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At her home in Goodwood, on the windswept Atlantic coast of Tobago, Elspeth Duncan recounts a story about an interesting story about an unusual thing she once did. You might call it a social experiment. She might have a different word for it. Or perhaps she might not classify it or put it into a kind of box like most people do when they think about social interactions.
In her travels around Toronto she would go to a busy public place, write a short uplifting positive message on a post-it note, “something like ‘tonight is going to be magical,’ something like that,” she explains, and would stick the note on, for example, the glass of a revolving door so that the next person to walk through would see the note there in front of them and pick it up. Duncan and her friend would then wait at a distance and observe people’s reactions.
“Inevitably they would smile and quite often they would fold it up and put it in their bag or pocket like it’s something they want to keep. But we would always, when we could, look at the look on their faces and the change and it’s like…nice.” She laughs.
When she did the same thing in a taxi cab in London, however, she almost got the taxi driver fired. They used the same taxi firm to travel from a suburban railway station to their project location two days in a row and on the second day the driver told them the next customer after them had seen the note—which had said something innocuous like “Look around, there’s a lot that you don’t see”—misinterpreted it as some kind of subversive threat or warning and reported the matter to the taxi company.
It was around the time when fears over terrorism were heightened, Duncan explains and paranoia was rife.
It’s interesting to note the differing outcomes. It sums up how unpredictable human interaction can be. But that same unpredictability—the idea that you don’t know what might happen but that you as an individual have the power to play a part in somebody’s day, their life, for some short moment—is something Duncan thrives on. The average person might think it a bit odd but every day she has encounters with people in public places while she’s going about her day.
After a while she decided the nature of these encounters—at times funny, moving, poignant—ought to be recorded, so she began to write a blog about them. Starting next month these short blog-type pieces will appear weekly in the T&T Guardian. The column, entitled Tobago Peeps, could be described as unique for a newspaper. Duncan is a unique person.
Now 47, she's done and seen a lot. Raised in St Augustine in a scholarly family—her father was a professor of botany at UWI and her mother a librarian in the Extra-Mural department—the young Duncan and her two younger sisters travelled a lot with her family. They even spent a whole year abroad in Germany and England. Later, Duncan majored in literature and minored in linguistics, general psychology and sociology at UWI.
After university she taught English literature at a high school in south Trinidad for a year before going to Cambridge to do a master’s in criminology. She never went on to use the master’s professionally, and if you ask her why she chose criminology, she tells you she’s a creative person, and what interested her at the time was rehabilitating people.
“For me that merged the ability to be creative, to appeal to another side of the person rather than just…” She tails off at the end of the sentence, but what she means, in short, is that helping people is something she does.
A lot of her life, or lifestyle decisions, amount to finding ways in which she can use her creative energy, what some might call her spiritual healing side, to help others. She used it when writing her book Daisy Chain, a collection of short stories about interconnected characters and lives. She uses it as a kundalini yoga teacher and when creating perfect evenings at her mini-restaurant, Table For Two, which she hosts on the garden patio in Goodwood overlooking the sea.
Each meal she cooks is not just a meal, it’s an occasion. Before you come to dine you fill out a questionnaire about yourself, your needs, your likes. Duncan takes the information and produces food, ambience and activities that the couple, or just two friends, will always remember fondly. Except, perhaps the couple who turned up to consume her vegan cooking who had never eaten a meal that didn’t include meat.
“They barely touched the food,” she says. “They must have gone home ravenous.” On other occasions it becomes a magical experience. “Every night is memorable in its own way, but one of the most memorable was an English couple who came. On the form one of the last questions is: if you had a wish for the two of you, what would it be? And the woman put: ‘That we could’ve seen leatherback turtles,’ because it was their last night on holiday.
“So the whole dinner was turtle-themed and I created this experience with things in a box, some meditational music and turtle visualisations and each course was a clue leading up to the final thing—which was that I took them turtle watching, down at Turtle Beach.” The couple had tried five times to see the turtles and never seen them.
“As we reached the beach, BAM! This big massive leatherback mother covering up her eggs, and the husband was just silent. We were there for about an hour. He didn’t say a word, he was just in shock. The woman was just like: ‘Oh my god, oh my God.’” Duncan moved to Tobago a year ago. Her friends ask her how she can live there but, for now, she prefers the quieter pace of life.
“Everywhere has its pros and cons but I like it, I feel better here than in Trinidad. Trinidad is a rush. The traffic, the heat… “Here the focus has shifted. More yoga. New things came up while I was here. The restaurant—in inverted commas—for example. I don’t think I would have even thought of it if I was in Trinidad.”
Before the yoga, the restaurant and the column Duncan spent nine years as an advertising copywriter with McCann Erickson and later Lonsdale, planning, designing and executing whole campaigns for corporate clients. For such a ceaselessly restless, ever-moving person it's perhaps surprising she stayed in the same job for nine years. “At first it was fantastic. Getting to be creative all day. Getting paid. The weekend would come and I'd be like, ‘Shoot, it’s the weekend.’ So I enjoyed it at first. ”
So why did she leave the advertising industry if she loved it so much? “It's almost like telling lies every day. You’re advertising stuff you might not necessarily use. “Also I began to feel that clients’ ways of thinking were very limited. A lot of the time they’re saying, ‘Add on this,’ when it’s really not necessary. Advertising can be very minimalistic and powerful, but a lot of them don't get that. “So it got frustrating creatively. And I felt I wanted to use my creative talents to help people and heal them.”
She also felt the range of things she does—music and writing—were not getting a chance to breathe. Nowadays she creates soundtracks—she learned piano as a child, up to grade 7. She also makes films—something she loves as it brings together many of her passions, writing, music and the visual arts. She shows me several paintings she is working on that are currently scattered about her living room in various states of finishedness. She has written several plays.
It’s almost as though there's nothing this woman can’t do. Did she find that process of writing a script hard? “No.” Dialogue came naturally? “Yep.” So that's theatre covered then... But why does everything she’s involved with come back to healing? Why is that so important to her? “Because you have creation and destruction, and there’s a lot of destruction. We all have a creative energy that can either manifest in a creative form or a destructive form.”
To demonstrate how far one can go to help to overcome destruction: Duncan last year went to India and put together a dance production with girls who were the victims of sex trafficking. They performed it at Sadler’s Wells in London. “It was so amazing. They got a standing ovation. Such tiny girls and yet when they got to that stage they were larger than life, they just towered.” It's hard to describe her as any one thing.
“I'm not any one thing. I don't think I could be. I would feel trapped.”
Elspeth Duncan’s new column Tobago Peeps begins next Monday in your T&T Guardian
Captions:
04: Duncan prepares for an evening at her mini-restaurant, Table For Two.
07: Elspeth Duncan leads a student through a kundalini yoga session in a picturesque outdoor setting in Goodwood, Tobago.
02: Explaining her painting Fire Horse.
PHOTOS: ARIANN THOMPSON