Caroline writes: “I don’t know whether I’m just tired after months (or it is years?) of rushing about at high-speed, or perhaps I’m just enjoying the luxury of being able to stop for a while and savour the moment, but I am finding it very difficult to muster the energy to do very much.  Is it perhaps that sub-consciously I am putting off the moment of having to read yet another manual?

The other night I realised that my bedtime reading was the manual for the battery-operated angle-grinder. (That’s the kind of thing you need to know about when you are sailing round the world)  Everything has a manual these days and everything seems to be complicated – well at least from my standpoint. Believe it or not, when I was small we had a wind-up gramophone and six records to play on it.  Even at eighteen, it was only in the last term at secretarial college that we were allowed to use the electric typewriter. Haven’t things moved on!

So not only do I have little technical background, but we perhaps have more manuals than most to plough through.  Normally, Discovery Yachts company gives owners a three-day handover.  In our case, as we were so involved with the design and specification of this first cat, I think it was assumed that we’d know rather more than I actually do. To be fair, the office is brilliant at giving technical back-up when we need it, but we both want to prove that we can be independent and, of course, need to be so.  Anyway, I’m just going to read the manual for hair-clippers so that I can make my first attempt at cutting John’s hair – he’s a brave man”