Testing the Blogger App

This is the blogger application for iPad. A brilliantly dysfunctional way to blog. Whoever dreamed this page up gets a gold star for not having a clue. Because here I cannot post a picture and then write a paragraph. All the words have to go at the top of the page and all the pictures at the bottom. Geniuses at work at Blogger, for very high pay I expect!

Little Palm Brunch

We had ourselves a brunch yesterday, on a tropical island which happens to lie not in the south seas as may appear to be the case judging from the palms lining the beaches around the resort.

It's a fifteen minute ferry ride from Little Torch Key at Mile Marker 28 and that's the only way you can get to the rather exotic brunch offered at Little Palm Island. Only overnight guests can tie up their own boats at the Little Palm docks.

We ate our meal on the outside deck overlooking the water, after we were greeted atthe dock by a young shapely hostess wins fixed smile. The is something of the Stepford Wives about the staff who are used to waiting on the one percent and thus act subservient to a degree that is unnerving to ordinary mortals.

They offer a champagne and vodka bar with all the fixings needed to mix your own cocktails.

And there are several cold buffets around the indoor dining room, including seafood, meats, cheeses, fruit and pastries. A Falstaffian abundance of oysters!

The hot menu includes a dozen dishes of tasting meats and seafood. Beef churrasco:

My wife liked the shrimp wonton better than I did, while I preferred the beef benedict seen in the background.

we both liked the only vegetarian offering on the menu, a delicious French toast of unique appearance.

Our buddy Phil has been tickling the ivories for twenty years at Little Palm.

We ate with the lovely view you would expect from such a dining room, recorded for posterity in lots of home albums no doubt.

 

And then we caught the two o'clock ferry back home to the real world.

 

I think the full price for the brunch is around a hundred bucks, but we ate with a local's discount which was nice for us. On top of that my wife had a voucher from a local charity auction and so our meal was actually quite reasonable for the three of us, $140 including the obligatory twenty percent tip after all the discounting and stuff. Great fun and a great day out.

 

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Schooner Wharf Bar

I went to Schooner Wharf. I was at a loose end and wasn't ready to ride home so I thought: how about a drink in the last little piece of old Key West.

So there I was squeezing myself between sweating drinking patrons asking myself why is it that I don't much like bars when so many other people love them... I remember a comment on a TV show I used to like (Northern Exposure for the record) wherein the character Chris in the Morning muses on his lifetime appreciation for bars that some people are destined to own and other people just to drink in them. A few are us were genetically modified to sit on the sidelines and wonder about bars.

I like this picture of the musician so near and dear to the hearts of patrons of Schooner Wharf. Feel free of course to use it. His music was okay but I wanted to see the view so I climbed the stairs to the deck overlooking Key West Bight. Okay so the crowds below freaked me out but this was lovely.

The big gray lump is GarytheTourist's home from home, the Galleon Resort, whence one presumably enjoys a similar view across the open water as well. Schooner Wharf's beer selection is a bit behind the times frankly. The best of the draughts was Samuel Adams and the best of the bottled was Red Stripe which is frankly inadequate in the age of craft brewing.

People watching was okay if you enjoy watching people crane their necks looking for fish swimming.

They do a lot of this sort of thing.

The helicopter flying over the power boat races was noisy. But so were the boats, so I guess they were even.

It was a pretty afternoon on top of the bar, made bright by Haiti's flag on the left and Cuba's on the right.

 

Lots of big boats cruised through the harbor for a while. The racers have inboard engines, the local boat had outboards.

These strange vessels draw aficionados to sit and stare. I guess I look as weirdly absorbed whe presented witna. Parade of interesting motorcycles, of all things. I just got to look at a friend's collection of pictures of an exotic car show Up North. Internal combustion rules.

