Recent reads

The Last Pink Bits, by Harry Ritchie. Ritchie, a former literary editor for The Sunday Times, takes the reader along on a madcap, disjointed tour of those far-flung colonial outposts that the British Empire had not yet managed to discard as of 1997.

This includes not only places of strategic importance like Gibraltar and sites of recent military conflict such as the Falkland Islands, but tiny specks of land like Tristan de Cunha, so far from continental shores and oceanic trade routes that its inhabitants' sole contact with the outside world comes from the BBC World Service radio and a twice-a-year supply boat. Fiend might enjoy his description of the Caribbean Turks and Caicos islands, where the local economy seems to be stuck in a perpetual state of slightly seedy, pleasantly lazy bemusement. (Did anything further ever come of the 2004 proposal that Canada annex the islands? A desultory search of GoogleNews doesn't reveal any recent articles on the subject....)

Ritchie is a tourist and a newspaperman, not a historian or anthropologist, so it's no surprise that his portrayal of these tiny outposts and their inhabitants is sometimes arch and frivolous. But he does provide an entertaining, if somewhat shallow, look at life in a collection of places that are completely unknown to most of the world.