without smiling, the hint of a giggle almost always present on her lips. It started my day, waking up, collecting the dogs for a walk, and coming across her, already at her tasks of getting the hotel ready for the day. To be that positive and with such grace every day takes a very special talent for - and love of - life.
She had worked here for years, following in her mother’s, Anulawathi’s, footsteps. Anulawathi was one of the people we sort of inherited when we arrived, the rubber tapper of the estate trees, daily emptying the white latex from their coconut shells into a bucket that would be taken to the ancient 1940s rubber rollers (imported from Wolverhampton, and still running strong today) to be processed.
At first Chinta worked on the estate, helping tame the jungle into more pliable plantations for pepper and spices. When we opened the hotel, she moved across as a housekeeper, keeping the rooms and public spaces clean and orderly. This task is always herculean - even when the hotel is closed, so great is the presage of nature in the jungle, the leaves, insects, pollen, and occasional over curious wild squirrels, birds monkeys. To leave things for just 24 hours is to court the censure of all right minded Little Miss Tidys.
Politics & The Art of Family
Episode 12
Wednesday, October 18, 2023 • Duration 09:47
Politics – and the art of family. Monday, 25th September 2023.
“Spaghetti,” barked a planter friend, describing Sri Lankan politics. “Noodles. A ball of coir, all entangled. A roll of barbed wire. “ He was on roll himself here.
“Pepper vine, “ he finally ventured: “all entangled but makes you sneeze too.”
Politics was front of mind today. The country was having a major sneezing fit. Yesterday, London’s Channel 4 Dispatches broadcast a programme that alleged links between Muslim extremists and public figures close to two previous presidents. It also outlined an alleged plot to make a past presidential electoral victory a little more of a certain bet for one of them.
The consequent debate, and many calls to action begs the question: how do you understand island politics? Was there, I wondered, a simple exemplar, a symbol that, once grasped, unlocked the complexity of power to reval its real nature. For although I can see the obvious allergic associations in the noodles or spaghetti, neither quite captured the technicolour intricacy of Sri Lanka politics.
The inevitable post Perehera rains have descended with loving vengeance and the entire estate is vibrating softly with the sound of persistent warm dewy raindrops falling from like manna from heaven. It is comfort food season; spaghetti all the more inviting.
But dodging the downpour as I ran into my office, a much more satisfying symbol suddenly filled my eyes - albeit so obscure as to defy every reasonable guess.
Yes.
An embroidered tapestry from Vietnam. That is what I saw. It hangs at the very back of my office, ten feet long and four feet wide.
It is one of three I bought back in 2006 in Saigon, and dates back just 60 or 70 years before this.
It is made piecemeal style – (and with an unintended ironic nod to the once great enemy) like those famous patchwork quilts beloved of America’s early colonial settlers. Famously, the women of whole villages would sit together to sew the sort of bedcovers now beloved of Sotheby’s, Christies, and the American Museum of Folk Art. But is it art?
A Walk with Henning Mankell
Episode 11
Monday, August 28, 2023 • Duration 08:55
Monday, 28 August 2023
Damnit. I mean honestly. Just damnit.
This is the second time in as many weeks. One more such episode and you can call me obsessed; or, at best, dull. Either way, I am due a real wigging.
Pining for the fjords. Playing the piper. Deep sixth. Toes up. Terminated.
Death is like one of those mildly irritating guests present at most parties, eager to pass on to you the plot for his unpublished novel; his holiday plans and a recent dream involving (of course) his mother and Saxon candlesticks.
It is – death, that is - a right old drama queen. It flickers into the little grey cells implying a sudden – or reasonably abrupt – entrance, and precipitating a rapid and often dramatic finale.
Or does it?
Would that I could be so lucky as to embrace it with so certain a thespian urge.
Most people get instead the mortal equivalent of a cracker from Poundland: a slow humiliating loss of control and independence; revolving circles that spin ever closer to the drab cabbage-coloured corridors of a caring institution. Kind people doing jobs I could never manage. Alarms. The doctor on call like a sparrow manacled to the bird feeder.
We do not discuss it. We do not think it. We really don’t much want it. We certainly don’t get it.
Believers have, of course, an inside track, knowing that, so long as they have been reasonably good and can defend their moral choices, Rumpole-like, they will be ok on The Other Side.
I firmly expect, though no religious believer myself, to be there with them on The Other Side, chortling ever so slightly as we observe together the utter disorder of Nirvana. This will make them a little bit cross, or at least I hope it will: my underserving agnostic presence coming together with the administrative chaos of afterlife processing, a tiresome twinning no good person deserves.
But I say to them, as I say to the monkeys in the mango tree, immortality is like waiting for the bus. It is something you have to trust in, come what may. It is not like HSBC or Lloyds. You cannot bank with it in advance by joining a religion or doing or not doing certain things.
The Mathematics of Mortality
Episode 10
Sunday, August 20, 2023 • Duration 06:42
20th August, 2023.
Everyone has their thinking space: the bath, the shower, the treadmill after work. Voltaire had his bed, Dylan Thomas his shed – and I a narrow track of road weaving through jungle hills and valleys. Flame trees and palms line the edges, and beyond stetch plantations of timber, pepper, rubber - and space.
A thinking space. And a very agreeable one, as I give four of the five dogs their early morning walk. The only distractions are monkeys, which have the schnauzers pulling on leads like charioteer horses at the Circus Maximus.
It was a counting day this morning as I checked the leafy path to see how many more showy, and indulgent trees I could still shoehorn into the vista.
And as two plus two inevitably takes you to four, counting led me rapidly to the crumbling mathematics of mortality. It has been a challenging time. Two close relatives and three friends dead in quick succession. “It makes you wonder,” said Ann Patchett presciently, “all the brilliant things we might have done with our lives if only we suspected we knew how.” Or, she might have added, if we had made time.
