So this was it, what I had always dreaded; this was what it felt like to be paralysed, trapped in a useless body completely at the mercy of others. I wanted to say ‘Well I’ll be off then‘, but I was going nowhere. I could move my head and arms, I could speak, but I was flat on my back and the rest of my body felt like a trussed oven-ready chicken. No amount of concentration could make my leg move or my body lean over. How dreadful for those left totally paralysed or struck down by a stroke; unable to speak, left to listen fully aware while doctors discuss whether you are a vegetable, alive or dead. I tried to cast these dark thoughts from my mind and concentrate on my own predicament. I had such plans for this year, only this morning I had been strolling in the sunshine, but after tonight my life would never be the same.
I breathed slowly, taking it all in; bright lights, murmuring voices, figures in green moving calmly around, equipment with buttons and red numbers. Perhaps I was experiencing the ultimate human nightmare; the figures all wore masks, everything felt unreal – I could be on an alien spaceship. Had I lost minutes, hours, days of my life?
One of the figures was talking to me. ‘Can you feel that?’
‘Feel what?’ I replied, relieved that he sounded human.
He turned to speak to another figure. ‘No sensation in lower body, blood pressure okay.’ He turned back to me. ‘This is Doctor Campbell, we’re ready to proceed, how are you feeling?’
My surroundings closed in on me. A screen went up, there was only my head which the masked face was talking to, my arms which he was poking things into and a machine above me with its bleeping and flashing numbers. I tried to make intelligent replies, hoping to be seen as an individual not a lump of meat strapped to the table.
The murmurs beyond the screen were getting louder and more excited. Another masked face spoke to me ‘Nearly there now.’
There was a general sigh of relief and satisfaction. ‘Here we are, it’s a Boy!’
Read more flash fiction and longer stories of all sorts in SOMEONE SOMEWHERE essential for your coffee break reading, on Kindle or in paperback.
If you are purposely going into hospital for an operation, perhaps purposefully, elective, not elected… you will probably be filtered through the system with all the operations for that morning, afternoon or day; so make sure you get the right operation and don’t assume the time on your letter has anything to do with the actual time you meet your doom go to the theatre.
The basic procedures are much the same for all of us and after our many lockdowns and isolations at least we get to talk to lots of people and answer lots of questions, again, from nurses, anaesthetists and surgeons. This is your opportunity to remind the surgeon which side they are doing. You can also mention to the anaesthetist that documentary you saw thirty years ago about patients who wake up during their operation, but can’t alert anyone because their eyes are taped over and they are paralysed. Point out this is in the notes on general anaesthetic under Rare Risks AWARENESS, just above Very Rare Risks – DEATH. Anaesthetist reassures you that there is only a very slight possibility of waking up, just wave your arm if you do. You have more chance of being involved in a road accident on the way home… reminding you of something else to worry about. Of course, there is also a very good chance of waking up at the right time in the recovery room.
In this long corridor of waiting rooms and little consulting rooms and long waits, at some stage you will have to change into a hospital gown, tight black stockings which are hard to pull on ( ladies, you needn’t have worried about shaving your legs after all ) and your dressing gown and slippers, which hopefully you haven’t forgotten to bring. Then you realise the overnight bag you brought isn’t big enough for all your street clothes.
When I went for my interview with the breast care nurse the week before, she produced the consent form for me to sign and it said mastectomy left hand side ‘NOoo, it’s the Right side’
‘That’s funny, only the second time that’s happened to me in twenty years, I’ll do a new form.’
Because I was slotted in at an earlier date I hadn’t met the surgeon who was going to do my operation. He asked if I was happy for him to examine me or did I want a nurse present. I thoughthmm, not worried about being molested at my age,but I just said ‘No, that’s fine.’ I was tempted to add ‘well you will certainly be the last chap to play with that breast… ‘ I did add ‘…as long as you know which is the right side, which is the right side…’ He did some drawing with his felt tip pen, saying don’t worry, it will come off.
The worst part was being back in the waiting room in the middle of the afternoon with no food since 7.30am and no water since 11am and more waiting; there were not many patients, but they all seemed to go before me...
