A Rastafarian with metre-long dreadlocks worn like a turban tells me - beneath a coconut tree on Christmas Day - that his nephew played football for England.
I blink in disbelief as a surfboard zips a metre above a waveless sea alongside £200million superyachts, powered by a motor on a pole beneath the water.
I freeze as I spot in a spoonful of cooked rice mix, bought from a roadside food stall, what appears to be a cow's udder.
This is a snapshot of the fantasy paradise of joyous Antigua life into which we fell, arriving with hand luggage for a week in December 2020, and leaving two months later after England's Covid lockdown.
PARADISE, FANTASY, JOYOUS
When I say paradise, I mean it.
Leo slurps juice from coconut shell husk in our magical accommodation's tropical fruit garden, yards from the tree's giant, floppy fronds.
The swish of waves carries past a palm-thatched wooden beach gazebo to our terrace's hammock, as goats' neck bells chime from a farm on the lush mountainside. Treated like family, our hosts' guesthouse feels like our house.
Nati snorkels over starfish as Leo - after homeschooling - plays on a beach swing I made from fishermen's old ropes, while I sit in our favourite picnic spot in the shade of a sea grape bush, repeatedly catching myself saying “This is bliss.”
Even the cows seem the happiest in the world. How wouldn't they be, in a field with coconut palms and a tree loaded with 500 ripe mangoes?
When I say fantasy, I mean it.
Nati and I play beach volleyball just beyond the infinity pool of one of the most luxurious homes at the Caribbean's biggest man-made harbour (even Leo is heard saying 'We're in paradise' as he videos us). Footnote: OK, this area was once a swamp until the 1980s.
I dance while swimming (difficult) as a yacht plays one of my favourite songs offshore a house music bar containing a billionaire boat owner's crew.
We watch New Year fireworks beside a £1,000-a-night hotel, outside which we met the Rasta (Emile Heskey's uncle).
But what I mean most of all, is when I say joyous Antigua life.
My guidebook says locals will wave to us within a week. Wrong. It takes a day. It's the friendliest place I've ever been.
Leo and I dance at a local community's Xmas street party as the tempo of a 50-person steel band rises and rises to an pulsing crescendo, in a moment of such intense energy I will never forget.
“Big up, big man!” a minibus driver yells at me as I finish another swing. Even “Hello” doesn't exist here. It's “Yeaayghh!” - always shouted - whether from a teenager or a granny.
NATURAL WONDERS A WORLD AWAY
We are at the north-east corner of the Caribbean, the region's closest point to Britain, an eight-hour flight and a life away.
Our island measures just 12 miles by 17 and we are in the mountainous south-west corner.
I'm living in a village for the first time for 22 years. And it's magic.
Urlings is not just any village. It is an island dream, with pastel wooden clapboard chattel houses tucked in the fold of a hillside with a reef offshore and the evening chatter of residents beneath a sky full of stars.
Hundreds of fireflies magically glow and dim by beach bushes after a sunset clamber up to the old fort overlooking St John's.
“The shell is moving,” Leo blurts out one evening as one of our daily shell stash shuffles across our apartment floor. We have a temporary hermit crab pet.
“Woah!” a paddleborder beside me remarks as I swim in the ocean, telling me a two metre-wide ray just glided right beneath me.
This place is so fertile, crops even grow in the air. Pumpkin thrives on a wire fence, its roots nowhere near the ground.
A man tells me Jesus told him to swap town life to live off the land in the forest. He shows me his fields of coconut, banana and papaya trees, with remnants of sugarcane.
The next field along, stoned cannabis farmers show us their crops.
A sweeping hillside of long, yellowing grass gloriously sways as the wind turns it into a giant natural canvas.
20cm-long black and red centipedes shuffle around our guesthouse garden, while the constant loud tree frog croaks become the unnoticed, comforting sound of night.
WIND AND SAND
Pants or shorts, never both. That's Leo's and my motto.
It's just too hot – even in winter. Locals complain of cool 20C nights as I sit shirtless. Days are 28C. So what's Antigua's coldest night ever recorded? A balmy 16C.
Even the rain only lasts 20 seconds.
Caribbean islands are strung north to south, so as clouds whip across the sky from east to west, weather fronts pass swiftly.
It's a different story in hurricane season, with our village's church still missing its roof after a 2018 hit.
The beaches are ridiculous. And empty.
Visitor numbers are down 90 per cent, with just a trickle of Americans here. It's true that part of the magic is that we have it virtually to ourselves. Beaches usually covered with 2,000 sun loungers are deserted, the adjacent mega hotel shuttered.
We visit 28 beaches in all. Ffryes is our favourite, an impossibly-blue sea, backed by soft, sunset-facing sand and the world's most scenically-positioned kids' wooden playground (to which we add a bamboo raft and tree swing).
Turners, with its' coconut frond shelter/pirate hideout is virtually on a par, and then there is Jolly Harbour North Finger's (man made) meditation-inducing silent sweep of fine shells, where the only noise is the gentle whirr of the wind through pine trees.
SPOON SURPRISE
“Goawat water,” a large, grinning Antiguan lady yells at me when I enquire through the car window what she's cooking at her stall.
