I’m Afraid of Americans…and their coffee – Originally Published: Cordoba, May 2022

Too long have we waited for an unOrdinaryWorld blog post I hear you cry. Believe me dear ones, I share your pain. Please forgive my radio silence, I promise it was not without cause. So settle in, pour yourself a sturdy drink, and let me regale you with outlandish tales of wonder and woe from this poor charlatans wanderings. 

The GS against the iconic bridge in Ronda 

It’s the third week of April, 2022. The incessant spring rains have passed as suddenly as they began (at 10:38 on the 25th of February). It’s not quite warm, but it’s dry. Finally, the riding season is here. Not that I’m a seasonal rider, nor have I anything against those who are dry-weather riders only but, for the first time in years, I barely rode during the first three months of this year. It was not the rain, though I hardly go out of my way to ride in the wet, no – it was the petrol. In December 2021, I filled my tank for €1.50 ish per liter. I parked the bike, went home, and had a lovely Christmas. I return in February to the depressing realisation that I can no longer afford to ride just for the sake of riding. I took a spin to Granada in March to see a friend. A mere 200km each way, riding (relatively) slowly, trying to maximise fuel efficiency and, when I ran out, roughly calculated the minimum amount of petrol I would need to make it home. €1.91 per liter. A little part of me died that evening as I stood outside the motorway filling station eating an unappetising chicken-tikka sandwich and wondering what I was going to do now. I’ve had some questions about the lack of motorbiking content since the end of last year and this is the reason. It’s a problem facing us all, and in my case at least, hardly one to keep complaining about. We still have many good roads ahead of us; now they must be rode with reason, every corner enjoyed with a purpose. Personal petrol-burning transport is a luxury that may be reaching the end of its era, but it’s not quite there yet. For the record, I will make the switch to electric bikes as soon as the market becomes more generalised and accessible. E-bikes are quite a bit behind e-cars in terms of range, affordability, and performance. But I don’t have an internal combustion fetish. It’s the freedom that does it for me, not the feeling of a few thousand explosions per-minute under my bum.  

So with that in mind, I decided to at least wait for the rains to pass before hitting the road. But it rained, and rained, and rained… I’ve been told that it’s been the latest spring in living memory here. Certainly I had given up on this years’ chilli seedlings ever popping up, and I filled the days with reading and research for the next historical adventure doc (coming this summer!). Early in the morning of the 15th of April (06:11, ah – what a moment) the skies cleared. I threw the gear onto the bike in one unorganised heap and headed south for the mountains. I stopped in the historical town of Ronda for a quick bite – a tapa of ensaladilla rusa and a coffee – and to film the intro for a motovlog (the one shown above, click the image to watch). Searching for a suitable location, I picked my way down the steep gravel road that leads from the town into the valley below. Mountaineers and tourists filed past. I set up the camera as they walked by. Despite my lifelong affinity for the stage, I feel very awkward talking to a camera. It’s unnatural, completely the opposite to performing live. I become unbearably self-conscious and often wait in excess of half an hour at locations to shoot thirty seconds of dialogue that I struggle to deliver to camera in the presence of people. Maybe it’s my own eye-rolling reaction to the instagrammers, YouTubers, so-called “influencers” that plague our times. In their natural environment they’re invisible, omnipresent, circling you like rabid dogs, waiting for the split-second you inevitably relax your guard and absentmindedly pick up your phone. Then they pounce: arresting your eyeballs, shattering your subconscious and viciously, savagely, consuming your attention. Nothing is free in this world, especially social media. Of all your daily expenses it’s probably the most expensive, costing that which nobody can make more of and which everybody is forever running out of – time.  

When encountered outside of their natural environment, however, they’re easily spotted and, although relatively harmless, are best avoided. After some observation from a distance you may even be able to distinguish their differing varieties. Most commonly seen in social environments is the instagrammer, predominantly a picture predator, though they have recently been reported to also hunt for short videos or “reels”. They are often witnessed hunting in packs, during which every member, in order of popularity, performs a bizarre routine of a dozen or so practiced poses against a carefully chosen background, usually a picturesque vista or an interesting urban feature which, of course, they end up obscuring entirely. An interesting sub-group of the pack-hunting instagrammer is the instagram couple, a duo I often spy from my balcony vantage point overlooking the romantic scene of old-town Cordoba. Similar to the pecking order noted in pack-hunting instagrammers, these frightening pairs also display an unspoken hierarchical understanding. The lead is always an attractive and extroverted young person who scouts ahead for the ideal hunting ground. The second, designated primary photographer and chief bag-carrier, struggles a little behind; this is sometimes the significant other or, more often than not, desperately trying to become so. But another type of wild instagrammer, for reasons unknown, prefers to hunt solo. These unnaturally enthusiastic hunters are hard to keep track of. You may glimpse one rapidly darting hither and thither, stopping only briefly at crucial points to deploy the monstrous appendage that these solo-hunters have evolved to maximise their hunting ability, a lethal telescopic extension of their bodies: the selfie stick. It strikes with fatal speed and precision. If you find yourself in close proximity to a solo-instagrammer in the process of deploying this terrifying apparatus, evacuate immediately. There is the very real possibility you will be caught in frame when they suddenly make their signature, killing move: an unnerving fifteen-second 360 degree turn around their own face, ruthlessly ensnaring all unsuspecting creatures unfortunate enough to be within the lens range of an iPhone 13.  