Then at last yet another nurse comes to collect me, my bags are confiscated secured and tagged. Now the long walk to the theatre, the walk down long corridors, this is why you bring your slippers. It was a relief to get moving and stretch my legs and interesting seeing all the secret parts of the hospital. Everything is blue; corridors, doors, uniforms, scrubs…
These days patients wear masks as well as the medical staff, so naturally I was wearing my favourite mask to get Brownie points. My last general anaesthetic was in 1978 and most of those involved tonsils or teeth. I had all my caesareans with epidurals and some hand surgery under local anaesthetic, so I didn’t miss out on what was going on…
Destination anaesthetic room, next door to Theatre Number One; the nurse let me peer through the porthole where people in blue scrubs were getting everything ready; all that just for me! My elderly neighbour who had the same operation a year ago had reassured me that being an anaesthetist is an actual job, an important job and my friend who watches all the hospital programmes said they look after you all the way through the operation!
Everyone who has an operation will tell you that they put the canula in, put an oxygen mask on and tell you to take some deep breaths, next thing you know you wake up in the recovery room. I kept taking the deep breaths and I was still wide awake, it wasn’t working! Then the anaesthetist said ‘Okay, I’m going to start putting the drugs in now, first the pain killer, tell me when you feel funny.’
Whether you consider it started at the twelfth stroke of midnight, first of January 2020, or a year later, I think we can all agree the third decade of the Twenty First Century has not started well. But even if we have lost loved ones, friends or fellow bloggers, life inevitably goes on, though ‘normal life’ still seems a long way off. My life took an unexpected turn a few weeks ago when I was diagnosed with breast cancer; treatable and curable, so at my age ( not that I’m that old… ) can’t complain! It IS tragic when young mothers get the more aggressive forms of breast cancer, it is tragic when any young person or child has cancer, life is not fair and none of us know the rules of the game…
In the space of a few weeks I have entered the system, had all sorts of tests and my operation brought forward. The NHS has come up trumps, but it is true that breast cancer has had a lot more attention and research devoted to it than other cancers. It is also true that if you have other undiagnosed chronic conditions you are not funnelled so swiftly and kindly onto a pathway.
Many of us have tests of various sorts over the years with all the wonderful magic waves, magnetism, ultra sound that exist these days, then feel a bit guilty when it turns out nothing is wrong, you were just anaemic or it was just a pain, nothing serious. Then one day the atomic super scanner does find something; to say it’s unexpected is not true. I have lived with cancer all my life, brought up on the stories of my grandmother, who died of bowel cancer at 56 when I was little; the only grandchild she would get to meet. My grandfather had died suddenly the year before, also 56. A short time before, he had been saying how good life was, with lovely little me and my grandmother returning from hospital after a ‘successful’ operation. Family legend has it that Grandma ‘gave up’ after losing her husband; the reality was that there was no cure for bowel cancer then. But it is true that my mother walked into her mother’s bedroom one day when she was undressing and saw lumps on her body. She was shocked that her mother had not told them or gone back to the doctor. I seem to have always known this story with its vivid image of cancer bursting out all over the place.
Few modern women can be unaware of cancer, expecting or fearing our wombs, ovaries or breasts to be invaded at any moment, not to mention all the other parts of our bodies. I am not a doctor or scientist, but the simplest explanation I have read is that it would be a surprise if people and other creatures did not get cancer; our bodies are a mass of living cells designed to constantly reproduce, sometimes they go awry. When my aunt in her seventies sailed through her mastectomy I said I would never be afraid of having one; my mother had a mastectomy in her nineties and took it in her stride, living long enough to die of old age. With my father dying of leukaemia and my sister surviving cancer a long time ago I have glibly assumed it was just a matter of when, not if I would get cancer. Humans are living long enough to increase our chances of succumbing; there are no magic bullets because there are a multitude of cancers, lots of people get better or have a long remission, others don’t. I have no more right to survival than anyone else, only to not cause my family any more stress after losing their father nine months ago. The Game of Life is strange; a local friend has just had a mastectomy and my old school friend was having breast surgery the day before I got my diagnosis, I am certainly not alone.
Warning Cancer Joke
Doctor: ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you the tumour is malignant.’
Patient: ‘Oh thank goodness, I was worried it was cancer.’
And more irreverent thoughts…
Daughter on phone trying to sort out my iPhone account… Me: ‘Just tell him I can’t sort out my phone cos I’m a widow and I’ve got cancer’– Yay, now I have two reasons for not doing things…
Yes there are plenty of positives. I can’t go to the camera club AGM as I’m isolating ready to go into hospital on Friday – oh hang on, roadmap delayed, AGM will be on Zoom, I can go…
Our family has a tradition of feeling guilty, about pretty much everything and now a weight of guilt has been lifted off my shoulders. I can hold my head up high and look others in the eye. No longer feeling guilty for going around being healthy while others have so many medical burdens to bear.
