October 2011

So I arrive back in Cape Verde after a 6am check-in and 6 hour flight. What show of tenderness did Tony arrange? A quiet café meal before the kids got home from school? A bottle of bubbly to celebrate my return? A bottle of vodka to commisserate my biopsy results which I hadn’t received at that point in time?  A relaxed afternoon with the children I hadn’t seen for two weeks? Yes, Capoeira class in town. I get to see two of my children performing martial arts all evening in a power-cut. Let’s pretened he didn’t get a roasting for that one.

Well, I got back to the apartment and sitting in my living room is a lovely granita ice sorbet machine sitting on top of a newly-imported-from-the-United-States tricycle bike. Alan Sugar, watch out.

We have been planning for quite some time to try living here more permanently. (For anybody who is kindly storing our stuff in England, please note we will be back in July 2012 at the latest to come and get it back. Fingers off and stay away from the car boots, please!) I just realised, is that Olympic time? Will our flights be really expensive?

We are going to start two businesses as you really need to be earning quite decent money both to live here and also jet-set back and forth between  England and here. So that’s idea number 1… glammed up slush puppies. We didn’t waste our Uni degrees, oh no.

So we’ve had all sorts of meetings, reviews and visits since I returned here. The Department of Health wanted to ensure we wouldn’t posion anybody. Tick.  The Department of Tourism wanted to make sure we weren’t lowering the tone of the island. Tick. The Department of Growth and Economics wanted a look-in, too. Tick.

We just have to wait for the paper permit and off we peddle. Strawberry cheesecake sorbet anybody?

So the kids think we’re cool. They don’t worry that were aren’t proper grown-ups like doctors or teachers anymore. They just want us to earn some cash.

So we found out last Friday that our business has been approved. I celebrated with some jammy donut and fish fingers. Daniel hasn’t eaten prepared food since March (apart from lots of pizza) and when presented with a fish finger butty, he replied in his best Southern accent “What is this fing?” Imagine the fun he’s going to have with a McDonalds Happy Meal.

We also returned to the turtles on Saturday- I did a sunrise walk with Holly and we saw babies hatching naturally. A ranger showed us a dead baby that had been decapitated and stabbed through the heart by a peckish crab, hungry for a spot of breakfast. Holly loved that bit.

One of the saddest moments of the month is that Daniel’s last link to babyhood  disappeared. Wicked mother that I am,  I bought some of the disgusting anti-nail biting liquid. We have been using it on Daniel’s thumbs and he is no longer the cute thumb-sucking little person anymore, just a big lump of pre-teen boy.

Sunday was Halloween prep and games here. No trick or treating, but loads of childrens activities. We also watched”The Goonies” thanks to Kitty’s loan. A great Sunday afternoon chill out. Holly decided she would be the pretty cheer leader, Joey the cute little brother, I was the wicked Italian Fratelli mother of the bad guys, Daniel wanted to be the Chinese inventor kid and we unanimously pictured Tony as Sloth –the physically and mentally challenged giant beast of a man. Sounds fair.

Today is Monday, Halloween and the day I received my biopsy results. Several vodkas havealready been swiftly necked and I’m ready to celebrate with a strawberry jam blood pancakes and a big bar of Duty Free Toblerone (the creamy white one). So excuse me. You only live once!