But then reality intervenes and we are reminded that we live In a cool little resort town with lots of water sports possibilities even though I think the waters are too cold for swimming in November. I like watching the oat loads of eager tourists going out on these beautiful waters. I have had a crappy year for bowing this past summer but I will be here next summer, if I'm spared, and 2013 will be my year to go boating, perhaps.

The deck started to fill up and felt like a proper bar so I thought perhaps it was time to beat a retreat, before the pigeons let loose.

They do love their bar, don't they?

Key West sunshine, live music and swirling crowds of people lubricated with beer and animated conversation.

Schooner Wharf, a last little piece of old Key West, since 1987.

 

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Around Geraldine Street Of An Evening

Words by Sir John Betjeman, the poem: A Subaltern's Love Song, set in the quintessential Betjeman turf of middle class southern England land of rigid routines and hopeless mediocrity. Why Bahama Village came to mind I couldn't be sure but the quality of the dying light of the day reminded me of some of the lines in the poem evoking the long dusk of an English summer evening, land of the engagement described.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
How mad I am, sad I am, glad that you won,
The warm-handled racket is back in its press,
But my shock-headed victor, she loves me no less.

Her father’s euonymus shines as we walk,
And swing past the summer-house, buried in talk,
And cool the verandah that welcomes us in
To the six-o’clock news and a lime-juice and gin.

The scent of the conifers, sound of the bath,
The view from my bedroom of moss-dappled path,
As I struggle with double-end evening tie,
For we dance at the Golf Club, my victor and I.

On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and shorts,
And the cream-coloured walls are be-trophied with sports,
And westering, questioning settles the sun,
On your low-leaded window, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

The Hillman is waiting, the light’s in the hall,
The pictures of Egypt are bright on the wall,
My sweet, I am standing beside the oak stair
And there on the landing’s the light on your hair.

By roads “not adopted”, by woodlanded ways,
She drove to the club in the late summer haze,
Into nine-o’clock Camberley, heavy with bells
And mushroomy, pine-woody, evergreen smells.

Miss Joan Hunter Dunn, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn,
I can hear from the car park the dance has begun,
Oh! Surrey twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl’s hand!

Around us are Rovers and Austins afar,
Above us the intimate roof of the car,
And here on my right is the girl of my choice,
With the tilt of her nose and the chime of her voice.

And the scent of her wrap, and the words never said,
And the ominous, ominous dancing ahead.
We sat in the car park till twenty to one
And now I’m engaged to Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

 

From Wikipedia:

Joan Jackson (née Joan Hunter Dunn) (13 October 1915 – 11 April 2008) was the muse of Sir John Betjeman, best known from being the subject of his poem "A Subaltern's Love-song".

Jackson was the daughter of Dr George Hunter Dunn, a physician from Farnborough, Hampshire. Her grandfather, Andrew Hunter Dunn, was Bishop of Quebec from 1892 to 1914, and her uncle Edward Dunn was Bishop of British Honduras (Belize) and Archbishop of the West Indies. A great-great-grandfather was William Hunter, Lord Mayor of London in 1851-52 (the grandfather of both of her father's parents). Her mother, Mabel Liddelow, died in 1916, and Joan was educated from the age of six at Queen Anne's School, Caversham, near Reading, Berkshire, where she played tennis, became captain of the lacrosse team, and was head girl.

She studied for a diploma at King's College of Household and Social Science, and joined the catering department at the University of London.

Betjeman saw Jackson for the first time in December 1940. He was working for the Films Division of the Ministry of Information, based in the Senate House of the University of London, where she worked in the canteen. Although married for seven years, he was struck by her beauty, he fell in love, and composed a 44-line poem fantasising about them being engaged and playing tennis together in Aldershot.

Sir John Betjeman

The poem was published in Cyril Connolly's Horizon magazine in February 1941. He invited her to lunch, and presented her with a copy of the magazine containing the poem, begging her forgiveness. In an interview in The Sunday Times magazine in 1965, illustrated with photographs by Lord Snowdon, she said: "It was such a marvellous break from the monotony of the war. It really was remarkable the way he imagined it all. Actually, all that about the subaltern, and the engagement is sheer fantasy, but my life was very like the poem."

