Jun 22
Climate change ain’t a real thing is it….
Take care of yourselves back at home. I’m seeing that temperatures are going to rise to 40c, and a rare red weather alert has been issued for parts of the country. That’s crazy.
Please click for moreFor those that have read these pages regularly they will know that my family and I have regularly been impacted by hurricanes, the last one was in October last year when Milton made landfall just up the street from us, and we had to evacuate.
We chose to live in Bermuda and we chose to live 400 metres from the water here on the gulf coast of Florida, so no pity required, but I also spend a lot of time studying their impacts for work.
Please click for moreNice to see Charlton’s Jamaican Addicks plus others with Jamaican roots donate to relief funds and raise awareness to the devastating impacts of Hurricane Melissa that ran over the island with sustained winds of 185 mph winds in the early part of this week.
That is a huge storm, stronger winds than Hurricane Katrina for example, which devastated New Orleans in 2005 and killed 1,392 people.
Please click for moreIt’s been a long weekend without football hasn’t it.
I found myself refreshing over and over the Charlton Women’s score earlier, and thrashed the air with delight after they hung on with 10 women, to beat Crystal Palace 1-0 in the WSL2 season opener at The Valley.
Please click for moreA big night in Bermuda tomorrow as Charlton might have chartered their own airplane to bring Karoy Anderson, Tyreece Campbell, Kaheim Dixon and Amari Bell to the Atlantic outpost.
Bermuda host Jamaica at the Dame Flora Duffy National Sports Centre (photo) tomorrow evening in Group B of the CONCACAF World Cup qualifier.
Please click for moreI was exhausted by the time I went to bed last night. I felt as I had headed every long ball.
Three more days until the next chapter of this season, rest will be key for all of us.
Please click for moreYou will mock, but it is cold down here in south-west Florida. I have just taken the dog out and I had to go and find some gloves.
This week Florida has seen snow settle on the ground in its northern parts and along the Panhandle. In the town of Milton northeast of Pensacola they saw 10 inches of snow. That’s more than double the previous state record of 4 inches, also in Milton in 1954.
please click for moreI am in Bermuda this week. A catalogue of meetings interspersed by Christmas drinks, or the other way around, I’m not sure.
The Bermuda weather is about 10 degrees warmer here than it is in Sarasota, but still as humid as ever.
Please click for moreI am picking 20 Places and 20 Charlton Players to celebrate 20 years of this Blog. No pecking order, just those that were memorable.
Number 13 on my list of 20 Places, well it had to feature, is the tiny, often quirky but always idyllic island of Bermuda.
Please click for moreBack to Bermuda today for the first time since June, which doesn’t sound very long but is the longest I have been off the island since 2008.
Hurricane threat’s aside, this is one of the best times of the year to be on the island. Humidity has dropped, the temperatures are just about perfect and it reminds me of evening’s on boats or sat in the garden drinking dark ‘n stormy’s.
Please click for moreI’m making my way back home after a week working in Bermuda. I’m at Charlotte Airport, where I tend to spend half my life and my onward flight to Sarasota has been delayed.
Please click for moreWe are really pushing the boat out this new year and are spending the night at the north terminal of Gatwick. Sounds of jet engines and people dragging their suitcases down the corridor will replace popping champagne corks.
We travel home to Sarasota tomorrow after a very enjoyable ten days back at home (sic) seeing our family for Christmas.
Please click for moreI have just spent the last week in sunny rainy Bermuda working as well as enjoying the Christmas spirit, quite literally.
Rain on the island nearly all of last Wednesday pushed 2023 over the line to make it the wettest year since 1902.
Please click for moreThere’s a saying that after you leave somewhere you can go back too soon.
7 weeks after leaving the island of Bermuda I was back this week and it probably was a little soon.
Please click for moreNo, not two new Charlton signings but two Hurricane Category 3’s that in a twist of fate blew by Sarasota and Bermuda this morning.
I have become a little neutralized to storms after being in Bermuda where we rarely escaped a summer without one, and now as a Florida Gulf Coast resident we remain in the cone for any storms that make it towards the north west of the Caribbean and beyond where the Atlantic Ocean and Gulf of Mexico collide.
Please click for moreIt’s been about two weeks since we moved to Sarasota in Florida. Me and the dog anyway, and it does already feel like home helped for sure that is was already our house and we had known for a while that this move was in our future.
There is much that is different though. I haven’t yet started my new job, but our daughter has started school, which will be remarkably different from what she was used to in Bermuda.
