TGI Monday. I know that not the usual expression but over here it’s good to be Monday, it means the week end has finished. Now regular readers of the Blog will know that over the years I have become accustomed to the odd drink or two and maybe on very rare occasions perhaps having an odd one too many but over here it’s a way of life...................


Take this last week end which started on Thursday night because Friday was a bank holiday being Discovery Day which I was surprised to find out was more about Columbus than the discovery of alcohol which would seem more appropriate. We had a quiet night in sampling some very refreshing vodka and cranberry juice, a drink I seem to mention quite often since being out here followed by Bacardi Anejo and coke, Bahamian measures of course and then onto wine, as I say a quiet night.


Friday is boys night out so it’s down to Jumbas for happy hour, two beers for the price of one or something like that with free spicy wings and some sort of BBQed meatballs thrown in. But it’s a quiet night as a lot of the usual crowd are away for the long week end, Mike from News Cafe is there as normal but our other big mate Eli who used to be our Blog editor is not around. In all my visits to the Bahamas I have never known Eli miss a night out, unless he is still hammered from the night before and even then I can’t remember him missing a night, yet he’s not here and when Mike tells us he is at home child minding I begin to wonder if I’ve moved into a parallel universe.


So only a few of us out, Mike goes off to the BBYC at 8.30pm and Dave and I are finishing our drinks when Kevin arrives with his auntie. Now when younger I had aunties, I had an Auntie Elsie, I had and Auntie Phyllis and even an Auntie Edie but I can assure you none of them looked like Kevin’s auntie, whose name I can’t pronounce let alone type, mini skirt, long legs, good looking, big........... you get the idea. Because of our inability to say NO Kevin gets a round in and we are forced to talk to Kevin and his auntie for the next three hours and drink numerous more Kaliks.So instead of getting home at 8.30 for an early night it’s 11.45 with the prospect of a headache in the morning.


Saturday is of course Rugby Club for the sevens competition and the odd can of Stella, Mike is there as usually and even Eli’s made it today then back home for tea and perhaps a bottle or two of wine. The problem with the wine , if you can call it that is that Christine, being her normal healthy self only has one glass and at the most two so the rest gets shared between Alex, Dave and myself.


Sunday we take the kids to the beach and keep off the booze until almost five o’clock but then it’s four bottles between the three of us with our evening meal.


But the best news turned out to be that we didn’t go to the Cricket Club on Sunday.


Monday morning we call into News Cafe for my breakfast muffin with egg and bacon and a little sausage on the side and I am trying to get Christine to leave me here while she takes her morning walk on the beach but she is insisting that I go with her, when Mike pulls up a chair, puts his head in his hands and says

Never again, I am never drinking again.

He had apparently gone to the 20:20 tournament with the promise of taking Conch Salad home for the family at 6.30. He did in fact buy the Conch Salad but was waylaid in a small bar and arrived home at 11.45 having eaten all the conch salad and being a little worse for wear as a result of a fair few Kaliks during the day. Surprisingly he was finding it difficult to understand why his wife wasn’t talking to him!


I did then remind Mike that next Saturday is the Cultural Festival where you eat and drink yourself ‘round the world’.

That’s right

says Mike

as I said I am never drinking again until next Saturday

He wanders off looking for some headache tablets or perhaps another Kalik. It’s just a way of life out here