How lucky that my younger son and his fiancée have given up their rented home and are moving in with me this week as part of their plan to be in a better situation to buy their own place. Their planned seaside break next week has turned into being carers, not so lucky for them…
My NHS daughter will be organising her brothers and the NHS as she did last year; as she is a physiotherapist she will make sure I do my exercises.
It has rained a great deal, summer solstice was a wash out, but at least my garden won’t need watering for a little while because…
As I am having lymph nodes taken out as well there will be lots of things I can’t do with my right side like gardening, cooking, housework… More importantly maybe I won’t be able to type much – good excuse for blogging being erratic, though perhaps I’ll post lots of pictures.
To go with my garden pictures here’s my favourite happy garden tune ‘English Country Gardens’, an old folk song arranged for the piano by Australian Percy Grainger and played with gusto in this original recording.
Worried about WordPress Block? Perplexed by Pressword? Digital life at Tidalscibe Towers is far more complicated, it’s a wonder you are reading this at all.
Warning, technical geniuses may be offended by the use of inappropriate technical language in the following item.
Thanks to the easing of the Covid roadmap and visits from Cyberson 1 and Digidaughter, a few problems have been ironed out. I can now post and edit my blog from the BIG computer with the BIG screen – old television. I can write in the relative calm of Microsoft Word and cut and paste, I can add links. Actually, it turned out I got just as many Likes for blogs cobbled together on the iPad with bits and blocks, prose and pix dancing up and down the screen or disappearing. I am aware that the late Cyberspoue’s love of computers and digital technology, preferably second hand, meant our house had a higher than average digital delight rating, which was fine when he was my happiness engineer; more hands on than the WordPress Happiness Engineer… But now I do at least have more than one device to access the internet portal. I imagine bloggers all over the world; some in control rooms NASA would envy, others sitting in bed with their smart phone, which are you dear reader?
I thought my old android phone, bought by Cyberspouse from Dave at work and passed on down to me, was finally giving up. Then through a process of brilliant deduction, seeing a detached wire at the end of the charger cable, I looked in the dreaded drawer of wires and found a spare charger. But by then the seed had been planted that I should have an iPhone which could form some sort of incestual relationship with the iPad. We only bought the iPad so we could Facetime Team G when Cyberson 1 was posted to the USA for three years. They’ve been back for one year so the iPad is probably due to go to a museum soon…
Cyberson 1 decided to buy me one with his pocket money when they were here at half term, but the model we agreed I would like was not available locally, so he then had to check with his sister if she would be able to set it up if he ordered from Amazon. Yes.
The phone arrived and I was ready with the secret code to give the delivery man. Next day Digidaughter arrived and we were she was ready. Of course my old sim card was too big so she phoned up Tesco to send a new sim card so I could keep my very basic Tesco account and my phone number… not that I ever phone anybody with my mobile or tell them my number…
A few days later, on my own again, I came home and saw a Tesco leaflet amongst the mail and nearly threw it in the recycling bin, then realised this big piece of paper contained a minute piece of magic. I have never actually put in a sim card, I wouldn’t be much good as a spy or criminal constantly changing phones. But we had done a mock run through and I had a link to the ‘how to’ youtube video. All I had to do was not lose the wire tool or drop the minute sim card…
What are your favoured devices for writing your blogs and posting on WordPress?If you have a mobile phone do you use it to phone people or to look at Facebook and take photos to post on Instagram?
In a Heathrow hotel conference room the tables were scattered with a host of battery operated furry creatures; this apparently was to ‘break the ice’. British Airways was paying for our catering company to attend a course of several events on passenger service, quite amusing as British Airways needed to learn about passenger service, not us – in my opinion. It was we who had to soothe the troubled brows of passengers by the time they had made it to the business class or first class lounges.
We didn’t need the ice broken as we were already relaxed and chatting to friends and fellow staff we hadn’t met before; a good chance for a natter without being interrupted by passengers. Being paid to have a day off with coffee and lunch instead of being at work, what was there not to like?
My first job as a lounge hostess had ended when the Qantas Lounge ceased to exist and Qantas moved over to Terminal Four. The lounge was now British Airways, used for flights to the USA and unless you noticed the kangaroos on the glass screens you would never know. The first class lounge became the quiet area and first class passengers had their own little lounge downstairs – at least they didn’t have to cope with the awful lift. We now worked for a much larger catering company who were subcontracted to work for a variety of airlines. Our new uniform consisted of a comfortable blouse and elasticated skirt which adapted itself to any figure, the fabric design was a multi coloured jigsaw pattern which also hid a multitude of sins. The navy jacket made it look quite smart, but my younger son was horrified and said ‘You’re not going wear that on the bus are you!’ On the bus and anywhere on the airport, we could easily spot who else worked for the same company, though the chaps wore white shirt and grey trousers with just a tie in the zingy pattern.