Please click for moreIt’s been an emotional last few days in Bermuda. We’ve had the full gambit from hopes and fears to regrets and relish. So much to miss, so much to look forward to.
The moving company have taken every precious personal effect, and more. We have sold stuff, donated stuff and dumped more beside.
Please click for moreInto our last few days now living in Bermuda, and I am trying to take in every sideways glance of the water and the centuries old palmetto and calabash trees that tumble high over the narrow windy roads.
Those thin roads bordered by jagged walls made from quarried coral that hide homes, preserves and lanes behind them.
Please click for moreAs we pack up the house around him, our chocolate Labrador has looked a little bewildered in recent weeks (they do say that dogs take after their owners), yet more disorientation is still to come.
Due to the hot weather at both departure and arrival locations – Bermuda and Florida, which at the moment could be anywhere in the northern hemisphere, the airlines won’t take our dog. He is too big to go under the seat, and frankly we had neither the time nor the cheek to register him as a ‘service animal.’
Please click for moreJust over 15 years ago we moved from Chicago, the city of big shoulders to this beautiful if peculiar tiny island of Bermuda, but the time has now come to leave.
Bermuda has been good to us so we leave with a heavy heart staying far longer than we ever expected to. Bermuda is a wonderful place to live and bring up a young family, even our daughter was born here, but for numerous reasons in no particular order – school, a new work challenge, and as a family we were ready for something different, we have made a long thought and drawn-out decision to move.
Please click for moreMay 6
There was a meeting of Bermuda Addicks on Thursday night. We had a couple missing, but there was five of us including an interloper, a Frenchman from Bordeaux currently undergoing some Charlton Athletic induction courses.
We brushed off all the depressing thoughts of actually being a Charlton fan, albeit from this idyllic isle, by drinking plenty of cobra and eating copious amount of Indian food.
Please click for moreI’m on my way home to Bermuda after almost a week back at, er, home in the UK seeing family, mates and those Addicks.
I have been in Eastbourne most of the trip, my parents live just outside the town, and although it has been bloody freezing, Eastbourne did live up to it’s billing of the Sunshine Coast.
Please click for moreAs I sit here drinking coffee at my kitchen counter in Sarasota tired from overdoing it on New Year’s Eve Eve, I am pretty pleased to put 2022 in the books.
Normality returned to life as we knew it in 2022 after two pandemic impacted years allowing us to remember again how to do the simple things we took for granted.
I often had to remind those around me, and myself that in times of hassle and intensity, that it was these moments that we’d missed. I love being busy and slightly living on the edge of unorganized and spontaneous, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Please click for moreJohn Daly was the draw this week at the PGA Butterfield Bermuda Championship at the serene Port Royal Golf Club.
At 56 Daly makes me look like George Dobson, and although he was only here on an exemption, the legendary American easily received the loudest roars from the crowd on both Thursday and Friday before missing the cut by miles.
Please click for moreMy son leaves on a jet-plane tonight back to London, a day later than planned thanks to British Airways. We have had him through the past week, his first time on the island since before the pandemic, and it was a pleasure to hang out.
He has done almost everything the tour book can throw up here previously, and therefore he was happy to swim, chill, eat, drink and get some sun on his face.
Please click for moreIf you read my Puerto Rico Travelogue post from last week I wrote that we were told that a Cat 1 Hurricane hitting the island would mean that the fractured power grid would not survive.
Well, over the weekend Hurricane Fiona battered parts of Puerto Rico’s south and central mountain regions with more than 20 inches of rain and Cat 1 hurricane winds of 70-80 mph winds. The southern town of Ponce measured a gust of 103 mph. Landslides broke out in mountainous regions as waterways breached their banks. In the south-west the Guanajibo River crested at over 29ft washing a bridge away.
Please click for moreThe colours and atmosphere of the bi-annual Newport, Rhode Island to Bermuda sailing race has been filling the harbour and streets of Hamilton in Bermuda this week.
The island has slowly been getting tourists and visitors back, and it’s nice to see the capital’s streets bursting with life again.
This was the first running of the Newport to Bermuda race since 2018. The first one took place in 1906, and is the oldest ocean race for amateur sailors.
SailGP is a season of grands prix consisting of high performance sailing races around the world. The first one of this season was this weekend in Bermuda which has captivated this outpost all week long after last year’s skinnied down pandemic version.
Season 3 of the 10-race series boasts an expanded roster of teams, with Switzerland and Canada joining Australia, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Japan, New Zealand, Spain, and the United States. The competing teams feature the sport’s best athletes including Olympic gold medalists and world champions, all racing together at the same time in identical boats, meaning the results rely on crews and not engineering.
