Monday's evening

Tuesday, May 7^th 2013

Dinner last night was great. Not for the food (which was nonetheless very nice and pudding featured ice-cream again), but for the conversation. We sat with some ladies whose pensions from a well-known bank were clearly generous enough to fund frequent cruising. My accent deduction skills were on top form as I correctly identified that they were from Merseyside. They had worked in IT (or “computers” as it was in the 1980s) and one of them had been involved with the introduction of credit cards. It’s difficult now to think of the pre-plastic era let alone that someone had had the job of going around retailers installing the system for this.

Also on our table was a couple from Farnham, both of whom were (still) self-employed. The topics of conversation included:

• the perils of navigation (I had once got lost in Farnham and could think of nothing else to say about this settlement, unfortunately my mentioning of this resulted in an extensive discourse on Farnham’s one-way system)
• the dreadful weather we’ve been having in the UK over the last few years (I even threw in a comment about the jet stream)
• how much Americans eat (a lot)
• the benefits and pitfalls of working from home (you never have to get dressed versus lack of human contact)
• how good ice-cream is (and which cruise lines offer all you can eat ice-cream, they might be getting my custom next)
• the ridiculous health and safety notices on board. My personal favourite being “do not flush while seated”. Frankly if you need a sign to tell you this I think that you’ve got whatever’s coming to you. I would excuse this sign if they had those light activated flushes that you can set off by accident (I did this once in Switzerland, it was quite terrifying), but they are push button ones and the toilet seat lid covers the button up (until you put the lid down – I wish I had a diagram to show you) so you really would have to go to some effort to flush whilst seated.

Bonus calorie saving of the day: avoid the cheeseboard.

We decided to give the dance floor (and our feet) a rest and headed instead to one of the shop’s numerous bars. This one had a view to the stern (look at me with the nautical jargon) which at 10.30pm was not very much apart from a ship behind us. Matt took this opportunity to explain to me about port and starboard and red and green lights.

Amazingly, one of the bartenders recognised us from our previous cruise. Even more amazingly he recognised us as “The Dancers”.

A little night cap

Since the clocks were going forward overnight (which would be yet another complication to the alarm setting) we retired to our cabin after just one cocktail.