I’m sure I’ve previously mentioned the trauma I experienced as a child when my mother used to drag me to the shops and then spend half the morning blethering to random friends while I languished outside various retail emporia, just like the dogs you see, tied to a Magnum ice cream signboard by their leash. Well, guess what - deja vu. Yesterday, I’d been left outside the state owned Seychelles Hypermarket and told not to move an inch, hanging around, like an abandoned primary school child while Anne searched the shelves for McVities Digestives, decent yoghurt and other tasty stuff. Outside, I just sat there. Me in my shorts and everything.

To amuse myself I thought I’d fiddle about on the Navionics app in my phone, you know, see how far we’ve come. How far to go and all that.

I’m now wishing I hadn’t bothered.

In my head , which, as you know is a bit of a cornucopia of all kinds of nonsense, I’d convinced myself that having done sixteen hundred miles to the Maldives, followed by twelve hundred more to Seychelles, and six hundred down to Chagos, to make a total well in excess of three thousand, we must surely have crossed the Indian Ocean or at least, put the bulk of it behind us.

Well, to a degree, we have crossed. The problem is, where we’ve crossed is at what you might call the tip of the iceberg, i.e. the narrow, pointy bit. On closer inspection it looks like in fact we are only halfway with another 2800 miles to Cape Town. Half of it upwind. Jeez. Nobody told me it was this wide.