This creature generally seems to keep watch over the entrance to the Standard pub in Jamestown — though not very attentively, at least at this point in time. I like the colour co-ordination in evidence on this shot. The palate is certainly consistent between cat, walls and steps.
Jacob’s Ladder has 699 steps, and rises 602 feet up from Jamestown to the fort above. It was originally built to transport goods, using carts and a mule-powered pulley system. Nowadays it sees traffic from the locals who breeze up and down it as if it were nothing more than a stairway at home, and the occasional visitor, like me, who thinks — yeah, OK, I really should give it a shot. But bear in mind there is only one escape point, at step 285: after that, you are committed. My time up this morning — 13 minutes and 45 seconds, not bad for an ageing geezer. But I am never going down it. Nope, not ever.
Believe me, the St Helena Yacht Club is not as posh a place as it sounds. But it is certainly the best place in town to watch the sun set over the Atlantic, and on Wednesday nights there is a regular food night of some description. In early 2023 it was Taco Night — nowadays it has morphed into Fish Night. Either way, I was there early, and the guy with the impressively pointy beard is still setting up.
I’m no botanist but banyan trees aren’t difficult to identify, with their multiple trunks and more on the way. This is the blog’s second, after the one seen in Brisbane (with the wife) back in 2013.
Anne’s Place in Jamestown is a St Helena institution and is the go-to spot for tourists and locals alike. Many of the former have, down the years, contributed the flags that now obscure its corrugated-iron ceiling. Some of these are fabulously obscure; the one with yellow and black checks near the bar proudly commemorates “Sutton United FC: Papa Johns’ Trophy Final 2022”. To not only have brought such an object all the way to St Helena, but to have, presumably, done so specifically to donate it: that’s commitment.
Wednesday night is Taco Night at the St Helena Yacht Club, probably the busiest single social gathering I have yet attended on the island, and in full swing behind me as I took this picture. But the outlook is west, across James Bay: the next land in that direction is Brazil.
At this time of year, big swells move down the Atlantic all the way from Canada and crash into the first land they meet, which at this point in the ocean, is the north-east coast of St Helena. The locals call them ‘rollers’. They were certainly rolling today, against the sea wall in Jamestown. In one year in the 1800s they were big enough to take out half the town. Surfers would like them, I imagine — although surfing is not a sport that seems to have yet reached St Helena.
Philately is one of the few concerns that has ever made St Helena any money. If you want your hard-to-get first day covers of the local stamps, this is the place to get them. The rock walls above, 500 feet tall, are ubiquitous in all views from Jamestown, crammed as it is between them.
Jamestown is one of only three places on St Helena where it is fairly easy to get down to the sea, and that is where I was standing at the end of my day’s work when I looked down and was faintly revolted when a whole sqaudron of these little black crabs scuttled out from just below me and headed for the water. They looked rather plain and black from above but I got the camera out anyway. On uploading the pictures it was pleasing to see the detail on this one, the spots, the red and the blue. Perhaps there is beauty in all things. (Except jellyfish, which really are disgusting.) This specimen can become the first of its biological order (Brachyura) to make the blog.
I seem to have made it to the last day in St Helena without a Napoleon reference — so here’s one, a vague one anyway. Not that this shot has anything to do with the man himself, for whom, having heard the stories of his time here, I now feel a little sorry. Anyway: there will be more to come of this place. But it’s time to head home.
Being 42 