The week started off with a punctured tire and a dead bird in the driveway (have we already pissed off the afore mentioned Jamaican neighbours, d’ya think?). The drive to school is about 20 minutes and school runs from 8:45 till 3pm. It's quite late as neighbouring island kids have to get to Tortola via boat. Little William is loving ‘big school’ (it’s the uniform) but said “it lasts forever” and they are all wilting a bit when they get home in the afternoon.
Yesterday morning (Monday) Tyler and I went to a “List”. When people need to leave the island, big lists get circulated for stuff to buy. This poor woman had been on the island for 4 months and had lost the plot – hurricanes and tropical storms, bugs, mud-slides, incalcitrant bureaucrats, horrible supermarkets (she is from LA but has been living in Tuscany) was just all too much and she had decided to leave within 72 hours. I think this place can do that to one quite easily. It certainly has a Wages of Fear aspect to it, as can be seen from this photo from Tyler’s dads seventies collection. Many roads still look like this. [I’m posting this later and when we came past Elevator Rd this morning, a car had slid down on its roof (there is some rain today) and it looked like a poor little tortoise on its shell, thus deepening my sense of Wages of Fear.]
Anyway – us chirpy new islanders - had a shopping fest, limited only by the amount of dollars we had on us and we came away with laundry baskets, mosquito nets and enough loo paper, cling film and Twinings English Breakfast tea to last a couple of years. People here have serious Food Storage, and do impressively huge bulk buying in St Thomas and bring in their ‘national’ foods with alacrity, but there is only so much Campbells tinned soup I’m actually prepared to eat. I’m now deeply thrilled that our efficient shippers packed all our food – bar the contents of the fridge – so that I too soon can have a storage cupboard to be proud of. There is a South African shop with the inevitable Mrs Balls, Niknaks and Ina Paarman but it also has an excellent wine shop where we picked up a bottle of Chocolate Block and Pongrancz at $19 (yipee!).
The rest of the day was spent ‘Starting Up’ including an hour and half at the Cable & Wireless offices. We will have our home phone and internet in about 10 days with unlimited broadband, so excited about that. In the meantime, we will continue to hang around the cays with all the yachties and their Apple Macs on wi-fi.
We got home about 4pm and I collapsed on the veranda to read my book (the new James North Patterson) and Tyler took the kids swimming. I then had my first rum drink about 6pm with limes from the garden
Although our big garden was badly trashed last week by Earl, we still have paw paw trees, mango trees, banana trees, coconuts from all the palms, sugar apples, limes, bread fruit, tamarind and a few other things I don’t recognise. I’ve already planned out where I’m going to put my vegetable patch, but just need to find seeds (and everything else actually) to get this going. We have several chickens and their chicks scratching through the garden, so Tyler is threatening a coop.
The sun is up now and soon we will have to start the new day. I can see that it is already noon in South Africa. This quiet dawn time has been rather pleasant – so may make it a habit (after my early morning run and yoga on the beach of course).
It was wonderful to get so many emails yesterday, so please keep writing. Please also pass on the blog address, particularly to class moms and other school people so that the boys can remain in touch. They are all getting their own email addresses.
So well written Julia -you put me right there, with the rum on the verandah! P xx
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