More sinister and elusive than the instagrammer is the much-feared TikTokker. This new species, rumored to have escaped from a top-secret Chinese psychological-warfare research facility (although never confirmed), spread virulently across the globe making it their second most contagious export in recent years. TikTokkers are everywhere, though difficult to spot. Unlike the bold instagrammers, Tiktokkers are immensely territorial. Some never leave their secretive lair, preferring instead to produce “content” from within the safety of their carefully crafted burrows. But don’t be fooled by this apparent docility, for this so called “content” is highly infectious, particularly to younger demographics. It allows the TikTokker to lie in wait for its helpless prey without the need for much active hunting or creativity. At certain times of the year however, young TikTokkers leave the nest to convalesce in little groups on quiet streets or shadowy park greens. Assembled there before a propped-up phone, in what one may easily mistake for a satanic ritual, they begin to perform a loosely choreographed and barely synchronized ritual dance. For what? Nobody knows.  

Finally, the most sophisticated and well integrated in society – the YouTuber. They have learnt to pass relatively unnoticed in day-to-day life, cultivating human relationships and even gaining acceptance and status midst more unsavory circles. YouTubers do not hunt. Rather, they have developed a successful system of husbandry, and many YouTubers have built permanent and highly-functional domains in which to operate. From here the YouTuber tends to its valuable flock, “subscribers”, nurturing them with professional-grade content and keeping them hooked with irresistible “click-bait”. As YouTuber society developed in structure and complexity, religion naturally followed. The YouTube religion is monotheistic: all power derives from, and adoration is consequently bestowed upon, a single all-knowing entity reverently referred to as the “Algorithm”. The “Algorithm” is everything to a YouTuber and they spend much of their time contemplating its mysteries and seeking to gain its favor. They pour over the sacred graphs in “Analytics” and praise the prophet “Click-through rate” in hope of one day being accepted into the promised land of “Monetization”, where they will live forever in paradise – the YouTube Partner Program. Until that day however, the YouTuber must toil tirelessly in a competitive system of insatiable demand, likes and dislikes, and feared above all else, the ruthless Inquisition of the comments section. You may understand, therefore, why YouTubers under such high pressure to satisfy both the almighty Algorithm and their fickle flock console themselves by claiming to be at the top of the content-creator food chain. This explains their unfortunate diva-complex, their illusion of superiority, their unbearable sense of entitlement which leads to them parading around public bathing areas with a camera, delivering mediocre monologues about rising petrol prices, filling countless SD cards with hours of their own face and obnoxiously exploiting beautiful ancient sites for a handful of likes… oh god – what have I become? 

Baelo Claudia 

Hence my constant battle with the superego every time it comes to talking to a camera. But it’s worth it. The ride was much needed, and the Roman baths and Bealo Claudia are indeed beautiful. It’s never completely smooth sailing of course – in that video the time-lapse footage of me riding was due to my, once again, unknowingly leaving the action-cam on time-lapse for the entire day. Luckily this time I could ride the same route back to capture the stunning mountain roads, but I really have to stop doing that.  

The original plot, pre-evacuation 

I camped that night in a campsite on the beach, looking across at north Africa as the sun set. Unfortunately, when night fell the noise in the campsite did not. It was the Easter holidays in a high-demand area, and apparently nobody else wanted to sleep. After two hours of silent cursing and fantasizing of doing a Will Smith on the three obnoxiously loud men ranting about motorbikes in the plot next to me, I pulled on my shoes and dragged my tent, erect and full, to the darkest and emptiest corner of the campsite. That was stupid – I’m lucky the base didn’t rip on a sharp stone, but by this point I was damning the very existence of the entire human race for not letting me sleep.  

It was also Semana Santa, holy week, which is quite a big deal in Andalucía. On the 17th I flew to Dublin, and on the 18th to America. Yes, America. Let me explain. My youngest brother, Cuan, is a singer, and found himself in need of a videographer for his most recent gigs on the Caribbean island of St. Croix (which as we learnt while trying to explain our destination to a very confused American immigration officer is not pronounced as written in French, but rather as “Saint Kroy”). Naturally I was approached, and it was only after much pleading and begging and arm twisting that I reluctantly cleared a week in my jampacked schedule for an inconvenient job in the tiresome U.S. Virgin Islands. It’s a hard life. In the writing of this article my lawyer has reminded me of the non-disclosure clause in my contract for this gig, and I think I’m still under CIA observation, so I must limit my account of our time on St. Croix to non-sensitive trivialities, uncontroversial opinions, and never, ever, mention the Bermuda Triangle or the aliens. Believe me, they made that unquestionably clear. No aliens. 