Please click for more🔝5️⃣ Two more of these Top Five’s to share. Bermuda is like no other place in the World in so many different ways. It’s is peculiar and beautiful in equal measures.
Please click for moreSo bored of Covid. It has had it’s fun and games, killed loved ones, turned upside down daily life and prevented us from seeing the people and things that make us happy. Please just do one. Of all the hopes and aspirations for 2022 I want Covid to become no more than a nuisance factor and it no longer gets to run roughshod over our lives.
Please click for moreBack home indoors after almost a month away in the United States. The dog was ignoring me, but we rekindled a little on our morning walk earlier.
It was pretty restorative being away from this small isle for the past 4 weeks, travelling East Coast to West, and back again. When I left at the beginning of December Covid was in the rear view mirror and now it is back in the front seat. California and Florida have a complete different mindset when it comes to the pandemic, and one could easily see that after spending time in both States.
Please click for moreIt’s always spooked me that warm places over-compensate for being sunny this time of year by having the most outlandish of Christmas decorations.
Bermuda goes to town on the festive bedecking but after being in Sarasota, Florida for two weeks I reckon it takes the glittering prize.
Please click for moreWe’ve had the Bermuda PGA FedEx Cup here this weekend, golf for the uninitiated, which ended this afternoon at the Port Royal Golf Club, a beautiful setting out on the west end of the island.
Please click for moreMy American colleagues are forever mocking me for the amount of national holidays we get in Bermuda. We take the British ones, the American ones, have plenty ourselves and the island’s government are not immune to inventing the random one for good measure.
Nonetheless days off are not to be sniffed at, and we have one today to celebrate Bermuda’s first ever Olympic gold medal won by triathlete Flora Duffy in Tokyo. 🏊♀️🚴♀️🏃🏼♀️🥇
Please click for moreI was in Queens, New York yesterday watching the U.S. Tennis Open. It was a flying visit, one full day, two nights and four Covid tests. We had great seats for Tuesday’s afternoon session and in the first quarter final game watched Danill Medvedev beat outsider Botic Van De Zandschulp, ranked 454 in the world.
The Russian was cruising, but in the 3rd set the Dutchman made a game of it delaying our escape to find some shade. It was a hot day, the sun, motionless above us, was baking hot, thus the famed honey deuces were a necessity for hydration purposes. Medvedev, the no.2 seed eventually won 6-3, 6-0, 4-6, 7-5.
Please click for moreSo we have been in the Florida sun rain for the past 10 days. We spent the first weekend with friends in Miami, which was a lot of fun, and then drove to our house in Sarasota across alligator alley on the other coast at the beginning of last week.
Today in Bermuda is Non-Mariners Day. Traditionally a race to see which homemade boat using the most ridiculous of objects can sink the quickest. Baby strollers, beds, refrigerators and bath tubs have all been used previously with the expected results.
Non-Mariners day is always the Sunday after Cup Match, and is a chaotic and exceptionally busy alcohol-fuelled spectacle within the area around Mangrove Bay packed with the water hardly visible due to a ragtag mob of inebriated non-sailors on boats and pieces of machinery dressed up as boats. The photo is from two years ago.
And yes it is a lot of fun.
Please click for moreJust back from a little trip to Florida, a couple of days in Miami followed a couple in Fort Lauderdale, just 40 minutes north along the coast, and a place I hadn’t been for 13 years. It had changed significantly, and grown like a sunflower.
Neighbouring towns of Hollywood and Oakwood Park have been engulfed by Fort Lauderdale’s expansion. Once a renowned centre for spring-breakers’ high jinks the dive bar and burger joints had all but disappeared and have been replaced by boutique hotels, upscale apartment buildings and a burgeoning restaurant scene.
Wow 🇧🇲🥇
Flora Duffy won Bermuda’s first ever Olympic gold medal tonight in Tokyo, finishing the Triathlon a minute and 14 seconds ahead of GB’s Georgia Taylor-Brown in very wet conditions to send this tiny island in the Atlantic Ocean into raptures.
Please click for moreSo where will you be watching the game later?
After being lucky enough to be at Wembley on Wednesday, this evening I will be on BA159…. ✈️
Please click for moreA little bit of a mini break for the next couple of days as we head to Miami later.
Florida has long moved on from the pandemic and apparently visitor numbers are almost back to pre-Covid times. Double vaccinated Americans are increasingly moving around the country and I expect Miami Beach to be busy.
