Erikka Askeland: Having a rum old time without the internet IF YOU heard a dull thud yesterday it could have been me landing back in the UK after spending Christmas in Cuba. I don't often go swanning off to the Caribbean. But Mum and Sis, who live in Canada, were insistent we should all meet somewhere warm for the festive season. And as where they were coming from was -23C, you can hardly blame them. It is also the case that Cuba is essentially Canada on Sea, due largely in part to the lack of American tourists - a legacy of its choice to turf the Americans out and put in Fidel Castro in 1959. Plus, there was all the rum we could drink which made the small tropical island a sensible choice. I don't mean to rub any of your cold wet noses into it, but at the time of writing this I am still so relaxed I could be in danger of being judged to be in a coma by medical professionals. It is true that spending 12 days in an all-inclusive resort replete with palm trees and white sandy beaches is not what you might call real life. We persued a strict regime of lying on deckchairs under the shade of thatched umbrellas, punctuated by feeding and drinking at will. If the relentlessly cheerful resort staff actually wanted to plant between our shoulder blades the machetes they used to hack off the tops of coconuts which were then served as drinks, they never showed it. And the hardest part was being forced to choose whether to have another banana mama rum cocktail, or to switch to mojitos. Between us we had a small library of novels which we consumed greedily. I had also stocked my e-reader with the collected works of a number of authors such as Jane Austen, F Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf - which have the benefit of being highly edifying as well as being cheap because they are out of copyright. All told, we probably had at our disposal more reading material than there was in the Great Library of Alexandria. Yet, I am a bit ashamed to admit that despite this wealth of material I sometimes felt a bit twitchy. Access to the internet was highly limited which meant my addiction to e-mail and social media had to be soothed by other means. Not having instant access to random bits of fact niggled. I started a list of things I meant to Google when I got back. These included such queries as "what is the risk of death by falling coconuts?" and "what percentage of their body weight does a sparrow eat in a day?." Apparently as many as 150 people a year succumb to palm-tree-related incidents around the world, but I had to wait until I got back to assuage this insistent but irritating grasping after useless facts. Instead, we resorted to turning on the US rolling news on CNN to feed what has become my penchant for a near constant onslaught of information. But the trouble with US 24-hour news broadcasts is that they report very few things but they do it repeatedly. The only news stories seemed to be about snowstorms in the US, the "fiscal cliff," and the increasingly bizzare arguments from the US gun lobby in the wake of the tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut. It was this last story that had me shouting at the television as I applied my sunscreen. I was flummoxed that anyone would think a volunteer force armed to the teeth with semi-automatic firearms guarding schools was anything less than insane. I was even more shocked to realise that former British tabloid editor Piers Morgan is now probably one of the most sensible commentators on US television. Although ostensibly he hosts a light entertainment celebrity talk show there, the killings at Sandy Hook have given him an almost Paxman-esque gravitas. Albeit it does make me worry for him. There have already been calls for him to be deported back to Blighty - because what right does someone from Britain have to comment on the US constitutional right to bear arms, they decry. But I also hope he is aware he is stirring up what is essentially a very well armed hornet's nest. One of the nicest things about Cuba is that most people there also think that many Americans are a bit loco. It is a poor country but beautiful and very friendly. They have very high standards of healthcare to rival both the US and Canada. And gun crime is almost unheard of. And did I mention the plentiful rum, and the sandy white beaches?