My private calculations shows a fifth of my life devoted to childhood, education, entertainment, and the odd dash of character-building psychosis thrown in (therapists might argue that this is too modest a fraction). Thereafter two fifths devoted to toil and struggle, mortgages, money, doer-uppers, friends and family, travel, endless travel, shopping (I’m ashamed to say), and yet more work, and work.
The Bible gives seventy years as the cut off, but concedes eighty “by reason of strength.” So assuming I qualify, that gives me the last two fifth for – what?
Of course – today - for many 80 is just a beginning. Many of my incipient octogenaric friends wear their decades like a feather boa, flicking this way and that: a game of tennis here, a city break there; magnums and yoga all the way. But for others, it’s the start of the Great Decline. When you reap the benefits (or not) of having looked after yourself a bit better in the previous 20 years or so.
And, as my sorrowful tally of deaths suggest, these mathematics are arbitrary. Fit, healthy and ambitious one day. Dead the next. No warning. That’s it. Done and dusted. Stuff left undone – too bad. You are due somewhere else, and only the luckless wait in the waiting room.
Space, the Perhera - and Danby
Episode 9
Sunday, August 20, 2023 • Duration 08:57
17th August, 2023.
“Thanks for the warning,” came the text from Danby this morning. The message displayed his characteristic linguistic athleticism: lean, economic, pertinent, fully fortified against any misunderstandings, whatsoever. An expatriate, living in a house of books perched above a golden beach, and surrounded by battlements of cinnamon, Danby’s honed lifestyle ought be on school syllabuses. If he is not surfing, or beach combing, he is searching out lost architectural glories in Europe; ambient tea estates, or hot Colombo cafes.
I had sent him the dates of the Kandy Perehera, the country’s supreme festival. Every night, for over a week, Lord Buddha’s tooth relic is removed from his eponymous temple and paraded around Kandy’s shabby-chic streets. The relic sits atop Sri Lanka’s most senior elephant, swathed in robes of gold brocade; and followed enthusiastically by thousands of serious priests, ecstatic dancers, fire eaters, acrobats, and junior elephants.
The festival occurs in July. Or sometimes August. The date is kept flirtatiously vague until the last moment, as monks (and possibly weather forecasters and astrologers) ponder the heavens to determine auspiciousness. I say weather forecasters because you can set your gardening clock by the dates of the Perehera. The blue monsoon rains only fall the day after the event ends. The forecasting is unerringly accurate.
Whether Danby’s message implied a fear of traffic jams, an aversion to excessive religiosity or a dislike of crowds was something he left teasingly open to speculation.
Traffic jams was an unlikely casus belli. Merely thinking car here is to invite traffic. Nor could it be distaste for excessive religiosity. Sri Lanka is nothing if not famously religious-minded. Living here happily presupposes an elastic tolerance - if not devotion- for the divine, with the option of some kind of temple, kovil, mosque or church for every 1,000 souls. No. It had to be enochlophobia that was troubling Danby.
The Kerfuffle in the Kitchen
Episode 8
Sunday, June 18, 2023 • Duration 07:23
The kerfuffle in the kitchen
The kerfuffle in the kitchen has calmed down since I (at last) remembered the old adage about too many cooks spoiling the broth. And acted upon it.
Sudeth and Kasun, our (pre) existing chefs, have stepped effortlessly into the gap created by the departure of a big enchilada and the pot is set again to simmer smoothly. Two Commis chefs have joined the team and the kitchen whirls once more with contented, timely creatively – rather than the sultry Gordon Ramsay B Side that is the alternative chorus of any kitchen.
Both Sudeth and Kasun are pleasingly talented and able; well organized, properly mindful of standards, hardworking and curious to prod the boundaries of our Menu Mantras.
Our kitchen is (I know I may be unjustly accused of bias here), the best within at least a 65 mile range, if not more. It’s certainly way better than anything in Kandy, Negombo, Matale, Gampaha, Kurunegala, Hatton, Dambulla, or most of the grand restaurants and hotels in Colombo. That’s more than conscionably good for a kitchen in the jungles of central Sri Lanka where finding pomegranate molasses can take the better part of a week.
Having eaten my way through more Michelin stared restaurant menus than any generous god could countenance, I‘ve rediscovered the blindingly obvious: you can’t beat simplicity, authenticity, routine. Do a few things really well; keep to what you can buy that is really fresh and local; and take to heart that food is a tour (or at worst, an excursion) through a country, a district, a culture. That’s it. That’s our menu Mantra. Entirely. No more. And definitely no less.
This means leaving other kitchens in other lands to fashion dry ice trompe l'oeil salads, pompadour cuts of preternaturally expensive meats from distant Japanese prefectures, mercurial seascapes daubed with caviar and served on mirrors dusted with blushing Anatolian salts; and all the other melodramatic dishes prepared for the jaded urban palates of this starving earth.
No.
No., No. No.
Food may be fuel; but it sure isn’t entertainment, brief and flimsy as anything you might catch flickering across the Netflicks screens before it is gone forever. Not unless you’ve run out of other things to do in a long and reckless life; and have taken to climbing the Munros or dropping in on the College of Hearlds to research your matriarchal family line. Food is culture; learning; life.
But all of this misses that one essential point: hotels nurture hermiting. Ravi Shankar, Coco Chanel, Clinty Eastwood all lived in hotels. And look at what they achieved. “When you get into a hotel room,” noted Diane von Furstenberg, “you lock the door, and you know there is a secrecy, there is a luxury, there is fantasy. There is comfort. There is reassurance.”