Flying over the Caribbean 

Americans, to Europeans, are a peculiar bunch, as I’m sure Europeans are to Americans. I, for one, have never met an unfriendly American. Aside from a brief stay in New York back in 2012, the majority of Americans I have interacted with are tourists on holiday – sorry, vacation – here in Europe. In Ireland we love American tourists. No seriously, we do. American readers I address you directly: your accents are amusing, your enthusiasm for just about anything is eyebrow-raising, and your politeness is over-the-top even to us, and that’s saying something. But we welcome the quirkiness and  joie de vivre you bring to our streets and pubs, and we embrace you as long-lost brothers and sisters because after all, as you never fail to remind us, you’re all Irish anyway. But it is a rare treat to experience Americans in America. It’s like tasting the soup rather than just the isolated ingredients. I wont say it’s the best soup I’ve ever tasted – there is no “greatest nation – I mean soup – in the world”, and I think anyone who claims they make the best soup in the world clearly hasn’t tried too many soups. But it’s definitely a unique soup; one you’re not likely to forget or turn down a second helping of once you recover from its sheer intensity and complexity of flavour.  

You’re all Irish anyway – Guinness bottle in Frederiksted 

You’ll notice I spell flavour with a ‘u’. That’s because I learnt British English as my first language, though technically not my mother tongue. That would be Irish, or Gaeilge, which shamefully I can’t speak (and is a topic for another day). But it is a peculiar thing to find yourself surrounded by people who speak the same language as you do, whose popular culture is so familiar to you (as indeed it is throughout the world, we call it Americanisation), yet feel so completely and inexplicably out of place. But not in a bad way, I hasten to add. Surrounding yourself with the unfamiliar and the alien is enriching. It forces you to throw away the cultural crutches, one called identity, the other called fear, that we cling to for a fragile sense of comfort and security. When you learn to walk on your own two feet through the crossfire of “us and them”, when you reach the firmer ground of our base priorities, our shared desires, the universal challenge of navigating the human condition, you realise those crutches were only holding you back. Travel is a luxury, but if it’s not also a challenge you’re doing it wrong. And in America one specific challenge was very difficult. I admit, I failed to overcome it. You may think it trivial, but I am convinced it has global implications because although America is still the number one super-power, its future dominance is not as certain as it was even a quarter of a century ago. Its society seems to be on the brink of war with itself; its institutional and political integrity being repeatedly questioned. Not only is it reluctant to lead the way in tackling the impending climatic catastrophe, but its collective questioning of the reality of such in 2022 is frankly insane.  

Of course, nobody believes this is reflective of, or the fault of, the average American. With such a huge population encompassing a wide range of differing belief systems and ways of life, combined with an enshrined right to freedom of thought and expression, the very existence of the United States as a nation is a triumph of civilization. It is a glimpse of what is possible. But, it has a lot of problems. Leonard Cohen called it “the cradle of the best and of the worst”. How I would love to be a historian two-hundred-and-fifty years from now just to see what becomes of the American experiment. By that time, America, if it still exists, will be celebrating its five-hundredth birthday. France, by contrast, will celebrating it’s one-thousand-three-hundredth-and-something’th. Certainly the relative youthfulness of America as a nation is a contributing factor to both its unrivaled success and the problems it now faces. But there is another reason. One which I believe is the cause of all America’s problems, no – I go further – is the determining factor for the very success or failure of a civilization, and it all comes down to two things: coffee and wine. Americans, listen to me, you guys drink bad coffee, and the wine… I weep. And that’s coming from an Irishman (though we invented whiskey, so we get a free pass). I am not claiming that you can’t produce quality coffee and wine, of course you can. In fact, most European vines (particularly French, though don’t tell them that if you value your life) only exist today due to their being grafted onto imported Californian varieties during the Great French Wine Blight of the late 19th century. This calamitous period occurred when an aphid indigenous to the Americas was unknowingly transported to France in the 1850’s and proceeded to decimate old European vineyards. So the issue isn’t in the capability of producing quality wine and coffee, but in the consumption and societal perception of such.  

