Saint lunch and fire training

Today, very unusually, we went out to Sandy Bay to have lunch with a church couple. I said to Nick on the way there that we would probably be served chicken legs, curry, rice, potatoes, fishcakes, and vegetables. I was right! Nothing more, nothing less. Our hostess cooks really well though, and definitely makes the best potatoes on the island – parboiled and then panfried, but ever so crispy, and soft on the inside. For pudding we had ice-cream and peaches. The boys ate well, and even Aaron didn’t lag too far behind on the eating part. We had a good time with them – they are lovely people, extremely simple and down to earth, and very generous too. In parting, they gave us a package of fishcakes, eggs, chips and chocolates for the boys, an entire chocolate cake (which I said to Nick was probably for afternoon tea, but we left too early), AND ₤10 for the boys to share. The weather, as we thought, was cool in the country and a little inclined to rain, like a child with a freshly scraped knee who will cry if someone just looks at them the wrong way. The boys had armed themselves for the visit with their bags, packed with toys, so they played nicely. Caleb apparently didn’t notice that it was drizzling, so he was wandering around in the garden, flying a transformer spaceship.

We took our supper of leftovers from last night’s social to the docks – one of our favourite things is to be there in the late afternoon, to catch the last bit of sun after it has already left the valley. After we got home from the docks, we noticed that there was a lot of noise coming from the schoolyard across the road, so we went upstairs to have a look from our bedroom windows, like nosy neighbours. The fire department was having a training session, where they were squirting a lot of water from their really big hose, which takes two strong men to control. Other chaps, dressed in red shirts with yellow braces which seemed more appropriate for a children’s video where the presenters jump around and do silly dances and sing silly songs, were engaged with unfurling hoses, connecting them, then disconnecting them and rolling them up again, carrying them to the other side of the playground, and repeating the exercise, presumably for speed and efficiency. It was interesting to watch. Nick took the boys across the road and they got a good close-up view of the action from the hole in the wall.