Thursday 2nd February 2023, 2.00pm (day 4,179)
Curiosity, and the need to stretch my legs during a day sat working on a report, took me down the road to investigate the old flax mill that stands there, a relic of just one of many attempts to institute some kind of working cash crop economy on St Helena — doomed from the point in the 1960s when the Royal Mail decided it no longer wanted to use string to tie up its parcels and would instead rely henceforth on nylon. Now the place seems to be used as a cow byre: but the dairy industry here didn’t survive regulations on hygiene, or was it something else? Laws and practices developed for quite different contexts have never really gone down very well in this remote and distinctive place.
Being 42 