I shall begin with wine, that most ancient and revered of beverages. The jury is out on the oldest alcoholic beverage: wine, beer, or mead. You will see different claims in different places (usually depending on whatever they’re trying to sell you), but it’s really quite impossible to nail down. The oldest written reference to an alcoholic beverage similar to beer is found in a Sumerian poem dating to 3,900 BCE. This is pre-dated by illustrated depictions of alcohol consumption in numerous cultures from Mesopotamia to China and, even further back, archaeology confirms that our ancestors were getting their buzz on well into pre-history. Whether from fruit of the tree or seed of the grass, if it ferments, we can’t get enough of it. The search for those wonderful sugars, the cultivation of yeast – our best single-celled friends – and the gradual learning to manipulate and refine them into mind-altering elixirs is the story of civilization itself. Spreading from the Caucuses into Western-Asia and across the Mediterranean sea, the art of wine-making, vinification, became an emblematic feature of early agricultural societies in this part of the world as it has remained to this day. Western civilization grew up with wine. It was produced in varying quality and sold according to such, value being determined by its age and place of produce. It was traded across the known world so that societies geographically incapable of wine production still consumed great quantities of it (to the horror of the Romans who considered it uncivilised to drink un-infused, un-diluted wine – a taste not shared by their northern neighbours). It was incorporated into religious rites and, under the wing of the catholic church, travelled to lands unimaginable to the Phoenicians or Greeks. As I pour myself a small pre-lunch glass, I must explain how wine is consumed here in Europe. It is a common drink to have with lunch or dinner across the continent though there are, of course, differing regional customs. In southern Europe, when it comes to northern Europeans and wine (and probably drinking in general), the perception is that they drink too much and at the wrong time. In Ireland, for example, it’s normal for a couple to drink a bottle of wine with dinner – an excessive amount for two people on a Wednesday night in the eyes of southerners. In southern Europe on the other hand, it is not uncommon to have a glass of wine with lunch, whilst in the barbarous north the alcoholic beverage of choice to accompany lunch, if any, is beer – wine being preferred as an evening drink. Ironically, in particularly hot regions like where I live in Andalucia, beer, or wine mixed with sparkling water and ice, is the go-to drink in the summer. Northern tourists enjoying the local wines whilst having lunch then find themselves, despite their best efforts, still being the odd ones out, surrounded by beer-drinking Andalusians. The irony is compounded by the fact that beer is typically better in northern Europe. Germany, naturally, has the best of both worlds producing both fine wines and delicious beers (France, Italy, and Spain also make beer of course, but lets just say they’re famous wine-makers for a reason). This has gotten confusing, so here’s my general rule: wherever you find yourself, it’s best to drink whatever the old man at the end of the bar is drinking as it’s probably the best stuff going. In Cordoba I am particularly fond of a very dry white sherry called fino. It’s something of an acquired taste, bitter and biting, it gets you on the sides of the tongue. But regardless of where you are in Europe, even in the far-flung beer-swilling whiskey-sipping uncivilised edge of the world (or home as I call it), the drinking of wine is always an event. The choice is considered, the glass measured, the note contemplated, the taste savored. And whether you’re in a dirty road-side bar in sunbaked rural Spain drinking a lunch-time glass from a re-used bottle with a sticker of the local co-op pasted over the original label, or sitting in a cosy restaurant somewhere in the dark and rainy north, closing your eyes and drinking the sun through the the blood-red ripples of a fine Sicilian, you relish the moment knowing that you will not, can not, experience another quite like it. This is what I missed in America. Granted I did not go out of my way to locate a limited edition bottle from a small family-owned vineyard in some Californian valley I’ve never heard of, nor did I partake of any exclusive and ridiculously priced vintages, but then again I never do – that’s not the point of wine. In America the wine tasted absolutely fine – but it all tasted absolutely fine. All of it. I found that very strange. It was uniform, stacked in uniform bottles (or – I shiver – cardboard boxes) and enjoyed in numbing uniformity. How can this be, I wondered – how can a glass of wine be such a non-event? And then I saw the light, the explanation for it all, the crises at the core of the American psyche. For if the average American walks into a bar, a restaurant, a supermarket, wherever, to procure some wine – the most subtle of concoctions, the most complex of creations, the indisputable zenith of gustation – and already knows exactly what they’re going to experience, well just look at the result. Chaos. A society that can no longer be emotionally moved by a glass of wine has severed itself from its soul. It has removed itself from the great parabola that stretches from that starving fur-clad club-dragging hominin trudging through the bush who first saw a rotting fruit and thought to themselves “huh, may as well eat that”, to agriculture, pyramids, and space stations. If you cannot be momentarily transported to that single transformative moment in human evolution, the instant you and Mr. Flintstone both taste that bitter fermented nectar and exclaim in unison from either end of the human story “damn, that’s good”, then you have lost your connection to the fundamental essence of the human experience, the highest plain of civilised existence, the final frontier of our genus and ultimate manifestation of Homo Sapien – appearing smug and superior to your fellow cave-dwellers with your extensive knowledge and refined palate for rotten fruit.  

