Friday, 12 July 2013

Thursday's entertainment

Thursday, May 9th 2013: continued
We’d effectively skipped lunch and were pretty hungry by the time we were back on the ship. But afternoon tea would deal with that. Waiter service and a window table for two so we could enjoy the view as we left Barcelona.

Unfortunately the table for two thing means that the usual social graces that hold Matt back from overeating did not come into play. He had two sandwiches (small and with the crusts cut off, by no means excessive), scone (with jam and cream), half a mini toasted tea cake, a crumpet and 4 cakes (3 of which featured cream). I had the same – but no cakes, replacing this with one shortbread biscuit.



Rather than burn some of that energy we repeated the previous day’s early evening – again having the whole of the sports deck area to ourselves (where was everyone?), enjoying the warm but not scorching sunshine. I have been amazed by the number of people around the ship looking like absolute lobsters from sunburn. Some of them have tried claiming that it is windburn. This is clearly not the case but Matt has been very restrained in not telling them all about the science of ultra violet radiation.

Tonight Matt and I may have met our match in the Talking the Hind Legs Off a Donkey stakes. Gillian and Mick were a lively couple from Scotland. My Scottish geography is not much better than my African but they didn’t mind too much educating me. We did quite a bit for our respective tourist boards – planning the cruise excursions that we would offer or that you could do under your own steam from our respective home ports. And I’ve certainly been persuaded to take a camping trip to Scotland in the summer.

Having thus far mostly managed to avoid talking about politics and trains we managed both (and quite extensively) in one night. The trains bit was probably my fault as I got rather enthusiastic when Gillian and Mick told us that they had taken the sleeper train from Glasgow to London (I do love an exciting train ride). They were really good company and we were practically being chivvied out of the restaurant as the conversation went on and on.

Friday, May 10th 2013
We gave ourselves a break from dancing last night and went instead to the “Havana Club” to see a comedy magician. (That is he was a comedian who did a bit of magic, rather than a funny magician.) He purported to be from Cuba but we had it on good authority that he was actually from Sandwich in Kent (a lady next to us on deck the other day knew his mum). Anyway, it was really enjoyable (especially when you consider that the material that he was working with was the age of the passengers and the bountiful nature of the food on board) and the (slightly elderly) ladies who were hauled up on stage to assist with his tricks were hilarious:
                              Him: What do you do in West Wittering Jackie?
                              Jackie: I’m retired
                              Him: What did you do before you retired?
                              Jackie: I looked after old people, like what you do now.

(Maybe you had to be there but I found this hysterical, and I hadn’t even had any booze.)

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