In Hawaii Writing is hell, especially in Hawaii, where it tends to turn paradise into purgatory.
So on the sunniest days I try to finish my writing before lunch, then I load my kayak on the roof rack of my car, hurry to India Bazaar for a vegetarian curry, and afterwards I go paddling out of Ala Way harbour (easy parking), looking for green sea turtles and listening to NPR on my waterproof Walkman.
I return to the shore at sunset, have a shower nearby at Ala Beach Park, and on the way home stop for a beer in Manoa marketplace and discuss skiing and nothingness with my carpenter friend who is on his way to Vail.
A perfect day I have written something, I have exercised, I have seen perhaps three green sea turtles, and probably some dolphins, and always a brown booby roosting on the marker buoy a mile out of the harbour.
All this has taken place near Waikiki, yet I have not seen a tourist.
The fact that I have been oblivious of tourists all day - none at the restaurant, none at the harbour, none at that particular beach, nor at that bar - is not so remarkable, even in a place that hosts 6 million visitors a year.
Tourists always labour under a time constraint and are the unwilling victims of cost efficiency; so they stay together, they travel within a narrow compass, and they tend to stay put, once they have arrived.
This is the result of both accident and design; it is a favour and it is also a conspiracy.
Tourists are contained, partly for their own benefit, partly for the benefit of locals.
By being kept in one place, there is no risk of their interrupting the flow of local life.
So there is a sort of voluntary apartheid that keeps tourists and locals separate.
It seems odd to me that this should be so, because locals know where the best fun is to be had and how to avoid being overcharged.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of being resident in a tourist paradise is the way in which you seem to lead parallel lives.
All my life I have lived in places regarded as prime tourist destinations, in Africa, in South East Asia, in England, and now Hawaii; yet for the whole of that time I have never had much to do with tourists - hardly saw these birds of passage.
They never visited my bush school in Malawi - they were getting bug-bitten and sunburned 200 miles away on the stony beaches at Lake Malawi.
(In Africa only tourists sunbathe; everyone else - nationals and Peace Corps Volunteers - stay in the shade.
) In Uganda, while I was teaching at University, tourists were bumping in Land Rovers through the game parks, in a fruitless search for endangered species.
Tourists in Singapore shopped, while we residents enjoyed the hilarious club life of the island state.
I lived in south London for eighteen years, but tourists seldom percolated south of the Thames, to favour its seedy charm and glorious parks.
They were hot-footing it to Phantom of the Opera or the Crown Jewels; I never saw them, never felt the need to.
Island of Oahu For my past four years or so on the island of Oahu the story has been the same, visitors and locals enjoying separate pleasures.
They are not hated; if anything they are patronised and pitied by the locals, because they seem so innocent, inhabiting a tiny corner of the island in a timid toehold.
Hawaii is a culture of genial mockery, yet no one pokes fun at tourists; there are local Filipino jokes, and Samoan jokes, but you seldom hear anyone say Did you hear the one about the tourist? Most local residents are silently grateful for the revenue.
The tourists stick pretty much to Waikiki, and for them Oahu is the glitter of that mile of streets, its wall-to-wall hotels, T-shirt shops, and (with some notable exceptions) indifferent restaurants, meretricious entertainment, and loveable Polynesian kitsch.