I am writing this column from London, Bermuda, and several locations between. Right now, I am somewhere over the rainbow. I am in a tizz, unable to find my passport. The British Airways crew is having me recall where I could possibly have left it. They call Heathrow, hoping that I may have left it at the boarding desk. No luck. Eventually, a stewardess, slightly irritable, asks me to vacate my seat. The passport turns up beneath my footrest.

Middle age has finally crashed through my consciousness. My daughter, Tamara, had taken me to the airport. I had obviously appeared flustered changing my passport and ticket from one envelope to another. She held my hand, took the envelopes from me, extracted the passport and ticket from one of them, and put the passport into my jacket pocket.

"Remove it only at immigration," she said, "and everything will be all right." She gave me a kiss on the cheek and a hug to say goodbye.

My troubles are not over. I approach the customs at Bermuda airport. A young man, casually dressed, stops me and the most amazing conversation follows.

"Do you own a farm?" he asks.

"Farm," I stumble. "What farm?"

He asks the question once more. It can only be a question of mistaken identity, I think. But I have long been a target for Caribbean governments who think of me as a troublemaker. "What have I done now?" I ask myself.

"Do I look like a farmer?" I say. "No, I do not own a farm."

"Have you been to one recently?" Now, in my middle-aged paranoia, I think that Interpol, through MI5 or MI6, has been at work.

"Yes," I reply, "I was filming in Devon and Cumbria recently."

"Were you disinfected?" he asks. And then the penny drops. He is the foot-and-mouth man. By which time, at least a pint of sweat has dropped off my body. Life's a bitch, I think.

Not a very good beginning. It can only get better, and it does.

Bermuda is 21 square miles of prime real estate. Houses on the market now range in price from US$7m to $20m. Ten thousand of the leading companies in the business world have offices here. There is no production, only marketing and sales. It is a tax haven. The cream of the black population sits in these well-appointed offices. Sixty per cent of Bermudans are black; the rest are white settlers who originated in Britain.

Only two years ago did they get their first black government. It has not been all plain sailing. A violent insurrection 30 years ago accounted for the lives of the governor and the chief justice. Bermuda is still wrapped in the cocoon of British colonial rule. It imports 95 per cent of what is consumed on the island.

They are short on arable land, short on people, short on everything. Nothing is produced here.

At breakfast at the leading hotel on the island, a Sri Lankan pours my orange juice, a Canadian serves my bacon and eggs. Filipinos are house servants of the Bermudan elite.

The sounds and smells of Shakespeare evoked in The Tempest have disappeared, to be replaced by the buzz of urban life. Caliban, the slave in The Tempest, has been replaced, too - by the Bermudan businessman clad in Bermuda shorts, jacket and tie.

The island is a spit away from the east coast of America, drifting between old British colonial values and modern America.

All blacks here originated in the Caribbean islands. They get rather annoyed if you refer to them as West Indians.

They are determined to separate themselves from the chaos that inhabits the islands. And who can blame them?

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