Good morning lovely Our Girl Fans!

I know you're not supposed to post authors notes as a chapter, but rules be damned, I'm not running into an earthquake ravaged building with morbid curiosity about what its like inside, so I'm going to do it! I hope you won't mind indulging me for a moment...

I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who got in touch after Footsteps to welcome me back to writing. When I took all the stories down, my head was all over the place and amongst other things I was having a complete meltdown about real life and how to manage the ever bloody present 'getting everything done'. I was always very proud of the stories I wrote and the kind reviews that were left about them, but to quote Molly 'I couldn't get a calmness in my nut' and felt I needed to retreat from Our Girl a while to work it all through.

Learning The Ropes, was written over an interesting few months for me. When I first found FanFiction, and started to write, I would spend hours each day curled up in bed with my infant nipper. She would spend the majority of her day feeding, and even when not, was a child who would not be put down. So these stories where a double labour of love, in that those hours where passed reading the beautiful words of others or attempting to write my own. All 48,000 words of this story where originally written with my thumb into the email browser of my iphone before copying and pasting into FF! About half way through LTR being published my Nipper stopped needing to be fed by me, and - shock horror - started to sleep independently. Suddenly I didn't have those hours to write, and then some of you may also remember Banana Mum took an very nasty fall and gave us a pretty terrible shock.

I can't tell you exactly what has changed now, but having stepped back for a while, it turns out I have a nagging desire to be back. All is fine with Banana Mum, and my Nipper is at school and very happy to watch Barbie videos on You tube while I'm sitting at my desk writing this! I always had a nagging feeling that I'd like to go back to LTR. There was an epilogue that was never written, and having now gone through it with a fine tooth comb a number of typos that you were very kind not to mention the first time around!

So, what's the point of this note... Well, I'm happy to say that later today once I've finished typing up the changes, 'The one with the boat' will be back. I haven't changed the story much overall, I posted as I wrote and there were some story lines that never made the final cut, and having read it in full, I've decided to leave them in my head. I plan to post 3 chapters a week, so it shouldn't take too long to get it all up again.

Thank you for your kindness. I'm looking forward to taking a trip around my favourite place in the world with you again.

Love Banana Girl xxx