On to coffee. The roasted bean that was to the early modern age what cocaine was to David Bowie – this is where things get crazy. Like Bowie in the mid 70’s, civilization was chugging along just fine fermenting its fruit and churning out classic rock. But Rome had come and gone, the middle-ages were sliding away in the rear-view mirror, and album sales were plateauing. Something new was needed here, something to really shake things up. What’s that you say? An exciting new stimulant that means we can drink all night and still get up for prayers and persecution in the morning? Why don’t mind if I do. Behold, the fall of Constantinople, the colonisation of the New World, and the Enlightenment, henceforth to be known as Station to Station, Low, and Heroes. This is no coincidence by the way. It’s well known to those of us who have listened to an ungodly amount of David Bowie that he was in fact an alien supervising the progress of humanity and, foreseeing that it’s all downhill from here, dropped Blackstar, checked out early, and left to find another intelligent life-form that wasn’t so committed to its own self-destruction. Though I think what he meant by I’m Afraid of Americans was actually “I’m Afraid of Americans and their Coffee” because oh dear, American coffee. Coffee took the Islamic world by storm in the 15th century causing both great enthusiasm and concern for the same reason – being a cognitive-enhancing stimulant – and was the source of extensive debate. On the one hand it had already been in use for some time by Sufis in Yemen as a means of aiding their all-night devotions to God, but under Gods law substances like alcohol, tobacco, and therefore arguably coffee, were haram -forbidden. But defenders of the new bean argued that its effects were not comparable to alcohol and similarly harmful, mind-altering stimulants, thus ought not be associated with such. Eventually it was clear that coffee was here to stay, its effects were decreed halal – permissible – and it quickly spread beyond the Ottoman Empire. In Europe, the catholic church had similar reservations about the black aromatic substance as did their Islamic counterparts, calling it the devils drink, and illustrating how conservative bodies regardless of religious and political affiliations are inherently fearful of, and opposed to, anything new or unfamiliar. Fortunately for the Catholics who had developed a taste for it, coffee was give the papal thumbs-up in 1600 by Clement VIII, or so the story goes. Europeans spread the plant across the globe, their northern domains being unsuitable to its cultivation, and this is where Americas love affair with coffee beings. This is the time of the plantations and the trans-Atlantic salve trade, which we will have cause to discuss later in this article. From plantations situated between the tropics of Capricorn and Cancer, conveniently termed the coffee belt, export coffee was shipped across the sea to the imperial states of Europe and their colonies in North America. In the bustling home cities, coffee houses nourished dissenting political ideologies, caffeine-fueled harbingers of the age of revolution, whilst in the thirteen colonies, particularly after the Boston Tea Party, coffee symbolised American resistance and independence from tea-drinking England. It was the brew of patriots, and America never looked back. Or I should say, America never looked forward, and that’s why American coffee is so distressingly appalling. Allow me to explain myself, please, before you go and declare your independence from this blog.  

I reiterate that this is indeed being written by someone from Ireland – the Irish are the heaviest tea-drinkers in the western world (even surpassing the UK per-capita) – and not only that, but someone from Connacht, the northwesterly region that consumes more tea than anywhere else on the island. You have not known true desolation of the soul until you are a coffee addict lost upon an ocean of tea. Coffee came late to my part of the world, within my living memory in fact. Fortunately I had parents who, unbearable hipsters as they probably were, discovered in their youth what exotic brews were to be found beyond their gloomy shores. They organised; an unlikely alliance of university students and business people returning from continental Europe, meeting below shadowy college campuses and smoky airport terminals. They rebelled; fighting many bloody battles with the tea-drinkers and their barbaric mercenaries, the filter-coffee clan. It was the Celtic Tiger; it was all or nothing, now or never. Finally, by the late 90’s, the state was forced to recognise the rights of coffee-drinkers and now, twenty years later, one can enjoy a good cup of coffee just about anywhere on the island, though we have never forgotten the sacrifice and selflessness of that first pioneering, heroic generation. So I drink coffee, usually twice a day; one in the morning (ideally before getting out of bed), and one after lunch. When at home I use a moka pot and good quality, but inexpensive, Italian coffee from the supermarket. When we can afford to treat ourselves, we enjoy an artisan blend from the tea/coffee shop which is somewhat expensive but thoroughly delicious. When I’m out and about I opt for a simple espresso, or in Spain, a café solo. It’s strong, invigorating, and costs about a euro. When I’m at home in Ireland in the winter I will have an ‘Americano’, what we call two espresso shots topped with hot water. Continental Europeans don’t drink these, but they haven’t experienced winter in Ireland where an Americano is not only meant as a caffeine-fix, but also as a portable hot-water bottle. So I am by no means an amateur coffee sommelier like some of my peers (or as I call them, filthy hipsters). One of my best friends, whom I love dearly, travels everywhere with his portable coffee grinder and aeropress; my unrestrained derision and slagging instantly devolves to groveling and flattery when the first notes of that exquisite substance waft across my nostrils. But he’s a hardcore coffee aficionado, I’m satisfied with just a good cup of coffee – that’s not too much to ask, is it? Well apparently in America, it is. Americans, once again, I say to you: you guys don’t drink coffee; you guys drink mildly bitter murky water, and over the ten days I spent upon your shores, it was nearly the death of me. 