The poet and his muse as colleagues 1941

She married Harold Wycliffe Jackson, a civil servant in the Ministry of Information, in January 1945, at St Mark's Church in Farnborough. Betjeman was invited, but was unable to attend. The poem was republished in Betjeman's book New Bats in Old Belfries in 1945, and was later mentioned in Flanders and Swann's "Tried by Centre Court".

Jackson accompanied her husband to Malaya after the war, where he ran a radio station. They then lived in Singapore, before returning to the UK in 1957. Her husband worked for ITV and then for the BBC in Rhodesia. He died of a heart attack in 1963.

Jackson returned to their home, in Headley, Hampshire, to raise their three young boys. Despite straitened finances, all three attended Winchester College. She attended the memorial service for Betjeman at Westminster Abbey in 1984. Her letters from Betjeman, contained in a bureau, were stolen in a burglary in 1996.

She was survived by her three sons.

 

 

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Self Control, Traffic Control, And A Flat Tire

Driving up Flagler Avenue a few minutes before six in the morning yesterday I was congratulating myself on getting off work a few minutes early, thanks to prompt day shift relief, when I saw a bundle of scrap in my lane. The trash moved and there was a cyclist revealed, lying in the right hand lane of Flagler, his helmeted head about to be run down by my car. I figured I should stop and help so I did. The State of Florida considers me a First Responder, even though I don't, so I figured I should see what I could do. At least I know how to make a 911 call properly. I answer dozens every night at work.

The beauty of my job is that while I work in a police station, with police officers, I aren't one. I am a civilian and as such all the work I do in dispatch is directed by sworn police officers who are on the streets dealing hands on with the issues that are called in to us by people in the city. All my authority to make phone calls representing the Key West Police Department, all the talk on the police radio and all the access I have to citizens' private information databases comes through the authority of working police officers. They ask me to check a vehicle tag or a driver's license or to verify an arrest warrant on a person, I find the answers and they make the arrest, or write the ticket or issue the warning. When I leave the police station at six in the morning, or thereabouts, I revert to civilian status and I have no business minding anyone's police business. It is much better, believe me, than being a sworn officer. They make half a dozen more dollars an hour than me but they are technically never off duty.

The other little understood part of my job is how limited it is. People think that I know what's going on all night long. What we get in dispatch is a phone call, frequently incoherent, from someone whose life just went down the shitter in some form or another and the caller may be inebriated, incoherent through pain or illness or debilitation, angry beyond belief or shocked by sudden overwhelming disaster. The conversation frequently isn't very enlightening or may not be too accurate much of the time, and what happens after we send help is never revealed to us. The callers who are calm and precise and have a clear understanding of what they need from us are rare at two o'clock in the morning. Night shift brings its own challenges in dispatch. After help is sent we pretty much forget what we just heard as, especially in busy winter tourist season calls pile up and there are more crises to control. And the officers who did respond rarely fill us in on the details of what we sent them to sort out. Most of what I know comes from the crime report in the newspaper, just like everyone else. That's my job so yesterday morning when I found myself actually at an incident I was a bit surprised. I like the distance dispatching puts between me and the noxious reality of lives gone wrong.

I covered the cyclist with my car's emergency flashers and illuminated his prone body with my headlights. His bicycle was of course on it's side with a couple of red tail lights flashing monotonously. He was dressed in those ridiculous spandex suits with a brightly colored helmet on his head, every inch a committed rider. He looked to be close to thirty and even seen upside down his clean shaven face reminded me strongly of my nephew in Asheville, himself a keen and competitve rider. He was lying on his back clutching his shoulder, wincing, but there was no blood or anything gruesome. Thank the gods for small mercies. He spoke to me so at least I didn't have to grovel on the rough roadway and apply my CPR training. I usually do CPR over the phone when I do it at all and it's a much better way, with no physical contact, having a friend or family member deal with the mucus blood and vomit. Doing it in person is a trial, though either way getting someone to breathe again is rewarding.