Amongst well-informed hermits, arguments rage gently over what type of hotel offers the best hermiting. And at first glance you would seemed utterly spoiled for choice here in Sri Lanka. It lists over 10,000 places as providing accommodation. However, closer inspection shows that just a quarter of these places are classified as hotels And of those just 8% (200) are rated as 5-star.
For a small island still greatly overlooked by international visitors who are more accustomed to visit Thailand, the Maldives or India, this may seem more than sufficient – but most of these 200 hotels are small private operations - authentically boutique in a world that has heartlessly commoditized the word.
Thankfully, the hotel chains that dominate the rest of the world – Taj, Sheraton, Marriot, Starwood, Meridian, etc. – have yet to put in much of an appearance here. Even so, as tourism roves forward on its somewhat uneven upward trajectory, local chains – such as Jetwing, Cinnamon, Resplendent, Tangerine, Teardrop, Taru and Uga - are developing a growing reputation for exceptional hospitality.
My Colombo hermitage of choice is the Colombo Court Hotel & Spa, a much overlooked habitat of calm sitting just off the traffic jam that is Duplication Road. Alternatively, Tintagel offers unquestionable peace, a far cry from its 1956 tabloid moment when the radical Prime Minster S. W. R. D. Bandaranaike, seated on its veranda, was shot dead by a Buddhist priest whose business affairs had gone awry - the first leader of the modern state to be murdered – but not the last.
For those who prefer Colombo hermitting in massive edifices, there is Cinnamon Grand; the Hilton, one of the first globally branded hotels to wash up on Colombo’s then more parochial shores in 1987; or the Shangri-La, an odd offshoot of China’s Belt-and-Braces mission. Two others are worth hermitting in just for their restaurants: YUMI at the Taj Samudra Or Yue Chuan at The Kingsbury. Others offer a dash of colonial theatre: wedding watching at the 1806 Mount Lavinia Hotel or the Crow Man at the Galle Face Hotel. This once modest Dutch Guesthouse flourished when the Suez Canal turned the tickle of eastward bound Europeans into a river bobbing with the likes of Noel Coward, Che Guevara, Yuri Gagarin, or Nixon. But the ultimate prize for Colombo hotel hermits is Number 11, a rambling architectural museum with just two rooms to let. Here in Geoffray Bawa’s private town house, you have the entire gorgeous assemblage of curios and masterpieces to yourself once the day trippers have gone.
But it is to the south that most hotels lie, near or on the beaches where hermitting can be combined with imaging you are washed up on a desert island, albeit one that serves cocktails. Galle, the beguiling navel of the south, offers Fort Printer’s, the Galle Fort Hotel, Fort Bazaar, or the Amangalla, their verandas places from which to watch the busy world worry past. And just outside the town is The Sun House, built by a Scottish spice merchant in the 1860s, Pedlar's Manor, with its heartfelt collection of vintage cars; or The Fortress, overlooking stilt fishermen,
Go on eat or west from Galle and your fall into the sort of luxury preferred by shy celebrities, or discarded Western prime ministers: the Amanwella, in Tangalle; Malabar Hill, or Cape Weligama in Weligama; Yala’s Wild Coast Tented Lodge, a cluster of seed pod ocean villa-etts; or Kahanda Kanda, an indulgence of cloistered English country style villas that have happily woken up in a more tropical wonderland than Hampshire, Harrogate, or Hartlepool.
For most hotels, the east remains frontier country – but even there you can hermit happily at The Spice Trail, or Jetwing Surf in Arugam Bay. The tea country gives you Living Heritage in God’s Forest; 98 Acres, Ceylon Tea Trails; The Grand or St Andrew’s, two hotels that hark back to the days when Nuwara Eliya was the Little England to whose cool climate homesick planters could cleve. For virtuous hermits seeking a triptych (solitude, scenery, and a good cuppa), there is Amba, a 130 acre organic farm, the centre of the growing artisanal tea movement on the island and a true social enterprise.
Head north and you hit upon two front runners of local chains, any of whose hotels are lovely: Jetwing Mahesa Bhawan in Jaffna and Uga Ulagalla, Anuradhapura. But it is Geoffray Bawa’s Kandalama Hotel that wins ...
No. In Sri Lanka, the expert is there right next to you, just like Mr Goonetilleke, ready to intervene. On the train, in the street, at the doctor’s waiting room, his expertise in whatever the matter in hand, worn since birth, and so much a part of his physiology that you might as well try to sever an arm or ear, as to sever this part too.
The journey to this remarkable state of national know-how has been long and meandering, journeying past centuries of want, and decades of central bureaucratic incompetence, enlivened with parrots like flashes of glittering arrogance. From banking, electricity, and tea, to fish, drugs, cement, and chickens, state owned industries remain wedded to The Frank Sinatra Dictum:– “I've lived a life that's full / I've travelled each and every highway / And more, much more / I did it, I did it my way.”
Whisper if you will that they are largely technically insolvent or as dated as dinosaur in a poodle parlour – it is to no avail. Their expert song sounds on. And on. The elites rule. Their way, or no way.
Sometimes – not often – it all breaks down. The Civil War, JVP Uprisings, Hartal, Aragalaya. People get fed up with experts. And all hell breaks loose.
But Sri Lankan society is nothing if not civil, and in between these moments of madness a kind of gorgeous mannered existence runs along paddy tracks from village to village. The Emperor has no clothes? Of course he hasn’t. He’s so naked you can count the mosquito bites on his buttocks. But such a lovely hat. And the scarf he is imaging he is wearing. That too is beautiful, offsetting the make-believe sarong, just so.
As the experts busy themselves choosing their special clothes for the day and getting ready to advise those few people they have time to see, the rest of society just get on with it. Everyone is an expert in almost everything. They have to be, or life would simply stop in its tracks like a perfumer with a pegged nose. Expertise is not something you can outsource. To make the right choice you have to know so much as to leave you cleaving to the wings of a rocket as it does it 360 orbit of any problem or issue.
