BY TONY DEYAL

THERE ARE at least two good reasons for my liking Barbados and they are both related. The first is that while Trini pride might be in its oil wealth, Bajan Pride is a flour. Secondly, Barbados is the only country I know that has a bread called a "Health Cob".

In spite of the word "cob", amaizeingly it is not a cornbread. The word "cob" is from late Middle English and means "rounded" or "head" so a "cob" is a round-headed loaf. "Cob" can also mean "to strike on the buttocks with an instrument, as a punishment".

The Bajan bread is heavy enough if you get cobbed with it you can get "cobbed" (meaning "crush or bruise") and make you "get a cob on" or get angry. That is bad for your health which word, as defined by the World Health Organisation, means a "state of well-being" as distinct from the absence of disease. Even though Guyanese tennis rolls are my favourite Caribbean bread, the Bajan health cob tastes really good as does the Bajan salt bread, as does every bread I have known.

The long and the short, the French bread and breakfast roll of it, is that I am more than a glutton when it comes to bread, I am a gluten. Breadren is my name, flour power is my game.

If I were to be re-incarnated as a fruit or vegetable, I would return as a bread-nut. I can be described as "well-bread". As I travel through the Caribbean, when people call me "Breads" or "Breaddah", I marvel at their perceptiveness and insight. How do they know that bread is my favourite food? My preferred hymn is Oh Breadder Man and my prayer of choice is the Lord's which includes: "Give us this day our daily bread."

As my increasing age and corpulence cause my doctors to decree that I give up my favourite food, I think of the obituary of the veteran spokesperson for Pillsbury flour, Pop N. Fresh. It read, "Pop N. Fresh died Wednesday of a severe yeast infection. He was 71. He was buried Friday in one of the biggest funerals in years. Dozens of celebrities turned out including Mrs Butterworth, the California Raisins, Hungry Jack, Betty Crocker, and the Hostess Twinkies.

The graveside was piled high with flours, as long-time friend Aunt Jemima delivered the eulogy, describing Fresh as a man who never knew he was kneaded. Fresh rose quickly in show business, but his latter life was filled with turnovers. He was not considered a smart cookie, and wasted much of his dough on half-baked schemes. Still, even as a crusty old man, he was a roll model to millions. Fresh is survived by his second wife. They had two children, and one in the oven . . ."

Even the increase in the price of everything in Belize, including flour, has not inhibited my consumption of the commodity that is the basic building block of bread. Bread is the staple that holds the pages of my life together. Not for me the cake so beloved of Marie Antoinette who, when told that the people of Paris were demanding bread and could get none, responded: "Let them eat cake instead."

Mouth watering

Even though, historically, peasants have always been revolting, the one ennobling and elevating element of their existence is their love for bread. There is a Trinidad Trade Union that uses as its motto, "Peace, Bread and Justice" putting bread in its rightful place at the centre of man's search for salvation and salivation. All bread is indeed mouth-watering.

The musical scale of evolution and existence begins and ends with dough. The first bread was made in Neolithic times, nearly 12 000 years ago, from coarsely crushed grain mixed with water, with the resulting dough probably laid on heated stones and baked by covering with hot ashes. It went like hot bread and soon its fame spread throughout the ancient caves.

Probably bread helped to make the dinosaurs extinct since it transformed the Tyrannosaurus Rex from a carnivore to a bread-nut like me or even a doughnut. The Egyptians discovered that allowing wheat doughs to ferment, thus forming gases, produced a light, expanded loaf, and they also developed baking ovens.

Mark Anthony's frequent travels to Egypt were not, as Shakespeare and history would have it, because of his attraction to Cleopatra. As far as he was concerned, she could take her barge and shove it up her asp. Although she was well endoughed, he was more interested in her buns. That, after all, is the way the cookie crumbles.

One of the great miracles involved loaves and fishes and those of you who ever put some flour in your hand to catch sardines would understand the significance of the combination which, in Trinidad, has evolved into bake and shark and in Jamaica, Johnny Cake and salt-fish.

In Mexico, you have to be careful about what you give to women, in or out of childbirth. The reason is that they give their breads names like gendarmes (policemen), llaves (keys), cuernitos (horns), alamares (frogs), palomas (doves), besos (kisses), moños (bows), corbatas (ties), banderillas, campechanas, magdalenas, orejas (ears), garibaldis, conchas (shells), calzones (underwear), cocoles and pelonas (bald ladies).

I can see myself giving a cocole or pelona some calzones and besos; her husband would think that he was getting cuernitos and the next thing you know he would get the gendarmes for me. That is why I prefer to stay here in the Caribbean where we eat what we like, where we like, when we like. There are men I know who eat saltfish and roll straight off their beds.

*Tony Deyal, a crusty older man, was last seen talking about the two insects who left the flour bin to go out into the world to seek fame, fortune and dough. One became a roll-model and the other, whose life was filled with many turnovers because of his half-baked schemes, died before knowing how much he was kneaded. He was always known as the lesser of the two weevils.