A couple of sentences, breathlessly delivered by the prone athlete, explained the situation and it appeared he was the victim of a hit-and-run. I called the office after I confirmed my location on Flagler, just as a breathless young woman ran up, tearful and said she hadn't seen him, looking hopefully at me as though I had a real badge. Not a hit and run I told the office, simply a Signal Four with injuries. It was a short call as I knew what to say and they knew who I was. The cyclist was trying to get up so I reassured him he wasn't going to get run over and told him to wait for the paramedics. He lay back and we listened to the unfortunate driver utter apologies to anyone who would listen. I felt bad for her but shit happens. Especially in the dark even though he had plenty of visible lights on his expensive roadster.

 

Normally I'd hang up at this point, send a fire truck and an ambulance while Nick or Fred sent a cop and we could get back to wondering where the answers to life's persistent questions are to be found. Here on the street there was no getting away and once again I thanked the gods I was a dispatcher in real life, working in an air conditioned office behind two locked doors. Somebody else should be the cop, not me! I am not a hands on kind of guy, nor do I like handguns Tazers or handcuffs. Well, handcuffs maybe...

So there I stood incandescent in the light of passing cars wearing my uniform of tan pants and a dark blue polo shirt with a large silver police badge sewn on the chest directing cars and reassuring the cyclist still lying on his back staring at the stars waiting for the ambulance, I was never so relieved as when I saw the blue lights approaching and the arrival of real police officers left me free to go home and hug my patient dog, who awaits my return every morning on the deck listening for the sound of the softly rumbling motorcycle. However my Triumph is in the shop getting maintained so now she has to listen for the ultra quiet scooter or the silent car. But my focus when I leave work is getting 27 miles home whatever I'm riding, not futzing around with fallen cyclists.

I thought my broken routine was repaired when I got home 15 minutes "late" and Cheyenne came bounding down to greet me. We pile into the car every morning after work and drive a short distance to Big Pine Key or North Ramrod and take a meandering walk in the cool of the dawn. Cheyenne sets the direction and pace when I park the car and we will be gone usually sixty to ninety minutes until her tongue is dangling and her pace slows. It is very relaxing for me to watch the sun come up while Cheyenne sticks her head in some improbable place looking for reeking treats.

My wife called me while we were walking the "Ramrod Pool," a failed housing development that left a deep accidental swimming hole cut into the coral rock. Cheyenne was trotting back and forth checking the progress of dogs who had visited this popular spot the previous day, I was reading the newspaper and all was right with the world. I try to take Cheyenne on a different walk each day to keep her interested and happy but this was the wrong day to worry about my dog. "I need you here" came the cry for help, " I've got a flat."

I have to confess, and I write this by way of apology to my wife, but I was pretty graceless as I groveled in the pearock and dirt, the very maneuver I had managed to avoid while dealing with the cyclist down an hour earlier, and got sandy spots on my trousers and pebbles pressing my knees as I fought the flat tire on her Sebring, inflated the spare doughnut with my portable pump I carry for just such emergencies and emptied the trunk of all her teaching aids and crap to find the jack buried deep in the bowels of her convertible. I swore a bit, in fact I swore enough to make a parrot blush but I got her on the road fast enough to not be late for the little dears in her classroom. My dog looked depressed so we went home, our walk ruined, me to a shower and bed, and she to a delicious piece of industrial strength Chinese jerky.

What a morning. It could have been a lot worse but that is what I generally say any day when I leave work with a trail of death, drunkeness, property destruction and arrests in my wake. Being a dispatcher is a powerful reminder every time I answer the phone that someone, indeed a lot of someones have it a lot worse than a delayed commute home, a broken walk or a stupid smelly dirty flat tire at an inconvenient hour.

 

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