My escape to a simpler way of life

A singer named Shawn Mendes recently announced to millions of his fans: ‘The truth is, it’s so hard to be human.’ Gee whiz, poor Mendes, and I thought I had drawn the short straw in life. Depressed as I was about how hard it is to be human, friends such as Prince Pavlos of Greece and Arki Busson came to my rescue. They picked me up from my hovel at 720 Park Avenue and whisked me to a private airport in White Plains, where Bob Miller, Prince Pavlos’s father-in-law, had a magnificent Gulfstream G650 waiting to transport the three of us to a place where it’s less hard to be human: Harbour Island, a lump on top of a 100 mile-long reef overgrown with vegetation, which is an escape to a simpler way of life. Yippee!

America was always a country on the move, starting with the Pilgrims, the homesteaders pushing west, the gold rush, Huck and Jim drifting down the Mississippi, and so on. Then the virus wreaked its havoc and everyone, including the travelling Americans, stayed put. Not your intrepid high life correspondent, however.

I hadn’t visited the Bahamas in 50 or so years, but last time I was there I got into a fight with Margaux Hemingway’s boyfriend outside the casino in Nassau. I already had my doubts about the place, a tropical Blighty with an American accent, some parts Yankee-owned. The then mega-rich Huntington Hartford had purchased Paradise Island, and the poor little Greek boy was stepping out with his wife, making me a hated figure to some of his dependants (and there were many). Never mind, that was long ago and time puts a halo on many things. Better yet, Harbour Island turned out to be as far removed from the glitz of Nassau as Margaux’s gigolo was from me.