The dustbins of history

I have just been speaking to an old friend and colleague, Robert Taylor, who was employment editor of the Financial Times before he retired in 2001. We were discussing the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington that I had visited in the summer.

The museum is a thoughtfully put together record of the Holocaust but I thought Robert made an interesting point when he asked why it should be in the US rather than Europe.

"Why don't they have a museum that documents the killings of North American Indians or slavery in the US?" he asked. "Is that too close to home?"

It is time that the US came to terms with both its slave-owning past and its treatment of Native Americans. One of the finest displays of Native American clothing and artifacts can be found in the Museum of Natural History in New York. There was nothing I saw there, however, that told the story of the Indian wars; nothing about the way the native people were moved out of their hunting grounds on to reservations and deprived of the food source - the North American Bison - that had sustained their way of life for hundreds of years.

Each visitor to the Holocaust museum is given a card with the name and details of someone who was persecuted in the Holocaust. The idea is to remind us that each of the six million victims of the camps and those that survived was an individual. Robert said that on his visit he found many of these cards discarded in the trash cans outside the museum.

Fish out of water

I would be knocking on the door of Eric Clapton's rehab clinic if I had the energy to get there. The discos go on quite late here in Antigua, except they don't call them discos anymore and people don't dance to records. Whatever happened to Status Quo?

There's a party at Andrew Pindar's place and someone gets chucked in the pool. That should have been the end of a pleasant evening but I'm persuaded to call at a club on the way back to the hotel. Bad move.

The day had started well. The local distillery boss, Anthony Bento, is kind enough to drive me around the island and we have a tasting of his English Harbour Rum. He says it is a "sipping rum". Too late. I gulped. We spend an absorbing couple of hours chatting with a local historian, Paddy Simon, who runs a lawn-mower repair shop. Paddy has some fascinating insights in to the slave trade that once held the island in its grip. I think they're worth a blog or a column to themselves.

But that meeting seems a long time in the past as I crawl in to bed at about 5am. The phone goes at 6am. I don't answer it. Then, at about seven, what sounds like a very loud vacuum cleaner starts up. I totter out of bed, grab my fishing gear and find a cab. Someone has told me about a promising flats-wading spot that might hold bonefish.

We find what looks like the spot. It has flats grass that bonefish like to roam. I spend about two fruitless hours wading about a mile and see some baby barracuda and catch a couple of small yellow-finned fish. But I don't see any bones. They will be here but the spot looks quite tidal and I think it needs more water to bring them in.

The taxi driver is puzzled about this fishing. "What do you do with these bonefish when you catch them?" he asks.

"I put them back."

"Oh."

It's pretty clear he thinks I'm a nutter and, yes, I know he's not alone.

Unfortunately I can't spend the day here because I have promised to join a big game fishing trip in the afternoon. I didn't expect much and it didn't deliver much - a smallish barracuda and a dorado (called mahi mahi here) from four hours of fishing. The sea is pretty rough and I feel sick.

There's another party tonight. I bet old Eric's place is busy.