Day 29

The cold continues.  Up at dawn, although it's not dawn, it's pitch dark still.  There is a message from Matt that we can call him and so we excitedly do, immediately, but he is unable to talk, visiting l'Île de Gorée, the island off the coast of Dakar, which is actually one of the 19 communes d'arrondissement (districts) of Dakar, which everyone associates with slavery but which was not actually the main centre of the slave trade in Senegal. 

So we go to gym and run and pull and push until it is time to go home to get ready for school.  And I think of Matthew on the island, and about the romance of islands in the human mind.

So many stories about islands: deserted islands where Robinson Crusoe found Friday and perpetuated the colonial mentality towards the dark-skinned man, even though he had been a slave himself, and should have known better.

Desert Island Discs is a BBC radio programme that we would listen to from when I was a little girl, in which some celebrity is invited on the show and asked to choose 8 pieces of music (originally records), a book and a luxury item which they would take with them if they were cast away on a desert island.  The show has been going 71 years!  It began in 1942, during the war, when imagining a deserted peaceful island to which you could retire with your favourite music would have been a lovely dream indeed.

England is called a little island, although it's quite a big one really.  It is the "green and pleasant land" for which my grandmother longed, and my mother too, and so much a part of my culture.  When we learned to read it was from books set in England, where all the lambs were born in April and May, which seemed a bit strange to me, why were they being born in Autumn?  Wouldn't they get cold?

Islands close to the mainland have been used as prisons for centuries.  Perfect prisons because they are almost impossible to escape.  Alcatraz, in the San Francisco Bay, was a military base and then a prison for about 30 years.  Robben Island, in Table Bay, just a few miles from Cape Town, was used as a prison from the 17th century until 1996, and is of course the place where Nelson Mandela was held for many years. The Chatea d'If in the Mediterranean, is the most romantic of all in my mind, as it played a large part in the Alexandre Dumas story, The Count of Monte Christo, which we listened to on a record so many times that I almost knew the entire melodramatic production by heart. 

The Maldives, a country composed of an archipelago of about 1200 coral islands, is under grave threat from rising seas caused by global warming.  Mohamed Nasheed, the new president, has set as his goal the buying of land in India, Sri Lanka or Australia to create a new homeland where he can relocate his entire nation.  Most new leaders face huge problems, but this must be one of the worst, finding a new home for 300 000 people.

Male airport in the Maldives

 If I had to choose 8 discs for my desert island stay, the first one would be Chopin's Nocturne in E Minor. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JG2tc-knlUs