One of the reasons I ended up in Trinidad was because, while I was working as an audience researcher at the UK Guardian, an e-mail arrived in my inbox one day from an irate anthropology lecturer, the Sunday Guardian columnist, Dylan Kerrigan.
Kerrigan was outraged that a survey my team had sent out to Guardian readers worldwide had failed to provide a tick box for Caribbean people to tell us where they lived. Question two on the survey: "Please select the region you live in from the following list," only had boxes for UK, rest of Europe, US/Canada, Asia, Africa, Latin America, Australia/New Zealand.
The Caribbean completely slipped our minds when we were thinking about the world and where Guardian readers might be based. Being half-Jamaican, I was a little embarrassed.
In an attempt to placate Kerrigan and "show him we're not racist," as my boss told me, tongue-in-cheek, I replied to him and sent a travel article I'd recently written about the parish of Trelawney and Usain Bolt's village, Sherwood Content.
We got talking about the Caribbean media and academia and the rest is history.
But only by going to live in the Caribbean and returning to Britain has it become apparent to me just how ignored the place is when it comes to anything serious. Beaches, reggae, ganja, rum? Sure, the first place anybody looks is Negril. Politics, crime, the environment? It's about as far off the agenda to Europeans as you can get.
In Britain the only countries of any real importance are America, France and Germany.
A demonstration of this came last week when I was desperately trying to get Wayne Kublalsingh's hunger strike in the mainstream international press. I gave the story to the Guardian: they dithered then said no. I gave it to the Independent: they seemed interested so I rang twice a day for three days, but they were just teasing. I thought about the Telegraph and searched their Web site looking for their T&T news page, which was titled "The latest and breaking news from Trinidad and Tobago."
Underneath it sat an entirely blank page.
Funny, I thought, I could have sworn that quite a lot of news happened this year.
To the side were related stories: a picture gallery of Carnival 2013 and a picture gallery about leatherback turtles.
Britain's only black newspaper, The Voice, is concerned primarily with the black British plight rather than the Caribbean motherlands.
Perhaps I'm being unfair to the UK media. Clearly, newspapers are in a terrible financial state and there isn't budget to cover breaking news from all 196 countries in the world. T&T, therefore, is well down the list of priorities. Jamaica gets more coverage because Jamaica is synonymous with the whole Caribbean for Brits.
Bob, Bolt, Beenie Man, Buster: we know them. Red Stripe, Captain Morgan's, ginger beer: we drink them. Jerk chicken, Jamaican patties, ackee and saltfish: we've eaten them.
We also know Barbados, Dominican Republic and Cuba but the rest of the islands are shrouded in mystery.
So the highway and the plight of environmentalists, communities and wildlife in Trini went unheard by the world, just like the BBC declined to feature Trinidad in its forthcoming Caribbean documentary series.
A day after I gave up pimping Kublalsingh to the foreign desks of Fleet Street, somebody sent me a link about T&T: the story of the women's football team being so cash-strapped that Haiti donated US$500 to help out. (The money was returned by the TTFF.) The UK Guardian had commissioned its Houston-based writer to cover it at length.
Which goes to show; you never know when someone might prick up an ear.
As a colleague in Trinidad pointed out to me, it works both ways. T&T is interested in what happens in the US and Canada but, "We think Cameroon is in Sierra Leone, Bulgaria is the same as Liberia, and Gambia is next to Guyana."
It's all about hierarchies of cultural relativity and relevance.
Last weekend, we went out in search of Caribbean ingredients to make Trini food for a British family occasion; an introduction to callaloo, pelau, saltfish buljol with ground provisions.
We began in the World Food aisle at our local supermarket and were excited yet puzzled to find tins of "Jamaican Callaloo in brine" as well as saltfish, Milo and gungo peas (aka pigeon peas). Next we tried my Colombian brother-in-law's recommendation and visited a hidden-away section at the back of the mall and stumbled into a secret wonderland.
Away from the McDonald's and Starbucks high street was a paradise of "ethnic cuisine." We went overboard in our excitement and bought breadfruit, cassava, eddoes, green seasoning, coconut milk and pumpkin.
Wading through one of the stores (owned by Chinese, Indian and Mediterranean shopkeepers, not Caribbeans) my girlfriend suddenly shouted, "Chadon beni," and I wheeled around, hysterical, almost knocking down a whole row of hot pepper sauce, but it was a false alarm.
There was no cilantro and no dasheen bush, so we got parsley and spinach instead. C'est la vie.
I had searched for news and food and found there is an appetite for the Caribbean, but only if you look in the right places.