Hi Everyone! 

Judging from the title, I wouldn't blame you for thinking that maybe we're getting into some jungle-type school here by the Grenadian jungle, like going camo and crawling through the undergrowth or pulling out our magnifying glass and identifying new species of orchids. Well, I have to disappoint you! Now for the truth: Amazon school is a maths code for Delphine for solving arithmetic problems. Each answer has a letter that spells a certain Barbie piece of merchandise and after she's cracked the code, she can go to Amazon, the based-in-Swansea-Amazon rather than the largest jungle in the world Amazon and decide if she wants to add it to the basket. Take that, regular school! I'm not even sure of the level of desperation that led me to plumb the depths of Delphine's consumerism but I am sure there's no going back now. 

It's true too that doing boat school for weeks here at the boatyard cafe gave me something I don’t usually encounter in a dark alleyway or anywhere else for that matter; perspective. Most of the time the girls and I sit there like we’re tied together to a stone; some days the stone's maybe made out of lighter volcanic stuff like pumice and other days it’s the heaviest Alpine granite but the weight is always there. For me the stone is how much better they’d be if they were back at school with actual trained teachers, these two kids of completely different abilities; Lulu the sponge learner who deserves the best education and Delphine, the one-minute-step-at-a time kid. 

There is one thing I got though; one thing I’m not willing to do, even when this stone is pulling us into a deep hole. That's give up! The problem is, I never know if this stubbornness is a good thing or not. There are some moments when Delphine may as well be inhabiting a different, much more interesting galaxy, Lulu's pining for school so much that it’s coming out of her pores and I’m sitting in the middle of a dark and gloomy thunderstorm trying not to explode when Jack will say, ‘I don’t know why you bother.’ He could be tossing a pancake up in the air. ‘If I were you, I’d give them a day off.’ In these moments, I'd hit him with a bolt of lightening and I’d watch his toe hair sizzle satisfyingly on his pancake griddle. Oops.

So Perspective. Bob started it, bless him Bob. A fellow cruiser, he turns up at the back of Quest the day before we hauled out and introduces himself. Bob's so smiley, I think we could have thrown a large spiky stick at Bob and he’d still have wanted to come aboard. About an hour later, over a piece of Lulu's birthday cake, he tells us that our chosen boatyard is going terribly downhill. 'The owner shouts at his workmen,’ he says cheerfully, 'and all his best staff are leaving him to join the up-and-coming new boatyard round the corner.' 'Aren't you also hauling out here?' Jack asks. 'Yes, yes,' he replies like we're a bunch of duh-brains and instead launches into a tale of cruisers paid by Facebook to write sensationalist blog posts. Paid by Facebook? Shock, horror! How can we get in there? 'They reported a de-masted yacht in the Indian Ocean in trouble before the cruisers' family even knew.' Since most cruisers make nuns look like big spenders, I don’t think that we register the shock Bob was expecting. ‘You might have a problem with your daughters soon,' he says next. 'I’ve seen girls only a few years older than yours turn into a whole heap of trouble. One yacht in the Indian Ocean had to sail in the opposite direction from another yacht because her parents were so concerned about her attachment to someone.' He raises an eyebrow but doesn't explain and I start wondering, albeit irrationally, if Bob is talking about himself. 'I’m not sure if children are better off being at school when they reach a certain age,’ he finishes. Thanks, Bob. After two weeks he came to our outdoor cafe schoolroom. ‘You know,’ he says quite seriously to Lulu, ‘you are a very lucky girl and one day when you’re older you’ll think my goodness, what an amazing education I had.’ I sat back. Was Bob making a turn-around? He never said. He left five minutes later to catch his plane.

The boatyard owner's wife, Laura turned up next. She’s a British lady originally from Epsom and has three kids, a set of fraternal twins a year younger than Lu and a boy a year younger than Delph. The kids stared at each other across the room for five minutes, became friends and went to the beach. Meanwhile, Laura surveys our pile of school books and raises an eyebrow. ‘How do you find it?’ She was scary but I tried to hold my ground. ‘I’m not sure, I guess I try to muddle my way through it.’ She nods briskly and says, ‘I have a vision about the way I’d like my children to learn. They need a better education, not chalk and board. The kind of school I want to send them to doesn’t exist yet so I suppose I'll have to start a new school. I want them to adventure, to build forts and explore. The kinds of things that your children must do every day.’ Right, I think. Building forts? I can just imagine Delphine picking up all those ant-covered sticks, saying, 'Lulu, can you do it?' We have started saying things in Latin like, ‘Fina pulchra est,' which is not exactly fort-building. I don't tell her that bit. Still, suddenly I felt grateful I don't have to start a whole new school to ensure that my children get the education I want them to have. I cant help it; I ask one more question, ‘So you can start your own school here?’ but realise it's a dumb one as soon as it comes out of my mouth. She shoots me another look. This lady can clearly do anything. 

At the end of the week we met a retired cruising couple. From New York, his name is Sandy and her name is Pip. Be-spectacled and still very pretty, she had teacher written all over her in the way she graduated toward the girls. When Delphine told her her name, she's the first person too I've heard to get her name right the first time. Which is ok since Delph often doesn’t say the ‘L’ sound and it’s not such a common name. ‘Hello, Delphine,’ Pip says and sits down. That morning, I'd brought over our paints, thinking we'd better do some art and dreading it because I don’t even know where to begin to teach art. A hermit crab could teach it better. In fact, I might ask one for advice. Anyhow, Pip is with us when I get the paints out. ‘What kind of teacher were you?’ I ask. ‘An art teacher.' Really?! I immediately take her hostage and she responds with great graciousness and takes a piece of paper from our pad. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, folding the paper and folding it again, ‘your view can be overwhelming.’ Very carefully, she tears out a little rectangular frame and holds it up to the horizon. ‘Without the frame, your view is enormous.' She motions to us and the girls and I crowd together like suspicious meerkats around the hollow paper rectangle and peer through it. 'Now you'll see it's become just a little stretch of sand and the tip of a palm tree,' she says and by Jove, she's right! I want to kiss her right then and there. I don't though. She looks grateful. 

Love from F/F Quest and her crew xx