Please click for moreThe first day of Bermuda’s summer is May 24th. Traditionally, well for about 110 years, it was always on May 24th…. I know, weird.
Yet last year Bermuda Day was moved by the government in their wisdom to the last Friday of the month which is a pain in the harris for me as work is chaotic and the last Friday of the month is and will always likely be stupid busy.
Please click for moreBermuda is still in a state of lockdown, although we are allowed out of the house now, but that sadly did not extend to watching the first series of the 2020/21 SailGP held here this weekend.
Although families could go onto the Great Sound to watch in personal boats, the initial plans of a spectator village and stands were all cancelled, and with it millions of dollars into the islands desperately empty tourism coffers.
Just as my son was, and I hope many of you were, tucking into a nice cold pint in the cold outside your favourite boozer, here in Bermuda we were entering a shelter in place order meaning we cannot leave our homes unless it is for essential services such as grocery stores, pharmacies, doctors, covid testing and vaccines.
We can exercise for an hour only within 1km of our homes, but only in two’s. Never understood that, when you can all sit in the kitchen indoors.
It’s the baby-faced-other-half’s big birthday tomorrow. Don’t tell her I told you.
She got back from a quick trip to Sarasota today. I have her locked in the shed quarantining. Our Premier has taken a leaf out of Boris’ rule book and our guidelines are now as equally as confusing and they can’t find time or be bothered to update the government website. We think double shot vacinated, post two weeks, still means ‘mobile quarantining’ until you get your Bermuda arrival test result. The shed is comfy I just told her when I left a bag of mini-eggs outside her door.
Liam Millar came on as a 70th minute substitute and crossed for Wolves prospect Theo Corbeanu to finish the rout of Bermuda 5-1 in last night’s first Group B CONCACAF World Cup qualifier.
It was a home game for the Canucks, but the game was held in Orlando due to Covid restrictions in Canada. It did not stop Canada’s best players travelling to Florida including Bayern Munich’s Alphonso Davies and 7 others that play in Europe incluidng Millar, Cardiff’s Junior Joilett and hat trick hero Cyle Larin, who plays for Besiktas.
💉 💪 I had my second Pfizer-BioNTech COVID-19 jab last week, three weeks after getting my first. So by Wednesday I should have 95% efficacy. That feels really good knowing that life can soon get back to normal, and that specifically means the abililty to go and see family and friends.
A fair number of people I know here were unwell after the 2nd shot, the impervious-other-half had flu symptoms and spent the day after hers in bed. I just had a nagging mild headache which dissapated the next morning. A sore arm from the first one is a seemingly popular complaint.
I always cringe when Bermudians say they are freezing. I was on a call early this week when a young colleague said just that to someone sat in Boston. Our temperature was twice what it was in Boston, and I could see the snow peaking through his blinds.
But I got to tell you it is proper freezing today. 9.5C on the rock at one point today making it th ecoldest ever recorded for this day. Then with the windy remnants of a huge storm (photo) we had here in midweek, the wind chill takes that down to 4.5C!
🔝5️⃣ I have now been in Bermuda for twelve and a half years. Classic came for four, and you know the rest. As idyllic as the 21 sq. mile island is, the fact I split my time between the UK, the USA and if we were lucky some adventurous holidays, then this small little isle with it’s three main roads never seemed too suffocating.
🔝5️⃣ A global pandemic has curtailed a lot of eating out, and it has been the year of the take-away. Even Bermuda now has a delivery service 25 years after Pizza Hut first started doing it.
Like elsewhere for long parts of this year restaurants were shut on the island (fortunately for us they are open again although with plenty of restrictions), and we are lucky that for most of the time we are able to sit outside.
🔝5️⃣ Happy New Year to you all.
I’ve been doing my annual CA Top Fives for more than a decade, but there has never been a year like 2020.
There were always barriers to travel, whether self made, man made or natural forces, but never before was the world closed to exploration. For the ‘normal person’ anyhow. Who knows what the world looks like after the vaccination seizes control back from the virus and allows us to venture outside again, but all I know is I want to see it, old haunts, favourite spots, new places.
In saying that one of the small positives of being stuck at home in 2020 was more family time, and more time to actually spend with them on our own doorstep. Bermuda is hard not to appreciate, and if I include my home, then I actually can stretch to five places I spent some time in during this pandemic infected year.
The year of all years crawls to a welcome end tonight. Sadly nothing will be much different when the sun rises tomorrow, and it is probably going to get worse before it gets better. Still, a new year brings new dreams and hopes of better times ahead.