“Generator blown,” observed Kasum, the chef. “I’ll fix it.” I begged him not to. But he did it anyway. And it sort of worked.
Its mildly terrifying, marginally irritating and wholly discombobulating when suddenly you need to be the expert. And nowhere is this more true than in matters of health.
Soft westerner as I am, I’m accustomed to seeing a general practitioner for anything from a head bump to a throat sniffle. With celestial expertise, the GP will point me the right way – this specialist or that; this test or that; this hospital or that. But not here. Not in the jungle country of Galagedera. Or even on the temple lined roads of Kandy. Nor even on the boulevards of Colombo.
No. If you’re sick, you must work out why.
Nose problem? ENT perhaps? Unless is it from a fever. Or an intolerance of sapu pollen. Stiff leg? Muscle probably. Or it is bone? Or perhaps it’s the blood. God knows. But you too also need to know – and with sufficient certainty to enter confidently into the fun fair that is the health system (s).
Across the island four health sectors entertain their customers like octopi at an orgy. There is the traditional state medicine sector, all hospitals, qualifications, doctors, nurses, ministries, pill, and potion factories. And the private traditional medical sector, dominated by who so ever occupies the space.
Set against both is the western medical state sector – no less populated by its own hospitals, practices, qualifications, experts, and medicines. Facing this is the private sector - a handful of plush hospitals, expert doctors, reception desks with beautiful flowers dying in large vases, waiting rooms of Nordic furniture rearranged ever so slightly cocktail style.
For anyone to get anywhere in the western medical sector you need to play in both sectors. Despite the brain drain, COVID and the Aragalaya, the island has a notable universal free health care system but there are long waiting lists for specialized procedures. Private care is a necessity most people try to budget for.
Unlike my hounds, my own ability to sniff, smell and interact with full olfactory fervour, had over the months, diminished to a barely useable half a nostril.
Like Simon of Cyrene I carried my little adenoidal cross until oxygen deprivation set in. Anything to avoid the experts. But eventually, the unflusterable Machan drove me to Asiri Hospital, a place of such reassuring modernity as to make you welcome illness.
Yet I make it sound simple. To get even this far I had first had to enter into the rum liturgy of DOC990, an online doctor booking service. To book the right doctor you must first self-diagnose, just like an expert. ENT? Why not. But of the scores of ENT doctors – the same names appearing on multiple hospital site appointment boards - which was the best? Google is coy on the matter. So, I picked the one with the most scholarly articles to his name.
The learned doctor was late. One hour passed. Two hours trembled on the edge. This is the thing about experts. To be late is to expert. To be very late is to be a doyen of professional authority. For each 30 minutes of his appointment diary, he had prebooked in 4 patients. And there we sat, pathetically forbearing, eager for news of the great man.
But o...
Not long ago five ladies from St Petersburg came to stay. They dressed in a rich selection of gemstones for dinner, including two hair ornaments that may or may not have been tiaras; or State Crowns. Often pearls, rings, and earrings catch the gentle candlelight over dinner, but rarely do they offer the sort of overwhelming light force that you might encounter at a coronation, in Hi! Magazine, the Tatler Diary, or on meeting Luke Skywalker’s Cloud City lightsaber
Which is a shame, especially here, for Sri Lanka is practically the home of gemstones. If biblical rumours of King Solomon’s wooing of the Queen of Sheba with gifts of priceless Sri Lankan gems, are to be believed, the country’s gem mines can be back dated to 900 BCE. "The king of Ceylon,” wrote Marco Polo in the 13th century, has “the grandest ruby that was ever seen, a span in length, the thickness of a man's arm; brilliant beyond description, and without a single flaw. Its worth cannot be estimated in money”.
Thanks to the extreme old age of its rocks, Sri Lanka’s gems are so numerous as to just wash out onto flood plains, and into rivers and streams. Twenty five percent of its land is gem-bearing, especially around Ratnapura and Elahera. From here come the 75 semi or precious gems that call this island home: rubies, sapphires, spinels, amethysts, sapphires, garnets, rose quartz, aquamarines, tourmalines, agates, cymophanes, topazes, citrines, alexandrites, zircons, and moonstones.
And it was from Ratnapura over the past several years that sapphires the size of supermarket baskets have been found. So great is the affinity between Sri Lanka and its sapphires that the nation might legitimately put in for a name change to be better called Sri Sapphire. They account for 85% of the precious stones mined here – but the colour variant that gets the most acclaim is the Ceylon Blue Sapphire, the blue of cornflowers, clear skies, and inestimable, sophisticated material contentment. Selling for $5,000 - 8,000 per carat, they are as much statements of investment as they are items of adornment: “A kiss on the hand may feel very, very good,” noted Anita Loos, “but a diamond and sapphire bracelet lasts forever”.
And so they do. Since Ptolemy noted their glittering existence here, they are much favoured for crowns, thrones, diadems, as well as jewellery for First Nights, hotel dinners and cocktail parties. Sri Lanka’s sapphires have given museums and auction houses jewels of such arresting quality as to gain themselves names and identities in the own right
Diana, Princess of Wales’s engagement ring, a mere 12-carats of Sri Lankan sapphire, rocketed into the homes of anyone with a television set when the then Prince of Wales declared his love (“whatever that is”) for her in 1981. But the lead Windsor in House of Windsor can easily eclipse this. The Suart Sapphire, said to be Sri Lankan, sits atop the very crown still worn by the British monarch, and is probably the world’s most visible sapphire.