How can it be that the U.S., the dominant superpower, the great melting pot of the world, can fuel itself with this pitiful excuse for the most significant stimulant in the history of civilisation? It’s like expecting a Formula 1 car to drive on Capri Sun. How the hell have you made it through the past two-hundred-and-fifty-years on this stuff? Once again, illuminated genius that I am, I had the answer: patriotism. You guys still think its 1783. In so many ways American society is incapable of joining the modern era. Across the land there are old-timers changing the flints in their muskets in case the British re-invade, a cup of good-ole patriotic coffee on the bench beside them. Coffee made like the British made coffee in the 18th century – steeping a few beans in a kettle-full of water – coffee made like tea. Even after two world-wars, when millions of Americans trooped the length and breath of Europe, did not one enterprising G.I. think to bring an espresso machine home? I’m sure a few did, but the end of the Second World War heralded a frightening new age which cemented Americas identity, amongst other things, as terrible-coffee drinkers: the age of the atom bomb, of cold war, of unbridled capitalism; the age of instant coffee. My generation gets a pretty bad rap as being defined by “now culture”; the demand for instant communication, instant consumption, and instant gratification. But you older guys, so quick to condemn the young as you watch the world ever slipping away from the one you grew up in, were you really any different? Did you not also gobble up fast food, fast oil, fast pleasure? When some man came on the television offering you fast coffee without the hassle, did you even think twice? Of course you didn’t, why would anyone? “Now culture” was born in 1945, and this is its last hurrah. It’s had its day, the damage is done. Today we know that it’s unsustainable, that meeting the demand for something, anything, everything now, is simply incompatible with the planet’s limited resources. I don’t know what the next decade will bring, but the pessimist in me thinks that we’ll keep our heads deep in the sand, business as usual, until one day without warning there’ll be no more coffee left, and that, my friends, is the day the world will collectively lose its shit.  

Till that day comes however, I will continue to take my time over my coffee, as I do my wine. Some things in life are better when taken time over anyway. There should be nothing ordinary about a sip of coffee or wine; just think of the journey each roasted bean has had to end up in your morning cup of coffee, how many hands it has passed through, how many livelihoods depend upon it; and how many lives have passed since the vines whose produce you now relish were first planted in that warm rolling vineyard, who grew the vines there a millennia ago, and how did they enjoy a cup of wine at the end of days’ work done. It’s all in the mind of course, and there is no best way to enjoy coffee or wine because it’s all matter of taste and custom. They’re mostly water anyways. We have a tendency in Europe to view America as a consumer-obsessed cultural wasteland. We look for examples everywhere, mostly for fun and never meant maliciously, but I think it does hint at some underlying superiority complex we have yet to come to terms with. It’s a subtle trap to fall prey to. As I write I look across at the Mezquita of Cordoba, bells tolling every fifteen minutes as the sun sets on a city over two-thousand years old. In the plaza people sit drinking their fino, someone is playing a guitar, and below my balcony walking-tours pass being entertained with stories evoking the ancient culture and history of this place. You can make some superficial changes to this scene and transplant it to just about anywhere in Europe, it’s all the same. Couple this with being taught how not-so-long-ago your country was a global superpower (yes lot’s of brown and black people had to die, but look at the civilisation we built), and perhaps you can see why some Europeans look at America and see only McDonalds, “Florida man” and climate-change deniers. Conversely (and please, Americans, tell me if I’m off the mark here), I’m sure a stereotypical American caricature of a European is that of a baguette-munching, wine-sipping, unpolite snob (that would be the French). But although my argument is entirely humorous, it does reflect some very factual differences between Europe and America, namely consumer culture and America’s relationship with food, which struck me during the days I spent on St. Croix. 

18th ce. customs house and Fort Christiansted 

St. Croix is a two-hour flight south from Miami across the Caribbean Sea. It’s as far south-east as you can be in America which it became a part of in 1917, being bought off Denmark for the equivalent of a couple of peanuts and a pat on the back. Denmark didn’t want it – it was a troublesome, un-profitable, emancipated colony. America, naturally, scooped it right up. There’s a curious film which I think is really sweet called This Must be the Place in which Sean Penn’s character, an ex goth-rock star, leaves his Dublin home to find an aging Nazi dying alone in a trailer somewhere in the Mid-West. One specific line from it came to mind after a few hours on the island: “There’s something wrong here. I don’t know exactly what it is, but something”. Scrub covered hills, palms waving in the warm sea breeze, water so blue and clear it could be out of a Disney movie. A Caribbean fantasy. Unfortunately I was unable to spend much time experiencing the island proper, work (if you could call it that) of one form or another occupied most of my time. The following impressions are therefore entirely superficial and may be completely misinformed. Nevertheless, this is St. Croix – The American Paradise.  
 

