Hotbed

Our extraordinarily sharp new lawyer shares a surname, probably coincidentally, with one of our longest-term neighbours, Claudia. 

It sounds unswervingly French, but a claim could be made for its Englishness; Norman-Englishness at least. 

It is very similar in sound and formulation to the surname of a consistently high-achieving Canadian-British family whose notable members include Marcel, Louis, Paul and Justin.

It might be translated as meaning ‘compost’, but I have suggested a more appropriate alternative as the title of this post. 

Anyway, at the end of last week we ran into Claudia close to the nearby parque and she showed us some recent pics of one of her offspring, now residing full time in St Albans, England.

To do this she made use of a recent model Samsung smartphone and this sent me into a bit of a revery about how the world has changed so much in just a pair of generations, really. 

My father visited both North and South America as a young man, but by BOAT.  

When I first came to Central America in the 80s, communications with the outside world were hard to come by. Guatel…enough said.

When the Loma Prieto earthquake occurred in California in 1989 (yesterday was the 34th anniversary), we all gathered in the one bar in town that had a TV with cable: Mistral. 

Sometimes when I remember this it is a flat-screen telly, but of course it cannot have been. 

All the gringos then in Antigua (like, all six of them) were gathered there, eyes glued.  

A couple of years later, although I was starting to make a few tentative steps online with a WWW-less Internet and CompuServe, in my professional life in London I was tied to the dreaded fax machine and even Telex. 

As a kid I was privileged enough to have had family holidays around Europe and then as a teen I undertook a series of railway odysseys around the same continent, repeatedly dipping behind the Iron Curtain, but so-called long haul travel remained expensive and still open only to a relatively affluent elite. 

Some months before I first came here a friend sent me a postcard from Honduras and this seemed to have reached my pigeonhole at Girton from one of the most remote and exotic locations (!), and at the time I was sitting several afternoons a week in one of the isolated upper levels of the Cambridge University Library, reading up on the Russian imperial expansion into Central Asia and dreaming of unlikely expeditions to places like Tashkent, today altogether more readily accessible. 

And so to Claudia and her smartphone. She belongs to the generation of V's oldest brother Felipe. They grew up together as children, and she still lives right on the edge of what was V's father's substantial original plot in El Panorama. 

She seemingly hasn't moved much in her life, at least not permanently, for she has travelled in way her own grandparents might have marveled at, but the world around her has changed significantly and her real time access to those changes and ability to navigate them with ease is very apparent. 

One more sign of change over a comparatively short period of time. When V and I were first 'dating' I was under orders to return her to the family home by around 8pm at the latest every evening. 

This mostly involved a last ditch taxi dash from what is now 'La Calzada', then a mostly deserted avenue after dusk, but sometimes we would have enough spare time to walk. And between her finger-tapping father and the Ramada hotel (now the Soleil) at the edge of the Calle Sucia, there was absolutely NOTHING, not a single structure, street lamp etc, just unnerving darkness and a road edged by dirt or mud right the way through. 

Taxis sometimes seemed genuinely reluctant to do the journey. Rather like the Isle of Dogs in the period just before we set up home there.