Excepting, that is The Heart of the Ocean, In a perfect example of nature obediently following Hollywood, the so-called Heart of the Ocean jewel in the film “Titanic,” was posthumously created following the film’s success as a 170-carat Ceylon blue sapphire. The sapphire replaced the inexpensive blue quartz flung by Kate Winslet into the icy ocean. It was worn in 1998 by Celine Dion when she sang “My Heart Will Go On” at the Oscars and was auctioned for over $2 million at a charity ball though more affordable copies of the necklace can be bought on eBay.
For art lovers there is the Fitzwilliam’s Aphrodite Sapphire. For the religious minded, the 9th century Talisman of Charlemagne. Both Sri Lankan. Many have found their way into other museums, to be gazed at but never again worn, like the 423-carat Logan Sapphire, the 287-carat Star of Artaban, The Bismark Sapphire (the ultimate honeymoon gift), or the 182-carat Star of Bombay, worn by “America’s sweetheart,” Mary Pickford. All four now live in the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, D.C. Two other world -class island sapphires shine brightly in the American Museum of Natural History - the 563.35-carat almost flawless Star of India, and the 116.75-carat Midnight Star Sapphire.
Russians, slipping through the Kremlin’s Borovitsky Gate to the State Diamond Collection, can feast on the Empress Maria's Sapphire. Despite its massive size (260.37 carats), it is surrounded by such an orgy of other rare gems, insignia, and crown jewels that it is practically invisible.
But many of the best have simply vanished – on the auction block one moment, then lost to public delight the next. The Blue Belle Of Asia, sold in 2014 for $17.29 million is one never again sighted. So too the 600-carat Blue Giant Of The Orient, last spotted in Geneva in 2004.
The first of the really colossal sapphires only appeared as recently as 1998 when the 856-carat Pride of Sri Lanka was pulled from mines of Marapanna, a few kilometres from Rathnapura. In a year overshadowed by the violent excesses of the civil war, its discovery, along with the country’s cricket team’s victory in the test match against England, was one of the country’s few bright moments.
Barely a decade later, in 2015, came The Star of Adam. At 1,444-carats, it rather brutally eclipsed the Pride of Sri Lanka. And if this was not sufficient, it also displayed a distinct 6-rayed star, an effect known amongst jewellers as “asterism.” Th...
Chinta could manage the unexpected as well as the predicable, and with equal calm - whether it was feeding six tiny puppies every three hours with a teat, cooking her in-demand village dishes for staff lunches or helping keep at bay the occasional massive swarms of day flies that can suddenly arrive on the back of a jungle monsoon.
I sometimes play the game of “if X was an animal, what animal would they be?” And for Chinta it would have to be the loris.
There are a variety of lorises to choose from. There is the Northern Ceylon Slender Loris, discovered as recently as 1932 in the Gammaduwa region of the Knuckles Range, with its very distinctive facial stripe. Just five years later yet another sub species was discovered, this time on Horton Plains - the Ceylon Mountain Slender Loris, in 1937 and barely seen since. The sweetest sounding is the Highland Ceylon Slender Loris, whose Tamil name - kada papa – means "baby of the forest". Unlike its closest cousin the Loris Llydekkerianus Uva, its fur is redder in colour.
But for Chinta, the loris I have in mind is the beautiful Sri Lankan Red Slender Loris, slim, graceful, and modest as she ever was. This loris is also the country’s most celebrated loris species, not least because it is just one of 24 endemic mammal species on the island. It is a tiny, tree-living creature with heart-stoppingly adorable panda eyes. Like all lorises, it is a creature of the night, so unless you are a lucky insomniac you are unlikely to see them. Its custom with its offspring (one that I am sure Chinta differed from) is to coat them in allergenic saliva, a toxin that repels predators - though Chinta was ever proud and protective of her two sons.
Her commute was the sort of walk to work that most people can but dream about. Chinta lived in one of the tiny hamlets that abut the estate, and from her home, overlooking paddy and a small river at the northern edge of the land, she would walk along a tiny narrow jungle track, its faint route scoured only by the daily tread of her feet. She would have known every tree and bush, each creeper and family of monkeys that ran along her route. I am sure that they would have given her as much joy as I get along my daily walk, albeit one at the end of five taut and tangled miniature schnauzer leads.
I have never seen a loris on the estate but, at 1,000 feet, and given over to jungle and rich plantation, this is just the sort of place that lorises favour, sleeping in leaf covered tree holes by day and climbing through tree tops by night to gather the fruits, berries, leaves on which the feast.
Gratefully, we busy ourselves with the practical things, not least Angelo, the general manager, helping the family with the awesome and demanding requirements of a traditional funeral and alms giving. This typically lasts for a week, during which time friends, family, neighbours, colleagues, and anyone associated with them will drop by the house to pay their respects and enjoy a cup of tea, cake, and biscuits. With hindsight, it is remarkable (though at the time it seems merely normal) just how everyone who can help, does so, in small practical ways. Rarely does anyone ever die privately in Sri Lanka. The country, especially in its more traditional country villages like the ones around us, still enjoys an extraordinary degree of community. This can cut differently, but at a time like this, seems to cut in an agile and nourishing fashion.
Briefly, I pause the day to day, and all the practical considerations that have suddenly become relevant, just to write this. To say thank you to whichever Gods there are for the life of Chinta.
The more I looked at the tapestry, the more I wondered. Art or Craft? Politics in Sri Lanka, or merely a nice tapestry?
Oxford, that doyen of definitions, describes art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Whilst there is no debating which side of the divide a Goya painting might fall, a dinner plate is moot, though Picasso made such items. And a Qing Dynasty Porcelain plate recently sold for $84 million.
So was this tapestry art or craft?
At least 8 types of pre-made fabrics have been incorporated in this Vietnamese tapestry. Mostly rectangular, some squared. Some premade, all or mostly probably not made by the maker of this particular tapestry. So where is the art in it?
