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Downloading ‘Game of Thrones’ at the edge of the world

It takes a good long while to download anything on St Helena. A good long while and a pretty penny. A half hour of foot-dragging wi-fi at any one of the handful of hot spots in Jamestown, the island’s capital, will set you back nearly six dollars. Two hours will set you back nearly 30.

Thankfully, in November last year, the local service provider introduced free unlimited downloads after midnight. Of course, everybody on the island got in on the action and late-night download speeds are glacial. It takes the island’s Irish drama teacher, Pamela, three days to download a single episode of Game of Thrones. But download it she dutifully, diligently does. Her commitment to the show is matched only by her patience. She somehow manages to save the episodes up until she’s got enough for a proper marathon.

St Helena is one of the remotest inhabited places on earth. Nearly 1800 kilometres from the African coastline and another 3200 from the South American one, this tiny rock in the South Atlantic is currently accessible only by boat. The RMS St Helena, the last commercially operating Royal Mail Ship in the world, runs monthly passages between here and Ascension Island three days’ sailing to the north and Cape Town, South Africa, another six to the south. Contact with the outside world is tenuous at best.

A group of young, educated expats have gathered for a screening of show’s fourth season premiere. The island’s economist is here, as is its detective. (Everyone thinks that The Island Detective would make for a pretty cool HBO show of its own.) Ed Thorpe, a seventh-generation Saint Helenian, or Saint, whose family owns and operates a good number of the island’s private enterprises, is the only local among us. But he’s spent enough time abroad to have developed certain tastes in television.

Pamela is the only one who downloads the show. It wouldn’t make sense for everyone to do so, eating up each other’s bandwidth. And watching the show together like this is more enjoyable anyway. Pamela has commandeered a data projector from somewhere and intends to screen them first four episodes of the season on the courtyard wall above our barbeque, where we regularly cook up local tuna steaks, which sell for a pittance in the stores and on the docks.

We’re living at Cole’s Bunker on Napoleon Street, a small, highly agreeable property operated by the National Trust, which also runs a number of conservation programs on the island. Pamela is our upstairs neighbour. Mathieu, a French contractor who has been building bridges in Pointe-Noire, Congo, has been recovering from malaria for the past couple of days but stumbles determinedly into the yard from his bedroom across the courtyard in order to catch the screening. The smell of fresh guavas lingers about us as the birds sing evensong.

The expats aren’t tourists and have to take the island as they’ve found it. Only when it comes to downloading Game of Thrones have they stubbornly refused to change their ways.

Most of the expats are here on two-year contracts and they have come prepared. Pamela is packing an external hard drive loaded with a year’s worth of Hollywood blockbusters, French art house pictures and Disney musicals. (She will restock when she returns to Ireland for Christmas.) Another teacher, Victoria, whose contract is nearly up, is more familiar by now than she’d like to be with the contents of her DVD collection, which she carries around in a black binder in case anyone who shares her taste for horror in general and zombies in particular should wish to copy them.

On St Helena, piracy has less to do with getting something for nothing than it does with preventing one’s isolation from the rest of the world from slowly driving one
mad. The expats came prepared because they knew how difficult and frustrating it would be to try and get their hands on anything once they arrived. The internet situation is only one of many that are going to have to change by the time the island’s long-awaited airport opens two years from now.

The tourists that the island hopes to attract are going to require faster speeds at lower prices in the same way they’re going to require credit facilities—the island currently runs exclusively on cash—and a greater number of accommodation and dining options. But the expats aren’t tourists and have to take the island as they’ve found it. Only when it comes to downloading Game of Thrones have they stubbornly refused to change their ways.

Everyone here is up-to-date with the series and its body count — thank the gods — and we sit around speculating about who among the regulars is likely to get the chop this week. We settle down with bottles of Windhoek beer from Namibia and Savanna cider from South Africa and Pamela fiddles around with the computer.

Admittedly, the picture isn’t great. The off-white wall is large but lumpy, the characters rippling and bulging across it in strange ways, and it has a slightly convex shape that messes with the aspect ratio. The sound is even worse. The birds have transitioned from evensong to cacophony in the trees that line the netball courts across the way and our tiny, tinny speakers can’t compete, requiring us to lean in close.

But lean in we do, and not only so that we might hear better. The theme music begins and the shortcomings of the experience are immediately dispelled by the Sturm und Drang of the whole bloody saga.

They’re also dispelled by the experience’s charms, by its novelty and the sheer, dogged fandom that made it possible in the first place. They’re dispelled by the sensation of being in the middle of the South Atlantic, literally thousands of miles from anywhere, and still managing to feel that, in some small way, we are in contact with the wider world.

Even if the world in question is Westeros.

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