We have a Chinese guy in our office, and after he returned to Bermuda from being back in China at the beginning of January he was made to stay at home. When he did come back to the office he wore a mask. It was odd to see him walk around with a mask and no one quite knew how to act around him.
Fast forward 12 months and the entire world has been heavily inflicted by Covid-19. This silent terror of a virus has literally changed the world we live in, a film set only previously in the minds of story tellers.
Like most of the rest of you our Christmas Day was spent behind closed doors. Just the three of us with a continual loop of Christmas music, a fridge full of food, a shiny paper mountain of discarded wrapping paper, board games and a few glasses of champagne. The toasts for better times for the world beyond midnight this coming Thursday.
Fortunately though yesterday’s conversation was dominated about how pleased we were to have made the pilgrimage to Sarasota. We felt lucky that we were able to get a change of scene, and a taste of the world outside, my first trek off island for 11 months and for the little-un and island-fevered-other-half more than a year.
I’ve not left this little isle since February. The family since last December. 21 miles long, and a 1.75 miles wide at it’s very widest point can seem very, very small.
Yet, as I told the story the other day during the summer and into the early winter months you’d question yourself why you’d ever leave the beauty and reasonable normality of Bermuda during a global pandemic. Why throw yourself to the sharks, when we can swim with the parrot fish!
Two weeks ago whilst Addicks and other football fans at about half of the football clubs around the country were (were) venturing back into stadiums, Bermuda suddenly halted it’s football league and games were postponed indefinitely as the island suddenly wrestled with a cruel and quick re-emergence of Covid-19.
Bermuda was a Covid safe haven in the summer and early autumn. Those of us that live here boasted that we were in a bubble, life was normal, at least as much as it can be. From June to November Bermuda had zero active cases benefiting from a strict lockdown, which was very well observed. Our airport was closed and the cruise ship tap was long turned off. Very few people came or left the island and we moved around it quite freely.
“If ye break faith with us who die, we will not sleep, though poppies grow in Flander’s fields.”
It has always amazed me that today is not a bank holiday at home. It is a significant day in the calendar that every race, creed and religion should value. This year’s British ceremonies are masked (sic) in a coronavirus lockdown. More reason if needed to never forget those we lost fighting to protect our freedom.
This is not meant to rub your noses in it, for those of you settling in for the first night of lockdown, but tonight I’ve been at a neighbour’s bonfire night party celebrating that great libertarian Guy Fawkes.
I felt very fortunate this week as the UK and large chunks of Europe go back into lockdown I was lucky enough to be outside watching live professional sport.
The Bermuda PGA Championship has been taking place this week at Port Royal Golf Course and ends today in what will be an exciting finish.
A sea of green tee-shirts, socially distanced of course, filled the back streets of Hamilton, Bermuda on Thursday after the ruling Progressive Labour Party (PLP), swept to victory in the hastily called election just three years into their tenure, which can run as much as five.
On the back of an aggressive but intelligent handling of Covid-19 pandemic, which frankly has been a lesson to many much larger nations, and before the true economic reality hits, Premier David Burt took advantage of a flimsy and disorganized opposition One Bermuda Alliance (OBA) by forcing voters to the polling booths.
It’s beyond me how this 21 square mile island can get hit twice in a week by two different hurricanes occupying the 41,000,000 square mile Atlantic Ocean!
Like buses or supposed Charlton owners. Last Monday Paulette, today Teddy.
Teddy is this hurricane season’s 19th named storm, we have now by the way for just the second time since records began exhausted the alphabet and now on the Greek letters, with Beta about to crawl into Texas.
Thanks for the kind words. We made it through yesterday, but Paulette was slow moving making it a very long day.
This is a satellite image of Hurricane Paulette moving over Bermuda yesterday with the eye right over the island. If you can zoom in you will see the island in the middle.
That was around 8am, and the peace and blue sky that follows is pretty surreal. The absence of that eerie whistling sound, the crashing of branches and trees and creaking windows disappeared for almost two hours before the backside of the storm moved onto us, and she was hefty old bird.
it has been a very active Atlantic hurricane season thus far, with already 18 named storms, 5 in September already so Bermuda was never going to get away scot-free and sure enough Hurricane Paulette is barrelling towards us and is expected to roll right over the top of us around 6am tomorrow. Unfortunately it is meandering so slowly that the island will suffer hurricane force winds for up to 9 hours. What fun!
Sarasota, Florida
