My two seat mates on the flight from London to Mauritius were two lively young lesbian lovers. They did almost everything under my armpits, except penetration, as if I wasn't there at all. Same-sex relationships have now been normalised in a large number of 'advanced' countries, including the UK.

I don't know how the prosperous little sugar and tourism island of Mauritius handles the matter in law and culture for locals and tourists. But judging from their evident conservative ways, almost certainly not favourably. Outside of a few resorts with a clandestine acceptance of the homosexual tourist trade, those two girls would face considerable difficulties here in Jamaica with such blatant expressions of same-sex love as they displayed on the aircraft.

But on to the news in the lovers' country, Britain. 'A Biblical Flood', the loud-mouthed Daily Mirror screamed. Nearly twelve and a half inches of rain fell in the Cumbria region in the northwest of England in 24 hours. "The floods engulfing Cumbria were caused by a level of rainfall that occurs only once every 1,000 years," the newspaper reported. This was the heaviest rainfall recorded in England since records started. The Sunday Times reporting: "It could get worse", and "Tropical-style storms to follow climate change," said the deluge was equivalent to six months of rain over London and the south-east of England, notable for its bleak, drippy weather.

The worset-hit town was Cockermouth. Well, yes, for Jamaicans, this quaint name means that the town is at the mouth of the Cocker river where it joins the Derwent. And that location was its undoing. Tons of water rushed out of the Cumbria mountains at 25 mph, the rivers overflowed their banks, the saturated ground could absorb no more water, which all became run-off. A thousand people had to be evacuated from being trapped in their homes, some by helicopter. A police officer was swept away in the flood as he stood at one end of a bridge directing motorist away, and the bridge literally collapsed under his feet. His patrol partner at the other end was unhurt. Constable Bill Barker has become something. "Britain should brace itself for more tropical-style deluges of the kind that wreaked havoc on Cockermouth," according to climate experts, The Times. And global warming is fingered as the usual suspect.

We, in this country, are far more used to floods. And hurricanes have been turning up more frequently, but thankfully none this year, as global climate changes. "Floods were a rarity in Britain," The Times said. "It meant that when floods struck across the midlands in 1998, the country was unprepared."

Flood defence preparation

A lot of flood defence preparation by a rich country has since then gone on, some of which were overwhelmed in Cumbria. The times ran a double-page screamer last Sunday, 'Beware: deadly floods cannot be prevented.'

While the war against terror for us is the stuff of international news, and tighter airport security, which is a crying nuisance, for Britain it means body bags. The 100th repatriation of British soldiers killed on duty in Afghanistan and Iraq took place on November 20, the day I arrived in the country. More than 70 per cent of the British public is opposed to keeping British troops in Afghanistan. Prime Minister Gordon Brown has instructed defence chiefs to seek how some troops can be pulled out of Afghanistan by the end of 2010, The Times has reported from "senior defence sources." Some see this as only an election ploy.

The Daily Mirror followed Foreign Secretary David Miliband to Kabul for the second inauguration of President Hamid Karzai whose regime the newspaper labelled corrupt. In a report, "Why we are there", Miliband tells the Mirror reporter, "It's gone on longer than the Second World War and the death toll is rising to the level of the Falklands War. But this is a different war. As President Obama said, "it is a war of necessity ... We're there to stop the Taliban from overrunning the country and providing a shelter for al-Qaeda again ... We're helping Afghanistan, not just because it's poor, but in the '90s it became dangerous, and today the bad-lands on the Afghan-Pakistan border are the crucible of choice of international terrorism." Remember that when your toothpaste is seized at the airport security checkpoint and you have to take off your shoes and belt.

Immediate tasks

Henry Kissinger's famous question, "who do I call when I want to speak to Europe?" has been answered in the appointment of British woman, Baroness Catherine Ashton as EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, after previously serving as trade commissioner. Not bad for someone who was once national treasurer for an organisation, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which had communist sympathies, opposed NATO and the Falklands War and was of concern to the security services, with MI5 labelling it 'subversive'.

One of her immediate tasks will be to deal with banana and sugar diplomacy which is of direct and urgent concern to the Caribbean. The European Union as a bloc is one of the top economies of the world, alongside the United States, China and Japan and will be of significant interest to Jamaica and the Caribbean, post-banana and post-sugar. The project for building capacity in forensic science which has taken me to Mauritius via the UK, is an EU-funded project, and there have been many others for Jamaica.

Martin Henry is a communications consultant. Feedback may be sent to medhen@gmail.com or columns@gleanerjm.com