… I was in bed early and having watched a film, was soon off to sleep.<\/p>\n
And to my surprise I managed to sleep for most of the night too – with a brief awakening round about 04:40.<\/p>\n
Plenty of time to go off on a little travel too. I was in Shavington somewhere and we’d had friends staying – American friends. I awoke, and these people were awake too so I asked hem what time it was. They replied that there was 12 minutes to go until the alarm. So when the alarm went off these people got up and got ready. I directed them to go back to Crewe via Chestnut Avenue, that way, so they could see the houses and the town and see how people lived, councillors and so on. But whoever I was with said that councillors don’t live round here. They all live in the big houses on the new estates. We were out after that trying to find something and we wanted a newspaper. We had to work the controls to this machine in a certain way in order to work it, but I couldn’t get it right. The newsagent had some papers on display but it was things like the Daily Sexpress and the Daily Wail, Tory party garbage newspapers or whatever and I had no intention whatever of reading any of them. The rest of this dream has evaporated.
\nNo it hasn’t because it suddenly came back. The woman was actually Rose Stephenson but a trimmer version of her. We were in a car somewhere and had been for a drive, but had parked up on the edge of the road at the entrance to a narrow secluded lane. every time that a car came up behind us I’d move the car further down the lane. She started to become annoyed about me driving her car, not very happy at all. But then she cottoned on to what I wanted to do, which was to be alone with her in a quiet dark secluded place, so we ended up in a quiet, dark secluded place further down this little lane as you might expect.
\nLater, we were back on board ship and she decided that she would go for a swim. She met up with Rosemary, who already had on her bathing costume and Rose was getting into hers. Rosemary was ready first and went to dive into the pool.<\/p>\n
This morning though I didn’t manage to beat the first or second alarm, but I comfortably beat the third alarm to the bathroom which is always a good sign. Then I came up on deck to photograph the early morning sun.<\/p>\n
Realising that I had forgotten my medication, I went back down again. And I might just as well have gone back to bed because I hadn’t realised – and no-one had said – that we’ve passed into a different time zone (we’re at 62\u00b0N 16\u00b0W) so we’ve gained an hour and instead of it being 06:30 it’s actually 05:30.<\/p>\n
Eventually it was breakfast time and afterwards, I spent all of the morning attacking the rest of the photos for June 2019 and organising them correctly. And there were more than enough of them too. 301 to be precise.<\/p>\n
We had a pleasant surprise at lunchtime. We have a Nepalese sous-chef on board and he prepared a delicious curry for us. Of course, it was nothing like as spicy as I would have liked but this is a North American company with mainly North American clients so it can’t be helped.<\/p>\n
This afternoon I went up into the observation room and read a book on Iceland. But we are in the shipping lane now so there was a fair bit of marine traffic. And on one occasion, a container ship going past bounced its wi-fi signal off us so we even had an internet connection, so I was able to wish Amber a happy birthday.<\/p>\n
For tea, we had a pleasant surprise. All six of us were invited to sit at the captain’s table with the captain and a representative of the owners who is on board performing an audit. While we were there we had our first sight of land for a while too. Some offshore islands, including the one that suddenly appeared out of the ocean 50-odd years ago and the name of which I’ll tell you in early course (it’s called Surtsey).<\/p>\n
But I didn’t stay too long because I was struggling to avoid bursting out into a fit of uncontrollable laughter. The Canadians were complaining about Muslims coming to their country and bringing all their clothing and their religion with them. So I had a close look at these Canadians to see if they were wearing buckskins, with feathers in their hair, warpaint on their faces, worshipping shamans and living in a tepee, speaking Huron or Iroquois.<\/p>\n
Of course they aren’t.<\/p>\n
They brought their European clothes, their European habits, their European religion and their European language with them. North Americans don’t “do” irony of course, but the hypocrisy of these people is totally staggering.<\/p>\n
I had to walk away before I either burst out laughing or before I said something completely injudicious.<\/p>\n
It’s quite late now but I’m staying up until late. It’s beautiful weather outside and I’m sure that we are going to have another magnificent sunset. It will be worth waiting for.<\/p>\n
And I was right.<\/p>\n
