FEAST OR FAMINE?

Christmas is coming. Normally by now the Christmas cake would have been baked and wrapped in its foil (full of Christmas cheer -plenty of brandy). Tins of pineapple rings and boxes of cherries would be ready and waiting to decorate a gammon, which would be glazed and cooked on Christmas Eve. So far I haven’t found gammon (turkey and legs of lamb, yes, at a price), or pineapple rings, or fruit mix. A small bottle of brandy would have been plenty for the cake, but there are none of those and SR’s175 for a bottle is just too much. A friend kindly brought us some fruit mix and cherries from Dubai, so we will have our cake but will eat it without brandy. It would be fun to be browsing for gifts in beautifully decorated shops, with choices to boggle the mind. But this is the Seychelles. There are no shops like that here. We've been spoilt in the past, being able to buy pretty much anything we wanted. All the things we can’t find now are luxuries anyway though and way out of reach for the majority of Seychellois, not to mention millions of others living elsewhere.

We came across an amazing sight on a jetty last week; two crayfish or lobsters, both huge but the one particularly was enormous – the biggest any of us have ever seen.

The men who’d caught them said that they had got them at a depth of 20 metres. Is this allowed we wondered? They will probably have been sold to a hotel or restaurant and provided a feast for someone, but not the men who caught them.

Then at another little café on the beach, an array of huge, gorgeous shells were displayed on the railing. One never sees these sorts of shells washed up on the beach these days, so surely they must have been taken live from the sea, way out, where very few people venture. People must buy them (and it is tempting as they are so beautiful), as otherwise they wouldn’t keep producing more and more. Perhaps this is the only way some people can earn a few extra rupees, so that they too can give their families a little Christmas ‘feast’, something a little different from their normal diet.

So we're forgetting about the ham and fancy dinner with all the trimmings. But it won’t be famine for us. We will have our ‘feast’ at a local restaurant on Christmas Eve. It probably won’t be a traditional Christmas meal but the food there is very good. How lucky we are to be able to afford this. If the weather is nice, we will go snorkelling on Christmas Day and feast our eyes on fish and hopefully turtles too. This is where we often go snorkelling (and there’s my little dream house perched on the rocks….)