I establish it is goat, and water, and that's it. I order one, and rice, knock back an on-the-shack coconut rum while it's being served, and discover my spoon's cow udder – actually the tip of a pig's tail.
Goat or conch curry, oxtail stew and roti curry wraps are our favourites – but I try everything, including bull foot soup, stuffed fish, cooked papaya and delicious ducana coconut dumplings wrapped in sea grape leaves.
We eat at roadside stalls every day - and always look forward to Saturday, as locals cook and sell meals in front of their homes.
In England, we have apples. Here, they have sugar apples (scaly dinosaur skin: tastes like honey), golden apples (sour squidgy pineapple) and custard apples (firm purple watermelon).
My favourite is chocolate pudding fruit. No explanation needed.
Most fruit comes on a once-a-week boat from Dominica.
Our favourite food stall is Gina's, with its postcard-perfect flower garden. Her fisherman husband drops off the catches of the day beside Leo's swing on Morris beach. There is even a long-abandoned sugar windmill's stone tower for me to contemplate beneath my shady sea grape bush here.
BIG CONKERS
I tell Leo the conkers are really big here. It's the first day of our trip and my son, 5, is dangling from a coconut.
Lacking the locals' gravity-defying trunk shimmy, the double-handed hang is our preferred harvesting technique.
Leo drops, I grab him mid-air, and borrowing a machete, chop open the husk. The eight-month old nut has tasty juice, but no flesh. 12-month old ones have sweeter juice, and half an inch of crunchy nut.
So where are coconuts from? I was wrong – it's not the Caribbean, nor Polynesia. The answer is India and Indonesia.
It spread so fast as prehistoric voyagers shipped the 'tree of life' with them as it provided drink, food, shelter, clothing, wood, rope, charcoal, and even flotation.
Antigua now has very few coconuts - not only due to Leo and I. Most trees were de-topped by hurricanes, while disease killed the rest.
STONE STORIES
After rooting through 5ft lemongrass, we are standing at sunset at 'Stonehenge of the Caribbean,' a clutch of 1,200-year-old stone circles atop Greencastle Hill.
Thought to be an astronomical observation site, it was built by the peaceful Arawak people, themselves hounded out around 1500 by warlike Caribs (both originally from Venezuela).
With Leo on my shoulders another day, I trek through undergrowth and clamber into the thought-provoking creeper-covered conical remnants of a sugar windmill, dozens of which still stand on the the island which was once Britain's richest Caribbean colony.
Almost everyone who came here died, as they did elsewhere in the Caribbean. They just died - settlers, African slaves, white indentured servants, and soldiers. Disease meant death within just a few years for most. During Haiti's independence wars, 80,000 of 100,000 soldiers died from disease.
But there were no pirates here, for a simple reason - the island was also the Caribbean base of the British Navy.
I push the battered door of one of the handful of remaining ruined slave pens in the Caribbean, and it creaks open. In the dockside jail (were where slaves were held on arrival), I eye the rough coral stone walls and rusted iron bolts.
Five of the 12 million slaves taken from Africa were shipped to the Caribbean, locked in a 40cm x 18cm x 6ft space for the two-month journey.
The Caribbean also saw the degradation of slavery. Slavery itself was not new. But the child of a slave being a slave was new.
500,000 poor white servants also came to the Caribbean, some after being kidnapped and bundled onto boats. They were treated as slaves, and all too often not given their promised land after up to seven years' work.
PEOPLE POWER
These days, Antigua has swapped horrific for terrific. The island is loaded with great people and experiences.
Roadside stalls and fruit and veg markets toss in extra produce for free.
I stop for a haircut and shave one day, deliberately choosing the old bus stop turned into a mini garage/barbers. The mechanic's beefed-up beard trimmer appears to have a tractor motor as it pummels my cheeks.
Cars blast out soca music with enough bass to wreck nearby building foundations, then screech to a halt to crawl diagonally over speed bumps due to the trend for lowered suspension of cars and push bikes almost to the ground.
And the names of the friendly faces around us are just wonderful – take Castel, Admiral, Vincy, Dainty and Carvel.
As a note, it's the safest place I've ever been. We leave wallets, car keys and phones on the beach dozens of times. My phone is pretty worthless by then though, having dropped it in the sea one evening (while dancing).
It's not all a fantasy. Masses of spiky plants make some areas by beaches a toe-jabbing dance. And don't grab that machineel tree for balance while extracting spikes from your sandals – its so poisonous that Caribs tipped their arrows with its sap.
And, like many countries, there is litter.
So how can we give something back to Antigua, and its people?
We clear rubbish from our favourite beach lunch spot.
And, as Antigua does not collect recycling as it has no recycling plant, we stuff all our own recycling into the capital's few street recycling bins.
We spread our food spending across every roadside stall we can find.
And we leave seven beach swings, fashioned from those bits of old fisherman's rope, for local kids to play on.
We test each thoroughly, of course.
And as I swing, I think: More than anywhere else I've ever been, this really IS paradise.
PS: If you think Antigua sounds good, wait until you hear about its sister island, Barbuda.
