As I have said many times life out here in the Bahamas is exceptionally good what with the sun, the sand, the sea and the Kalik (the local bottled beer). But there is always a downside.......


Consider the local wildlife. Christine and I are passing a very day sitting by the pool looking over the ocean, I have my usual vodka and cranberry juice and Christine is of course being very healthy and drinking a grapefruit juice when we notice this fury looking ball amongst the rocks at the end of the garden. I can’t tell what it is so I poke it with a stick which I now tend to think annoyed it and it jumped up and started walking quite quickly towards me.








It was the biggest, ugliest spider I had ever seen, it was of course a tarantula so moving quickly away I grabbed the camera and took a long range zoomed shot whilst shouting for Christine to do something about it. She looks a little surprised but she knows I can’t stand spiders, back home she always just picks them up and puts them outside because she thinks spiders are useful for keeping down bugs or something. Now I accept that this one was a little larger than we usually find wandering around at home but what did she want me to do, if I don’t go near the ones at home I am not going anywhere near this, I have seen smaller cats.


With Christine refusing to remove the tarantula from the terrace and our granddaughter Amber who would have put it in a box and kept it as a pet being at school there is only one thing to do. Shout for Dawnette the house keeper who comes out and can’t understand what all the fuss is about “it’s only a spider” she says as she wallops it with her foot sending it out into the ocean. I am now very brave hanging over the rails at the end of the garden watching its attempts to swim. It’s easy how brave you can be when it can’t get back, I hope it didn’t have any relatives watching what happened!






But that’s just the spiders, consider also the mosquitoes. These are not ordinary mosquitoes they are the size of wasps if not bigger and twice as deadly. They remind me of Japanese kamikaze pilots, they target you from a distance and then swoop down and bite on contact leaving a very large red swelling which continues to look unsightly and irritable for days. The issue with the mosquitoes is that they don’t attack everybody, I am one of the fortunate ones that they leave alone whilst Christine on the other hand is a prime target.


We have mosquito nets up at the bedroom windows, plug in mosquito devices activated every night and the bed room is sprayed with mosquito killer before we go to bed but the next morning while I am fine and untouched Christine is once again looking like a patchwork quilt with red blobs all over.




She is of course not happy with the situation and starts the process of applying gunges and lotions to stop the irritation and reduce the red blobs so she can make herself presentable to wear all the new clothes that have appeared in her wardrobe as, if you remember she brought two suitcases full of nothing to wear. In the meantime she is forced to cover up, she was last spotted on the terrace challenging the mosquitoes with comments like “get me now if you can you little b******”


So why do they attack Christine and not me. Well it seems obvious to me. Consider the differences between us, I eat as much junk food as possible and drink plenty of alcohol, Christine is extremely healthy and does neither of those things.


So there you have it, sausage egg and bacon on English muffins for breakfast, meat pie and roast potatoes on a night complete with lashing of vodka and cranberry juice keeps the mosquitoes at bay. Proven fact, I think I need a top up, don’t want to get bitten.