I’m on the bow of Quest listening to the bing-bong. Bing-bong is my made-up name for beach tennis. That’s cause it makes the sound ‘bing-bong’. I love this game. Don’t play it enough. Damn you lazy bones.

There are a group of Barbadian men who also love this game. Pre-Covid they played every afternoon on the little stretch of sand opposite the Port St Charles yacht club. That’s when the yacht club bustled with business.

The yacht club is still closed now, but the bing-bong has restarted.

As I write, someone far off is blowing a conch shell. Traditionally the call of the fisherman’s haul. The trumpet sound of the conch. Some people and perhaps by that I mean tourists, play it too at sunset.

It’s been a good day all-in-all. The end-of-year exam week has finally begun. After a false start where I couldn’t find Lulu’s English Literature exam and then realised it was in a separate course called assessment week.

Who didn’t read the parent letter properly? Oops. Sorry too for the email I fired out. InterHigh’s admin team were like, ‘Who didn’t read the parents’ letter properly?’ I reckon they must have a roll-call of us. I would.

Anyhow, today for Year 10 was English Literature and Maths. For Maths, Lu chose to do the higher tier paper. Check it out. She did it in the time allowance and didn’t have a meltdown doing it. Wont lie: she looked beautiful.

Hold on – she did break a new pen. It was when Jack came in and started cracking her toes to wish her well. She threw it at him and the nib dented. But that’s sweating the small stuff. I had that covered. Bought five new pens in Cave Shepherd.

Meanwhile, Delphine worked on her coral reef portfolio for Humanities. Her year isn’t doing exams so much as a special project. Delph got to choose her own subject matter for Humanities as long as she could show she can plan and research it accordingly.

The conversation with her went something like this: ‘Delph, do you think you could do coral reefs? We have loads of books on it and we can put in a video of you diving the reef. That would be cool, no?’

Delph’s response was: ‘Yeah, ok.’ It was more of a eyebrow shrug really while she was in the middle of reading her new Dork Diaries book (also from the Cave of Shepherds).

Today was our third and final day of working on her project. The planning of it actually proved to be useful. It’s fun to do projects with Delphine because she is such a visual learner. To engage her fully in her school work, drawing has to be involved.

She drew and labelled a coral polyp. I’d forgotten what the inside of a polyp looked like. Looks pretty cool. Better in colouring pencil pink of course.