Dear Varsity,

I am now the somewhat reluctant co-owner of a Guadeloupian cat. We found it during a midnight rum-saturated beach expedition, and to ensure that it truly was all alone in the dark Caribbean night - and to safeguard against any cat-napping accusations-, we left it abandoned a little longer and proceeded with the night’s frivolities. However, after a salty-haired rampage that consisted of wading into the 31°C ocean, rum punch in hand (lime for which was cut on the nearest flat surface, a copy of Maupassant’s Boule de Suif. There was some poetic justice to be found in slicing up the rather tedious A-Level text in a tropical French paradise), the furry ball of helplessness was still tout seul.

So, spurred on by what I can only describe as a gushing Avatar-inspired awareness of the insurmountable beauty and interconnectedness of nature (I blame the heady CGI-reminiscent combination of phosphorescent fish, glow worms and shimmering constellations overhead) the screeching kitten wangled its way into the car, and into my life. Never before has UHT milk been consumed with such gusto, or a potent purée of goats’ cheese and rum so gleefully lapped up. We’ve decided to train him up to battle common household pests, like cockroaches and iguanas. I’ll keep you posted on his progress.

As for the music here, I’ve been enjoying my (often wilful) misunderstanding of French and patois lyrics just as much the seductive calypso rhythms and omnipresent dancehall and reggae beats. The soundtrack to this morning’s commute seemed to be a man so disturbed by a whining woman wearing culottes that he felt compelled to sing about it. Either that, or he was delighted to have a semi-naked girl grinding herself into his groin. I couldn’t tell, although the song that followed, which consisted primarily of the refrain ‘punani tight, tight’ hinted at the less surreal of the two possibilities. Equally lacking in subtlety was a recent chat up line directed at a friend to the effect of ‘have you a spacious vagina, madam?’, a humiliation that I apparently will never be subjected to, being, as I was, introduced to a class today as ‘le petit garçon’...

Haxie x

Read last week's Postcard from Guadeloupe