Hell in Paradise

I’m currently sitting by the pool, trying to calm down after a rather stressful experience. I woke up this morning feeling rather peculiar. There’s something wrong with my ear. It feels like there’s been some almighty build up of pressure or wax. Low rumbling noises like air conditioning units or the sound of wind are almost deafening, in a sort of curious vibrating weirdness. Perhaps I got some water in my ear whilst swimming yesterday. Perhaps it’s the start of a cold. Whatever the cause, and despite medical treatment, I’m feeling very dizzy. I’m a dizzy old queen!


I immediately took myself off on an adventure to the Miami Beach Medical Center, which in retrospect felt like a waste of time and $300 that I don’t have. I was seen by a doctor with halitosis who told me it was just a build up of wax. He heard my accent and decided to say “cheerio” to me until I literally wanted to throw up. Perhaps he thought he was somehow bonding with me, but every time he said it, I just smelt his breath. He also told me proudly that he’d been to London. “That must be why he knows my language so well”, I thought. “Where did you go?” I asked “To a big shopping mall,” he replied. After much prompting, I discovered he meant Harrods.

The whole experience felt a bit third world if I’m honest. They decided to syringe my ears. Frankly, I could have done better with a pea shooter and a tub of dirty bath water. There were none of the modern clicking machines that they use in the UK, just a syringe and a sort of kidney shaped bowl, which I had to hold. I got covered in waxy water and then the doctor got a big pointy stick and stuck it in my ear. It hurt like hell. They didn’t remove much wax, certainly not enough for me to feel any different and I was sent away to a pharmacy to get a nasal spray and some eardrops.

In the meantime my travel insurance company and I’ll name and shame them (Columbus Direct) were not only incredibly rude to the health centre, they systematically gave me wrong numbers to call. It got more and more stressful, until I was forced to pay for everything up front. Heaven knows when I’ll see that money again. And heaven knows when this weird vibrating thing will stop. The music I’m listening to at the moment is almost unbearable – and that’s not just because it’s rancid R and B.

You can’t actually escape music anywhere in Miami. Every pool, every shop and every restaurant pumps it out at full volume to the extent that you never get to listen to just one track; you’ll hear two or three simultaneously and at different volumes. It's like listening to Berio except with musak. Yesterday I heard Chiquitita played on pan pipes in the background whilst something by Edith Piaf played (probably) by Liberace droned on and on in the foreground. I'd have notated it, but it sounded like shit.

Yesterday I finally got the opportunity to visit the “historic Art Deco district”. It’s very cool. I love Art Deco and the area was exactly as I’d imagined with rows of brightly coloured buildings all with stunning bold lines and perfect curves, most with a hint of the Mediterranean about them; very different to the predominantly white art deco buildings we tend to find in the UK.

We saw a rabid drag queen "doing" Liza Minelli, photographed our shadows on the beach, met the rudest man in the world behind the counter at Starbucks, and sat and ate at the News Cafe, which is where Gianni Versace drank his final morning coffee just before he was taken from the world. The steps where he was shot, which are in front of his former villa, have become something of a ghoulish tourist attraction. I’m not sure it’s particularly appropriate to lie down and play dead in the spot where someone bled to death, but people do. Perhaps not everyone who was posing for a picture knew why they were doing it. Maybe they just saw a lovely Spanish looking villa, saw other people having their pictures taken there, and thought, “let’s see if we can smile so broadly that our perfect American teeth look like freezer units!”

Last night we went to the theatre to watch a play called The Golden Gays, which unsurprisingly was based on The Golden Girls predictably with men in drag. We lasted all of ten minutes and left whilst one of them was singing There Are Worse Things I could Do from Grease, with a chronic lisp and stranglely all on one note. "An achievement", I thought, between giggles.

Now here’s a quandary. 1660 was a leap year, so I’m going to have to write about what Pepys did on the 29th February as well as the 1st March. Hold on to your gussets! No, wait, he didn't do anything of any interest on either day, so you'll just have to skim read the next couple of paragraphs.

On February 29th 1660, Pepys discovered that Montagu was going to be returned to the high ranking Naval position he’d occupied under Cromwell and lost because there was a feeling he had sympathies for the royal family. Pepys called in on his mother and then Mrs Turner, where his cousin gave him a “brave” (meaning good) cup of metheglin, a sort of spicy mead, and the first he’d ever tasted.

On March 1st, Pepys went to the office, and found, as normal, that there was nothing to do – even after such a long time away! He then decided to write about the death of one of his friend’s coachmen in rather graphic detail; “killed with a blow of one of his horses that struck his skull into his brain”. Lovely. And I bet no-one has their photograph taken whilst pretending to be a horse at the spot where he died! Pepys then shared two pints of wine with Mr Shipley, and then retired to bed early. And that’s all, folks.