The shapes are coloured red, yellow, golden, orange, and shot through with abstracted designs in black, blue, green, pink, and white. Glimpses of extravagant flowers share space with intricate geometric patterns. It sounds as if it cannot do anything other than offend the eye – yet it does quite the opposite. It glows like a golden fresco in a dark cave, a coherent whole made out of utterly dissimilar elements.
And although it comes from Vietnam, it hails from a part of country that defies all borders: the Central Highlands. These mountain plateaus run from Vietnam into Loas and Cambodia. Their inhabitants – some 3 million – are ethnically different to the rest of Vietnam. Composed of 30 separate tribes - collectively called Montagnards – the language they speak have little in common with Vietnamese, still less with one another. And since records began in the 1st century BCE, they have largely resisted all attempts by any central government to dominate them.
The tapestry they made all those decades ago, and that I bought more recently was created to keep you warm, not to decorate a room. Yet the scraps of cloth that make it up have been assembled with apparent logical order. It is functional – and still displays both beauty and emotional power, as might any original abstract painting do. It is art concealed as craft.
And there is the node with island politics: the splice point, cross point, connection socket, point of engagement. For politics here is an art concealed – in history, and family.
The Oxford Dictionary is less helpful in defining politics than art. It describes politics as “the activities associated with the governance of a country or area, especially the debate between parties having power.” But in Sri Lanka politics is but family concealed by the loosest of all sarongs. Parties run a poor second.
Since Independence the country’s main parties have been more than family-friendly: the Senanayake–Kotelawalas; the Bandaranaikes; the Wijewardene-Jayewardenes; and more recently, the Premadasas and Rajapaksas. Amongst the high positions of government, the president, prime minister and cabinet of ministers, daughters have succeeded mothers, brothers handed on to bothers; cousins to cousins. There is nothing spaghetti like about it: it is all as clearly laid out as any piece of tapestry from the Central Highlands of Vietnam, the art of ancestry, honed by generations that frames both power and government .
The oldest party, the UNP was the home of the Senanayake–Kotelawala and the Jayewardenes, and is still led by a relative of both, the current president, Ranil Wickremesinghe. It splintered in 2020 to form the SJB around Sajith Premadasa, himself son of a previous president.
Its great rival, the SLFP was dominated by the Bandaranaikes until the Rajapaksas were elected to run it. When they themselves were defeated, the Rajapaksas left to remodel a smaller party, the SLPP into a born again SLFP. The 2022 Aragalaya protests that toppled the SLPP government and drove some 40 Rajapaksas family members out of office left many of the SLPP supporting the current UNP president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, along with sizable numbers of SJB and SLFP parliamentarians.
It is a fecund petrie-dish into which Channel 4 Dispatches have dropped their latest documentary, pursuing, to paraphrase the SLPP’s Namal Rajapaksa, a vendetta against his family – or igniting, according to leaders in other parties, the need for an international commission of investigation. The 2022 Aragalaya protests that toppled the Rajapaksa government also broke normal party politics. Political definitions have blurred. In family walauwas party leaders are cautiously positioning themselves for the 2024 presidential election, parties without leaders who can credibly win the election or leaders without parties who might.
I gaze at my glowing Montagnard tapestry art, its blocks of colour and design artfully united into a single holistic cloth painting, seeing these families - grand as any ancient aristocratic dynasty from the west - through party political sunglasses.
Like the Montagnards, they sit outside the everyday and break down into quite separate tribes too, each painting with a broad brush and considerable artistic licence. Whatever the lens, the real landscape looks very much the same as ever it did despite the filter. But the question each family behind every political party now faces is that posed by a much more questioning electorate: can they still see the big picture or not?
My tapestry may be art disguised as craft; and in its carefully placed blocks of apparently random fabric offer a helpful metaphor to understand island politics in terms of family units.
To imagine we even have one single whispered jot of a hint about what it all might mean is mesnomic; an own-goal heresy. How can we know the slightest thing about god? It’s not as if the clues – if that what we can call the universe – are especially obvious.
All we can do is trust – as if waiting for the London 328 bus which terminates in World’s End, or – for the more trusting, the Number 9, which will take you all the way to Olympia.
It’s Henning Mankell’s Wallander who has led me to this place. He is a gloomy soul. God, is he gloomy. His weather is gloomy. His father’s paintings are gloomy. His friends are gloomy. His rare holidays, his food , his car, his bank balance – everything gloomy as a railway station after midnight.
Mankell’s chief detective, Wallander, must be one of the most miserable literary inventions of all time. If he’s not drunk, late, or bereft, he’s in a diabetic coma. Rarely is he much concerned with villains. Stoney-sad, obsessed by a masticating mortality, a day spent in his company is like being trapped in a requiem mass.
Death, death, and death. It’s the wall paper, the meal on the table and the room itself.
It doesn’t have to be this way. One reads detective fiction to escape thoughts of mortality. The abiding presence of death and the incipient vulnerability the precedes it never much bothered all the other main crime writers. Just, it seems, Mankell
Agatha Christie is - as 2 billion readers will testify - a delightful comedian of manners, a Jane Austen who has finally been given a decent glass of whiskey. Death never troubles her. Ruth Rendell’s world is one of beautiful people with souls hammered out in hell. Death for most of them is like a checking in at The Ritz. PD James, who is, of course, really the best ( and I mean the very best) is all about and only really about things that are agreeable.
Agreeable. The word is worth a pause. Agreeable. Such a word is barely used today. But in P.D James’ books, where the topography is the central obsession; place precedes people, objects and even events. And they are either agreeable or not. Spooky Norfolk, Gothic Hampstead, Discreet Dorset. All very agreeable.
“And how is the death, sir”
Very agreeable thank you. So kind of you to ask”.
“Another sir?”
