7:30pm. Cant see it but there’s a boat in the anchorage blaring out Rihanna. Hold on. Is it actually Rihanna? I forgot this is her home. Duh. If it is her, she is singing her heart out right now. Her songs are played here all the time. Good thing they’re good songs. Rihanna is the spirit of Barbados.

Ahhh. What a nice diversion into normal. Normal was the old normal. Can we go back there? Where we didn’t worry about getting sick, or if borders would be closing – or if the food would soon be disappearing from small islands. And someone might finally realise that Eddie’s supermarket is open.

There are three boats in our anchorage as of today. The Mob, Victoria’s Ghost and us. We were all going to leave. Now, we’re staying and waiting.

We got together on the beach this afternoon. Roland bought his wooden Molkky numbers again. We threw the wooden block at them. Such a good game. Roland meanwhile, is competitive. He takes the score, keeps the game in order and plays it himself. He used to be an accountant.

When it’s your turn to come up and throw he reminds you where you are in the game. It you throw three times and miss knocking over a number, you’re out. Knock one over before the third attempt to throw though – and you’re completely back in.

Here’s the dynamic. It’s not exactly that Roland wants you to lose, but he definitely wants to win. It was Delphine who spotted it first. I didn’t notice any underlying competition. It was just so exciting to play a decent beach game. And those guys are good company. Straightforward Americans are a breath of fresh air for me. Tough and funny. Non-complaining. So good. Delph’s right though. Roland does want to win. He won twice tonight.

Molkky isn’t as easy a game as it first seems. You’ve got to get to fifty. If you hit one wooden number, you get that number. If you knock two numbers over, you get the number of blocks you knocked over rather than the numbers on the wooden blocks. Basically – you just want to knock just one block over. The aim is to get to the number fifty, but if you score over fifty, you go back down to twenty-five. This means that as you get closer to fifty, you have to be selective with the numbers you aim to knock over.

And when you throw, you throw from a good distance. A throwing distance. Every time you knock a block over, it’s put back upright at the exact spot it landed. This means that as the game goes on, the blocks get further and further away from the spot which you throw from.

Sorry if I bored you with this explanation. I might start trying to write a Molkky game guide. That would be ultra boring. And totally normal.