Cans and coconuts in a ruin 

Flying over the island I spied an unusual topographical feature: dozens of circles scattered all across the eighty-two square miles of land, every hill adorned with, what looked like from the air, a ruin. There was one just outside the airport carpark so I slipped away to investigate. An old stone-and-mortar construction, about four meters high and conical in shape, complete with weathered wooden beams inside. Nearby, camouflaged by the long grass, were impressions of some undistinguishable but clearly related structures. I could see another on a hill less than a mile away. My suspicions were confirmed when I asked our taxi-driver about them: sugar-cane mills. They were everywhere, some restored, others re-purposed, most slowly decaying. There were chickens everywhere, and the road was terrible. They drive on the left in St. Croix, but in left-hand-drive American cars. Warren, the taxi-driver, patiently answered all of our naïve touristy questions as we crossed the island towards Christiansted, the larger of the island’s two towns. Again, chickens everywhere. And ruins. Recent ruins too, remains of homes and businesses recently abandoned within the last half-century. In Christiansted, Warren pointed out the landmarks: the “boardwalk”, the fort, the colonial administration and the governor’s house. The seven flags of St. Croix fluttered excitedly, proudly displaying the island’s diverse heritage. Many people have come and gone here: the Spanish, the Dutch, the English, the French, the Kights of Malta, the Danes, and finally the Americans. Four-hundred years of changing hands yet something is wrong; the one constant, the people who have always been here and who still comprise more than three-quarters of the population, are glaringly absent. I suppose it would be hard to fit all the flags of west Africa up there, and it’s not their flagpole anyway. As the taxi drove eastwards the landscape became less developed. Luxury villas and luscious mansions dotted the brown-green hills. The road suspiciously improved. Warren pointed out the new hurricane-resistant pylons on this side of the island. Rumour is that they were hastily erected before the most recent elections and never filled with cement – they have yet to endure their baptism of wind. 

A young sea turtle  

St. Croix boasts some of the best diving in the Caribbean, or so I’m told. And I believe it. Dive tours are everywhere, lessons advertised anywhere tourists are to be found, posters and leaflets touting the inevitable sea turtle picture (I’m convinced it’s the same turtle on every one) bombard your eyeballs as soon as you get off the plane at Henry E. Rohlsen Airport. Coral reefs. Sharks. The untouched great blue is right here and waiting for you. Nature at it’s most beautiful and raw. Did we mention the sea turtles? Please ignore the oil refinery. Oh, that’s the Captain Morgan distillery. No we don’t recycle here in paradise, don’t worry, just toss it in the trash. And that’s all I’ll say about that. When you’re down there though, a tiny four limbed primate immersed in the immensity of the ocean, and all of a sudden a young sea turtle does indeed leisurely float by, for one precious unforgettable moment you can forget about all of that. And it’s not entirely true that there’s no recycling on St. Croix. Grassroots movements have organised efforts to combat the catastrophic waste problem on the island, but without financial or administrative backing they will only ever be able to accomplish so much. Litter is abundant on St. Croix. I think I went through more plastic water bottles in seven days there than I usually do in an entire year, there is simply no other option. The entire system of supply and demand is designed around instant, in bulk, consumption. After American acquisition, the island’s agricultural economy was replaced by the oil, rum, and tourist industry. This had the effect of cementing the population’s reliance on corporations for both imported supplies and employment, resulting in rising cost of living and rising unemployment. Unsurprisingly, and painfully obvious when you look around, poverty is endemic. In 2020, 22% of the USVI population lived below the poverty threshold, a measurement that critically under-represents the majority just about struggling by day-to-day. Combine that with the constant threat of devastating hurricanes, like the back-to-back hurricanes in 2017, and you can almost hear the faint strains of Bon Jovi emanating from the coconuts. 

My friend Lizzy the lizard 

St. Croix is an island of two halves, and while one is certainly Livin’ on a Prayer, I found myself on the side obliviously singing “cocktails everywhere”. Actually it was the Beach Boys Kokomo; I don’t want to hear that song again for at least a decade. About how well I fit in here can be evidenced by my befriending a lizard whom I named Lizzy. She was remarkably tame and inquisitive, and she kept me much-appreciated company through the days I spent hidden away from the world on my mountain-top lair, editing the most recent unOrdianryWorld video. I also enjoyed the company of Lizzy’s larger relatives, the majestic iguanas. The east side of the island where I was kept is extremely arid, a desert surrounded on three sides by sea. The west side is a rainforest, humid and lush. Two different worlds existing within sight of one another, but never mixing. I’m not sure how such a small island can be home to two unique eco-systems and micro-climates, but driving from one side to the other is like crossing a continent in forty-five minutes. On the way to Frederiksted on the western shore, by coincidence, we passed a famous tourist joint which we had overheard earlier was a “must see”. It’s a bar where you can pay to give a can of beer to a pig. The pig drinks the beer. And that’s it. Bizarre. Needless to say, we did not stop. 

