A Scorcher for the Captain’s Birthday!

It was an early start to his bday with the phone ringing around 4am, as usual Rowan’s parents in their eagerness to speak to their darling son, forgot about the time difference!

It was going to be a very low key birthday, but I had managed to sneak a purchase of some swimming trunks and shorts for him in Martinque, plus a french birthday card, the only one in the rack that didn’t look too schmaltzy. I was very amused when I got home and used google translate to interpret it. His best pressie however was the unbroken sunshine which was working his solar panels overtime!

We had booked a time to speak to all the kids and this time we got the time difference wrong! Requires a bit of thinking getting both South Africa and the UK in sync. Rowan was out snorkelling when they called. He was on a retrieval mission for the metal cup that slots into the BBQ to catch the fat, which he had dropped into the sea last night. He cleverly marked the spot with our man over board buttons on the chart. Amazing how far we were from the spot this morning, but it was a bit too deep and murky for him to find! Great catch up with the kids. Phoebs had got him the most inspired present. She has injected some large pieces of recently felled sycamore branches with 3 different varieties of mushroom spore. It involved lots of drilling, filling the holes with spores then covering them with just the right amount of wax. We are thrilled we should be returning to a mushroom farm. Phoebe’s ducklings are nearly fully grown and get released in a week, how time flies. Luke is getting his teeth stuck into a lot of work which he is enjoying. Han is also working all hours, with quite a few challenges, but an amazing experience.

Luke’s friend Libby, told him her mother spotted this, it had passed us all by! Rowan is very chuffed to share a birthday with the inventor of the world wide web!

We had a huge brunch, I then put in an order to the supermarket that has a special quarantine delivery. Sadly they don’t seem to have all the exotic fruit we had in Martinique but they did have local rib eye steaks…. what a birthday treat! We were called to the dock in the afternoon, and not only was our shop there but our gas bottle was sitting on the dock too. We got back to Pole Pole and the celebrations for his birthday picked up a notch as I was able to make a small chocolate birthday cake (now that we have plenty of gas), and baked some bread at last!

We had a really gourmet quarantine birthday feast. Rowan had made a delicious flat bread on the bbq, accompanied with homemade guacamole and slices of rib eye, with a pepper and aubergine side dish. All followed with a delicious chocolate almond cake, a wonderful simple reliable recipe from my sister Widge, topped with the last of the pecan nuts from the family farm in South Africa. Washed down with some nice wine, it wasn’t a bad birthday celebration after all!

Oops, Just spotted I got the 5 the wrong way around!