"Tea has become Ice Tea, cappuccino has become frappuccino and a delicious cup of hot coffee is now unbearable tepid tripe. I'd never been a fan of cold coffee, but I'd begun to appreciate it on Atafu, where they make it with just a little bit of coffee, a lot of water and some sugar and then put it in the freezer. That gives you a reasonably cold soft drink, but a soft drink's not what I want with my cigar - I might as well just have a drink with a lemon then. Furthermore, I don't have a fridge on board, so all the drink mixtures have a temperature of around thirty degrees.

There's one advantage: I find tea quite nice to drink at any temperature, so for now I'll keep to lukewarm tea and a cigar in the evening. Tepid broth and Cup-A-Soup aren't bad either, but I don't find them a brilliant combination with a cigar either.

Right then, I'll just go and have a tasty breakfast of fresh tepid white beans in tomato sauce from a tin.

I hadn't given up yet, and as I thought the unleaded petrol now looked more like penetrating oil with a hint of kerosene, I had the idea of converting my standard burner into a kerosene one. I don't have any preheating paste for kerosene of course, so I just put the flame in straight away and blow me if the burner wasn't doing more than nothing now. I actually got an orange flame, but it soon got very big and started to make more and more noise, quickly beginning to spurt out of more and more separate components of the burner, causing the flames to reach straight across to the petrol tank and begin to set fire to that as well. I had a genuine kitchen fire on my hands which was quickly getting out of hand, and I was forced to put it out with a pan of seawater, which was no mean feat. So the stuff I've got left now is still perfectly burnable - I just haven't been able to do much with it so far, so I'll be drinking lukewarm tea again for a bit."

"The sun is warm, and especially as there's been so little wind since my departure I've been using a lot of sun cream. The only thing is, I've been forgetting my forehead all this time, which I was reminded of by my skin starting to peel off. The peelings had been slowly creeping upwards towards my hairline, leaving me with lots of bits of peeled skin between my hair, which is rather itchy. I've developed quite a sticky head from one-and-a-half weeks of sweating without a good wash too.

The women of the village held a Bingo evening on Atafu to get a bit of money together for a ticket to New Zealand to visit family. A wage of 20 New Zealand dollars (about 7.30 pound) doesn't get you very far as a housewife. I'd bought a few raffle tickets on that evening as well, and as it happened I won some stuff: two coconuts and a toilet cleaning set. I didn't think that seemed very handy on a boat, so I managed to swap this wonderful prize with my neighbour for some shampoo and soap. And I'd have been able to make good use of that shampoo as well if I hadn't put it neatly next to the front door of the house where I'd been sleeping so I wouldn't forget it. Well, I'll just have to wait another few months, then."