UCA Kitchen 

Fredericksted is the smaller of St. Croix’s two towns, which we had been told was not so nice. To my untrained eye however, it seemed nice enough. More run-down than Christiansted for sure, but the quaint 18th century shore-front facing the evening sun, and the quiet shaded walkways, were a refreshing change. We had lunch in the UCA Kitchen, a community center and vegan home-style restaurant run by the United Caribbean Association. It was late in the afternoon and they were closing, but they generously cooked up what food they had left and chatted happily with us as we ate. It was the best food I had on the island. There was a memorial to an evidently cherished member of the community, who amongst other things was a cook in the UCA kitchen, and had recently passed away. Murals emblazed the walls commemorating emancipation and civil rights leaders. A table offered a selection of literature supporting black empowerment and community pride, a guide to Caribbean heritage and identity, and the importance of remembering and honouring the ancestors. There may be no problems for those living in the American Paradise, but there are certainly problems for those living in St. Croix. Here, at last, there was optimism as well as reality. 

In 1848, by protest, the slave population of the Danish West Indies gained their freedom. Today we speak of “economic slavery” in modern society, a situation of total reliance on a subsistence wage rendering an individual incapable of improving their situation and leaving them vulnerable to exploitation and abuse at the hands of their superiors. A similar situation evolved after 1848 whereby workers, although technically free, were contractually bound to their employer and the land upon taking a job in a farm or plantation. It was serfdom. In a few short years families had gone from being slaves, to freedmen, to slaves again in all but name. In 1878 another protest was staged demanding better working conditions and pay. It turned violent. The island was consumed by riot, buildings and crops put to the torch and great tracts of land reduced to rubble and ash: the Fireburn. The riot was put down at the cost of dozens of black lives, the male leaders executed in Fort Christiansted. However it is the women leaders who are honoured above all, praised and remembered for their leadership and courage in the face of injustice. The “Queens of the Fireburn”. Their legacy runs deep in the Cruzan consciousness, at least in those who are, in many ways, still fighting the same fight, one-hundred-and-fifty-years later. It was the young girl working beside her mum in the UCA Kitchen, then, who came to mind a few nights later when in an up-market restaurant in Christiansted I heard a white man disparaging the local population for their inability to free themselves from their subservient colonial mentality. “They still think they’re slaves”, he said, “and they see me as their white master, and they’re happy to sit on their asses living off government hand-outs”. You always think in moments like this that you would have the courage to rise to your feet to do and say what is right. But I didn’t. I couldn’t. The man was our host. I sat quietly and ate my duck confit tasting my shame with every swallow. There’s a big difference between supporting the good fight when it suits and being the one who actually needs to fight it. I guess I know where I stand now, and I hope that young girl and her mum will forgive my cowardice.  

The civilised pirate – a bottle of wine and a good book 

I would love to come back to St. Croix and explore the wider Caribbean. I can picture myself island hopping on a flakey old dingy with a bottle of wine and a good book, the life of a civilised pirate. But that’s not likely to happen. I regret I was unable to gain a deeper appreciation for what life is actually like there. From what I saw, St. Croix could be so much, and evidently lots of people agree on that fact. Their respective visions, however, may not be mutually compatible. What would I know anyway, I’m just a wine-sipping European coffee-snob, pronouncing your place-names in French and happy to enlighten ye poor settlers about all your un-couth ways but quick to drop any discussion that veers too close to European responsibility in colonising the New World. Just leave me here on the rocks, I’ll be reading about apology-avoidance strategies. Though the Irish have always had a knack for turning up in the most random places at the worst possible time, revolutions in particular for some unfathomable reason. So St. Croix, you know… or I guess the point is, you never do. 

Watching the rain over Cordoba with my granny 

Back on the other side of the pond once more. After two years of pandemic, I was finally able to travel once more with one of the three women in my life, my granny. We spent a few days exploring Cordoba together, eating delicious food and enjoying the late spring weather. Meanwhile Marina, my girlfriend, was working on, and has since submitted, her PhD thesis. I don’t think anyone realises what PhD students go through. I’ve seen countless photos of shell-shocked soldiers – Marina wasn’t too far off that by the end of it. But super-human that she is, she pushed through it and was immediately rewarded with Covid. We’re four days after testing positive and fortunately neither of us have been too sick. This article has gone on long enough so I’ll sign off here. Thank you so much for reading and being part of this project, I hope you’ve enjoyed! See you down the road,  

Ferdia.