The Last Pink Bits

Harry Ritchie

What an annoying book. Harry Ritchie obviously thinks that grumpy travel writing is going to turn him into the next Bill Bryson. The thing about Bill Bryson is that, however rude he is about a place, you never get the impression he has lost sight of how lucky he is to be able to make his living going to places and then writing about them. Harry Ritchie has come up with a great idea for a travel book - visit all of Britain's remaining colonies (the Last Pink Bits) and write about what he finds - but he executes it in the sourest manner imaginable. Ritchie's little joke, running through the book, is that he has set himself some sort of ghastly challenge. Britain's remaining colonies are, of course, in the main small, neglected and hard to get to. But since the majority of them are in either the Caribbean (sun, sea and sand) or in the South Atlantic (fantastic flora and fauna) I can't see how this equates to the itinerary from hell. At the start of the book Ritchie mentions Bermuda's referendum on independence and talks about praying for a Yes vote (in fact, they voted No) so he wouldn't have to go there. Look Harry, if you don't want to do the frigging book, don't do it!

In any case, Ritchie doesn't even try to visit all thirteen of our remaining colonies, limply admitting that he didn't fancy Pitcairn Island (in the Pacific) and that he couldn't be bothered to visit the Indian Ocean territories nor some of the smaller Caribbean islands. Which leaves Ascension Island, St Helena, Tristan da Cunha, Gibraltar, The Falklands, the Turks & Caicos Islands and Bermuda.

Furthermore Ritchie clearly thinks there are only two possible attitudes to Britain's puny remaining empire, you either cringe with embarrassment (like him) or you glow with imperial pride (in which case he intends to give you a quick dose of political re-education). The idea of a middle way, that some of us might feel merely that there is a largely harmless quaintness in some of the world's remotest islands having an allegiance to another slightly larger island many thousands of miles away doesn't seem to have occurred to him.

Of course, when you're as right-on as Ritchie, the Falklands and Gibraltar are a particular embarrassment because of the fierceness of the allegiance to Britain and because they are menaced in a wholly anti-democratic fashion by much larger neighbours. His solution in Gibraltar is to sneer at its provincialism and its boredom. In the Falklands he manages to reheat every left-wing criticism going. Thatcher engineered the Falklands War to get re-elected (oh, the beauty of hindsight). Britain held all the trump cards in the war (yeah, 8000 miles away) and would have nuked Buenos Aires if she had lost (never in a million years would a nuclear strike have been used.... what planet is Ritchie on?). We only fought because the Falklands is swimming in oil (19 years later and how much oil is the Falklands producing currently?). And it's all costing us a fortune (in which case why does the rest of the book spend so much time criticising Britain for penny pinching?).

Britain last added to the empire in 1955 when Rockall, a small uninhabited outcrop of rock in the Atlantic the size of football pitch was claimed for Her Madge by the Navy. I'd happily winch Harry Ritchie onto Rockall and leave him there.