“Why not, it’s all so agreeable. Do you make it here?”
But we never ask for seconds do we? Of perhaps we do, up there in the afterlife, in the bit that we trust in, though have not the faintest clue about.
“Thank you so much for that most agreeable journey here. Might I do it again? It was such an interesting thing, most recommendable”.
The vet has been and checked out all 8 goats. All are in full working order. The schnauzers too, all 5 of them given their monthly blood check, stethoscope check, weight check. Happy hounds.
Four hundred and seventy two new specimen trees have been bought to fill out a bit of forest, They are due to be delivered tomorrow. A wall was repainted. A table made to feeds birds and squirrels bread scraps. A web site redesigned. Navigation improved. A podcast added. The post Vijayan monarchy of Sri Lanka researched a little. And that all just yesterday.
I’m doing every possible that is positive. As the authors of motivational books and programs have it: I am living my best life (though in using so appalling a phrase, I of course merit immediate extinction).
And, in a marvellous miracle of schadenfreude at its most delicious and thirst-quenching, despite all this, old Mankell does not simply just clobber me on the head,; he takes me, willing, fascinated, hungrily appalled, down into his foggy cave to enjoy his banquet of wild meats and thoughts to darken dawn.
But I am Cornish. I’m practical. I can wallow a bit in stuff. Be a caveman. Make sure I am whetted all over like a fashion student beelining the perfume counters of Harvey Nicks.
But ultimately I need to do something about it. Most of us do, even if we don’t admit it, or discuss it.
Each to his own, right? Become a climate warrior? Why not. Very agreeable.
Make a low maintenance garden? Lovely. And useful too – for later.
Exercise more; pick up a Winsor & Newton Foundation paintbrush, spend more time with family and friends?...
If it doesn’t really bear thinking about, not thinking about it is even more difficult.
Launching and running a jungle hotel in the Sri Lanka highlands keeps inertia at bay; though the read credit is down to Angleo and the amazing team here. They keep the porcelain plates spinning no matter how many times wild boar eat through the water pipes, or the country itself wobbles (Easter bombings, COVID, Aragalaya).
But as others declutter and kick back, chill out, and denest, take up golf, grandkids and climb the Monroes, here the opposite looms larger. Sri Lanka is reverting to normal, guests return to the hotel, and the prodigal work of taming wild plantations, planting arboretums, gardens, of building staff bedrooms, spas, cabañas and so on returns, gladdening the heart.
But it is not – quite - enough, not when you consider the mathematics of mortality.
So I thought to tell a story too – Scheherazade like (with its mortality motivator). Sri Lanka has an remarkable story to tell and a compelling one to research, and disseminate. Despite the Tourist Board’s best efforts, it remains something of a well-kept secret. Before COVID, 40 million tourists went to Thailand, 26 million to Malaysia and over 4 million to Burma. Ten million fetched up in India, but just a stone’s throw away, barely 20% of that number reach these shores – roughly the same figure as went to the Maldives.
Travellers see bits of Sri Lanka; and natives their part of the whole. Argument rage about what it really is; though it is, of course, everything that it is. Every last fragment.
And there are many. The country has rarely done things by the book. Contrary and creative, it created a tropical Versailles whilst other countries were still experimenting with wattle and daub. When the Cold War ended, its own war began. It has absorbed, synthesised, and repurposed everything that has come its way, welcome or not, into a singular Sri Lankanness.
It is an attempt to document some of this; to make its history, fauna, flora, culture, topography, art, literature, mood, and manor more accessible that sits behind www.theceylonpress.com, the online publishing website that will take up much of the remaining two fifths of my fair portion of living. I would hate to hauled out before it is at least reasonably complete. If I am lucky to go out feet first, I will be clutching a keyboard and half a dozen marked up research papers from JSTOR, my thinking space much enriched.
Even so, it is hard for enochlophobs to take against the Perehera crowds, per se. They are faultlessly well behaved, lining Kandy’s streets ten or twenty deep for up to 6 hours as the nightly procession rollicks past. Picnics are held, short eats and blessings flow like flood water. The whole fiery event is unexpectedly magnetic.
Before the civil war ended the Perehera was wholly patronised by locals, the tourists choosing Bali over a war zone. Today well healed travellers pay serious money to bag a comfortable seat outside the straightlaced Queen’s Hotel – pole position from which to watch the spectacle.
Even so, hundreds of thousands of extra people cramming themselves into a tiny city tangled around several mountains is a lot of extra humanity to deal with, however well behaved they are. As I picture them, I sense, looming behind these crowds still greater ones. It took 200,000 years for our world’s population to hit a billion but barely 200 years more to reach 8 billion. And now the pundits warn that in 30 years’ time there will be 25% more.
That’s a lot more people to fit into land that, as Twain observed, isn’t being made anymore. No wonder Danby is stressed. He’s also probably seen that mesmerising Edvard Munch-like painting: previous occupants of a single room. The room overflows with the ghostly forms of people in different costumes, sleeping eating, reading, making love – living.
Like Danby, my reaction is to retreat upcountry. Village country. Jungle country. Mrs Miniver-like, I gaze across the great green vastness of the jungle here, picturing some of those who saw this very view 500 – 5,000 - years ago, just a few of the 100 billion people estimated to have ever lived on planet earth.
And looking, my foreignness starts to disintegrate. I picture the first nation Vedda, pushed to these inland hills by boat loads of Iron Age migrants from the Indian subcontinent. The columns of medieval refugees fleeing Chola invasions and the destruction of the glittering city of Anuradhapura, climbing up from the dry Kurunegala plains into these bastion hills. The ranks of colonial armies wilting in serge twill up the Galagedera Gap forever failing to take Kandy, until, at last, the last kingdom fell, victim not to brigades, but bribes.
