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Ask at the office. A lease is five years at two hundred rufiyaa a year, to a household on the island register, and a household may hold two plots.

Plots come free when a lease ends or when one goes back into the pool for not being worked. There are usually two or three a year. The office keeps the waiting list in order with the date each name was added, and it is on the noticeboard.

Yes, if it grows nothing for two full seasons. The land is the council's and the lease requires the plot to be worked.

It has happened eleven times and every one of them was decided at an open meeting with the holder invited, never by a letter out of the blue. Illness, a death in the family or a bad year are all reasons the council has accepted, and they are worth coming in and saying rather than letting a plot sit.

The growers do, at the meeting before the planting season. Twenty of the ninety three are rested each year and the growers propose which twenty.

The council keeps the record of what was rested when, so the same plots are not rested twice while others are never rested at all. Eleven plots have never been rested since the register began in 1994 and the council puts that on the table every year.

No, and the paper says so in one sentence. It is a lease of council land for five years, renewable.

The council cannot decide who owns any land on this island, turn a lease into ownership, or write anything that suggests either, and nothing said at this office is a ruling. Ownership questions belong to the office that holds that authority, and the council will take your paperwork, attach what its own register shows, forward it and chase it.

Monday and Thursday. During the works it loads at the south point and leaves at six rather than five.

Crates must be marked with your plot number and an unmarked crate is loaded last. The order rotates: the plot that loaded first last week loads last this week, down a list pinned up on the Sunday. More than fifteen crates needs word to the office the night before.

The north beach from the old loading point to the coconut line, for the length of the works. It is a construction site.

Stage three, the quay wall and ramp, runs from March for about five months and closes the south point approach for three weeks in the middle. The council has asked for that window to be moved out of the watermelon harvest and has been told it will be considered. Every stage is published with its dates before it begins.