Before going out to dinner I realised that we hadn’t pulled the Christmas crackers. We did and discovered that as well as exceedingly lame jokes and useful gifts such as golf tees, they also had charades in them.   It took Bob forever to guess We Will Rock You getting very hung up on babies which was not helpful.  His Incredible Hulk was something to behold, one of those memories for when the dog bites or a bee stings. 

Our taxi driver Don Richardson met us promptly at the dock and whisked us off to Veya for dinner, cagoules in the blue bag, and gave us our Christmas Day dose of religion with a sermon on our good Lord on this special day.  Veya wasn’t far, just too far to walk but a short sermon away.  Veya was lovely, a smart plantation house style layout and we ate on the veranda in a cool breeze. The staff were beautifully trained and absolutely charming and Mr Veya himself most attentive.  He proved to be as dour an American as he had appeared on the phone but was forced to admire my sparkly Father Christmas tshirt.  Bob had a Captain’s cocktail, most appropriately, and I had a Savannah, inappropriately.  Dinner was good but a bit haphazard in timing with pudding wine appearing a long time after we had tucked away the coconut cake with our two spoons, but the place was packed.  As we left it transpired that Mr Veya had googled us and had come across our blog.  I wonder if he is reading it now! 

Our return home with Don was enhanced by the addition of his delightful lady wife of three years, a lovely soul from Jamaica, still at the overtly doting stage of their married life and we had a very jolly ride back to the dock.  We stepped gaily across the sand, walked along the dock to find our dinghy had disappeared.  It was not where we left it.  We hunted up and down and looked hopelessly out into the darkness.  The ropes were still attached to the quay.  Bob puiled on the ropes and that naughty dinghy popped out from under the pontoon where it had been hiding.  Ho, ho, ho.

Today was a lazy day recovering from the excesses of Christmas.  We pottered over to town, the outboard still working, and had lunch at an Italian restaurant, strange to be eating gnocchi on an Anguillan beach, but they had excellent wifi so I could at last catch up on the photos of young George Pietrus etc.  What a cutie.  We then sauntered into the supermarket which proved to be rather than “a room with food”, a rather bare room without much food at all.  We snaffled the last 6 pack of beer so we will live.  We then checked out with the lovely ladies in Customs who I tried to convince, quite unconvincingly, that yesterdays mince pies were home baked and then found the dinghy where we had left it in plain open view.

Back on the boat we have stowed away all the Christmas gifts, battened down the Christmas tree, put up the lee cloths, prepared an easy supper for later as we prepare to do the long haul of just over 80 miles to Virgin Gorda overnight.  Fingers crossed that it is a silent and still night.