They are my friends, these few forgotten people. And walking the narrow mountain roads we have cut on the estate, it is hard to comprehend the seething stress, and excitement in the almost equally narrow streets of Kandy. Like Danby, I’m staying put.
Enochlophobia is, I reckon, something of an age thing. The older you get, the more enochlophobic you become. Its one of aging’s more agreeable symptoms – something you can bring up over dinner or drinks, unlike, say dribbling or a life threating medical condition. It’s something to bask in, and bask in it I do.
Unless, like Danby, you’re very self-disciplined, it is all just easy to be sidetracked: nights outs, once-only offers on Nordic furniture, spinning sessions at ambitious gyms; bagging the last table at Oxo; office jousting like a medieval knight. Life, in the absence of people or services, is finally about just what you alone should do.
Life on the estate is a textbook balance between solitude and activity; calm and commotion - some 6-12 hotel guests per day, eager for the rest and with a thoughtful story to tell; 20 staff, 5 miniature schnauzers and eight Marie-Antoinette goats. Priyanka comes and goes in his little tuk tuk fetching fruit and vegetables; the Palaeozoic village tractor collects rubbish weekly; the Ceylon Electricity Board stops by to fix power lines destroyed by monkeys. It’s just the right amount of hither-and-thither to keep you plugged into the world.
Friends warn me that I am severe danger of becoming a sort of hill version of Symeon the Stylite. But I aim to be a lot more successful that that. After all, poor old Symeon, sitting as a hermit atop his pillar, became so renowned that hordes of curious bystanders swarmed daily at his feet depriving him of the very solitude he sought. Like Danby, I will get on with my own quirky callings; and leave the festivals for next year, or perhaps the next.
What I revere about our estate food is that all our ingredients are really really local (though the curd most certainly comes from heaven). The most perfect vegetables and fruit are sensually abundant just a stone’s throw or so away; most of the usual – but still more of the unexpected. The spices we pick from our gardens: cinnamon, cloves, pandom leaves, pepper. cardamom, vanilla, curry leaves, turmeric, goraka, curry leaves, ginger, cumin, chilli, . The herbs we grow ourselves.
With meats, we are very picky. Good beef doesn’t happen on the island: it comes from thousands of miles away, tired, jet-lagged and an affront to any armchair environmentalist. Pork is challenging; locally sourced, easily disgraced. Lamb, like penguins, have yet to call this tropical island home.
But the chicken is excellent. And the fish, of course, better still. Sailfish swims off all the coasts, its flesh thick, steaky and white with none of the oily after taste of some sea creatures. And tuna – well, enough said. Tasty tuna can be seen off every beach doing backstroke, breaststroke, crawl, a gleaming Sri Lankan passport clasped between its teeth. Tuna is very very good.
And then of course there is rice.
Back west or down the sleek corridors of the G7 nations its mostly white. Intermittently wild,. Sometimes brown. Occasionally organic.
But here there is also Suwendel, Kuruluthuda Wee, Madathawalu, Sulai, Murungakayan, Pachaperumal, Sudu Heenati, Kaluheenati, Gonabaru, Kuru Hondarawala, Polon Wee, Guru Podi Wee, Kuru Ma Wee, Pulli Wee, Alagu Samba, Guru Wee, Pushpa Raga, Alagu Samba, Allei Perumal, Hapumal Wee, Mada El, Rasna Vaalu, Askarayal, Hata Da Wee, Rata Thawalu, Hathi El, Madei Karuppan, Rath El, Heen Deveradhari, Maha Maa Wee, Bala Goda Wee, Manikkam, Masuran, Bala Murunga, Heen Rath El, Rath Karael, Bala Samba, Heen Samba, Molagu Samba, Rath Mada Al, Bala Thatu Wee, Heen Suvuru Wee, Molligoda, Bata Kiri El, Hondarawalu, Motakarupan, Mudu Kiri El, Rathu Bala Wee, Beheth Heenati, Kahata El, Murunga, Rathu Sooduru, Kahata Samba, Niyan Wee, Kalu Bala Maa Wee, Kalu Bala Vee, Deveradhari, Kalu Handiran, Sudu Maa Wee, Goda Wee, Kottayar, and Wanni Dahanala. To name but a few.
As Van Goff might have said to a curious passer by: we am not short of colours. To shape food with all this around us is little short of joyful.
The are the obvious things you should never deviate from, like toast soldiers with boiled eggs; nutmeg with comfort macaroni cheese, proper homemade marmalade, and freshly baked bread.
But the katsup with our lunchtime fish and chips isn’t Heinz -its homemade, with nutmeg, cloves, and cinnamon.
Curries come with Mango & Rosemary Chutney.
Ice creams are flavoured with more than vanilla or chocolate – with cardamom or ginger; chilli & kitel or pepper & honey. Sri Lanka’s melting pot history of Indian, Portuguese, Dutch or British flavours tosses such loved invaders as hoppers, milk rice, love cakes, bibikkan, samosas, gulam jamun, bhajis, and lassis onto our menu. Soups made from carrot, cauliflower, beetroot, or pumpkin stir with the greater intensity of added ginger, cardamon, coconut or chilli. Island favourites like naran kawum, curries of cashew nut or vegetable, dishes of dhal, meats or classic dishes of tuna, cauliflower, spinach, salsas, potatoes, or beans are enlivened by a touch of lemongrass, rosemary & kitel, pineapple, saffron, tamarind or ginger, kittul & basil.
You just can’t not meet a bit of the real Sri Lanka when you eat from Kasun and Sudeth’s kitchen, despite choosing your food with the judgement of dowager. Even their breakfast fried eggs have little smiles on the yokes picked out in pepper grapes. Real food, as Julia Child observed, is a serious art form and a national sport.
