Marigot Bay, St Lucia

Thursday 26th February 2009, day 222. 13° 58’.04 N, 061° 01’.70 W Marigot Bay, St Lucia

There must be some simple chemical test that can be done to measure the extent to which salt has impregnated a liquid. Dipping a piece of reactive paper, the researcher decides if the liquid has reached a point of salinity beyond which it cannot be drunk, or is inimical to life.

If there is such a test for the degree to which salt has entered the psyche, we have just failed it.

We are in Marigot Bay, St Lucia. A natural hurricane hole, it is a small circular bay surrounded by mangrove swamps, sheltered further by a generous wide inlet between it and the Caribbean Sea. The harbour is so secluded that it is reputed to have helped a Nelson-era admiral in his battles against the French, by hiding the British fleet, who lurked disguised by palm fronds attached to the rigging. Once the French had sailed past, the English discarded the palm leaves, nipped out, and attacked the now undefended Martinque.

The Bay has been developed to form the home for a fleet of charter boats, a pleasant hotel with palm-roofed bars, and a scattering of villas and an attendant resort village to service them. The whole thing is beautifully done; the hotel buildings are barely visible among the palms, the shops and offices all built in duck egg-blue painted clapboard, with pretty carved white woodwork around the doors and windows. The shops had lovely things in: serving dishes decorated with moulded lobsters, fine china mugs with abstract palm tree designs, colourful pareos, shell jewellery, teas flavoured with the island’s spices. It is as charming and sensitively done as you could ask for – and we shrank from it as the tentative sucker of a barnacle recoils from tin-impregnated antifouling.

The salt has entered our veins.

We headed off down the coast to Anse la Raye, a simple fishing village, and felt much more at home there. It’s not that we have become too scruffy for places like Marigot Bay – although several of our favourite clothes are on the downward trajectory from smart, to sailing, to cleaning, to being used as rags, we can still muster freshness and respectability when needed. It’s not just that we have no money, so the idea of paying £50 for a china plate, when we could buy several days’ food for the same price, seems rather ridiculous. It’s more that we have got so used to living our self-contained and utilitarian and satisfying life on Tomia, with everything that we need a step or two away, that the idea of cluttering up our space with ornamental things that serve no purpose seems rather absurd, and things we don’t need seem increasingly irrelevant.

And all this from the girl who, less than a year ago, cut up her Harvey Nichols card with tears in her eyes!