Great news from UK yesterday. Debi phoned to say that she had just brought baby Joe home from hospital. He is progressing well, almost regained his birth weight and he has passed all the pediatric tests. Needless to say, the boys are so excited to have their new brother home and Andrew is mightily relieved to have both him and Debi home.

Early yesterday morning, Jeff decided to clear a few more of the weeds and rubble from around the garden while the day was relatively cool. He decided that a bonfire would be a good way of disposing of them. It had not been lit many minutes before a neighbour, Graham, came up the road to tell him that you couldn't just light fires here because of the danger of it spreading to the surrounding dry vegetation and it was necessary to get permission from the Police first or pay a heavy fine! Ooops! He sympathised with Jeff though, he has lived here for some years and knew the difficulties of trying to establish a garden, so he offered to send his gardener up to us as he now only worked 3 days a week for him. Sure enough, later on, a little old man appeared. He spoke reasonable English and said yes he could see our problems and he would come back today and start tackling the problem for 40 YTL per day (about £11). How could we resist.

Yesterday our builder Mehmet, sent some of his men around to us to start cleaning our swimming pool, ready for filling, great news. Mehmet later appeared himself with his foreman to check that we were happy with things. Apart from filling the pool and fitting some extra railings to the edge of a patio we just had one complaint. An area of plaster on one of the outside walls had seriously cracked and it was obvious would start to fall off before long. No argument once he was shown it and agreed that his men would tackle it on Monday. He also said the water would go into our pool on Sunday, but it is now evening and there is still an empty hole. The manyana attitude prevails out here so we are sure it will happen in the next day or two, inshallah.

This morning we left the house early as we were joining a group of friends for a day out on a boat and decided we'd have time to go to the 8am Communion first, so we didn't see whether little old man had appeared until we got back in the late afternoon. Sure enough, he had made good inroads into clearing the garden, so we will see what happens tomorrow.

The boat trip was brilliant. There were 16 of us, most of whom we had met before. We sailed east out of Girne harbour, later to anchor off Turtle Beach. It really is a beach where the turtles come ashore and a team of student biologists come every year from one of the UK universities (Bristol I think) to monitor the activity. It was lovely swimming in the sea, the water was warm and so buoyant. The crew made a delicious salad lunch with grilled chicken and lovely fresh tuna that the Captain had caught the day before. A lazy couple of drinks and then we began to sail back towards Girne, stopping at Diana beach for another swim. What a great way to spend a day.

Now while the majority of the ex-pats are watching England play Ecuador, we are going to a bar that we know doesn't have TV to have our supper.