A cleaning company was also contracted to work alongside us, ‘Airspeed,’ a contradiction in terms for some of their staff, such as the lugubrious Raymond who became a permanent fixture. On the front desk a variety of British Airways staff rotated, some very efficient and passenger orientated, others not quite so; they provided us with great amusement, but probably not the passengers. One was an alcoholic who had easy access to the two bars and liked ‘orange juice’. His announcements when he called the flight were most entertaining; his exhortations not to leave anything behind and have passport and ticket ready came with colourful warnings of what might happen if you did not. Another staff member was always on the phone and her easily heard telephone conversations were interesting, with the added frisson of worrying if the passengers were listening. One morning I heard her say within easy earshot of passengers ‘We’ve got a right load of trailer trash in here today.’
The passengers were lovely friendly, polite Americans who said ‘Thankyou Maam’ plus an assortment of Brits and others.
The first manager we met said he was ‘running eighty per cent Pilipino’ and without the hardworking Pilipinos I imagine the lounges wouldn’t have run at all. We didn’t see this manager often and he hardly spoke to me until he discovered it was my husband who was the licensing officer for Heathrow and he needed to be interviewed by him to get the licence for the lounge to serve alcohol.
Our immediate manager was an Indian bundle of energy who had his own unorthodox way of running things, which worked with our wonderfully mixed staff. He was never without his large diary and mobile phone; if anyone was off sick, or needed to change shifts he was on the phone and in seconds had a replacement. There were always people happy to do overtime or do him a favour because he would help them out in turn. Some of the Philipinos worked every day without a break and saved all their holidays and days off to go ‘back home’ for three months each year, often investing their savings in property in the Philippines. Some staff were supporting all sorts of family members and needed the extra money, while others obviously preferred being at work to being at home. Heathrow airside and no doubt any big airport, is a world of its own, cut off from the rest of the world.
I started off with no intention of doing overtime or being whisked off to other lounges and terminals, but gradually I found myself doing just that and discovering that each lounge and airline could be very different… but that’s for another blog.
And what of our passenger service course? We also enjoyed a dinner out at another hotel where we had to rate the service and one to one coffee, cake and chats. They were asking us for our opinions, taking down all our suggestions for improving life for us and the passengers. None of our suggestions were ever acted on , but at least we had had fun.
Monday marked the penultimate stage on the English roadmap out of Covid and like the real paper road maps of old, there are lots of creases and you can’t read the parts where the folds are. Most of us are convinced the roadmap will be folded up again, but in the meantime…
I didn’t go anywhere exciting on Monday as I had a hospital appointment, but there was the hope of rounding it off with a treat. The hospital destination was the furthest away in our conurbation, but the easiest to get to. The journey encompasses almost the whole of the bus route and takes an hour, but stops right outside the hospital. Every seat has a phone charger so I could catch up with blogs and emails – if anyone reads any strange comments from me that is because it’s not easy tapping on a phone jolting along. I had a pocket full of coins as it was too early to use my bus pass – easily accessible coat pocket as I didn’t want to be fumbling around in my purse and exasperating the driver. I still exasperated him as he could not hear what I was saying with my mask on and behind his plexiglass screen. When he did grasp my destination I could not hear how much he said with his mask on.
The hospital is built halfway up a hill, a delight for hospital architects whose main aim is to make it impossible for anyone to find their way around. They now have different colour routes, plus instructions on your hospital letters. I had been this way before so no problem, upstairs, follow purple route, out the back door and down a long ramp then off to a totally separate building. When I was in the waiting room a lady came to the reception desk and said ‘I am completely lost, I can’t find the car park. ‘ She was advised to ‘go back upstairs to the Ladybird Suite and start all over again.’ After my appointment was finished the receptionist asked if I could find my way back. I smugly assured her I could as I had done it before, forgetting that last time I mysteriously ended up at the north entrance, which fortunately came back out onto the main road. This time I was aiming for Costa Coffee near the main entrance, but I did not pass any familiar landmarks such as shops, glass dome, information desk. Luckily a person pushing a trolley asked if I was lost and directed me to the nearest stairs. Of course, if you go upstairs on the outward route it helps to go down on the return route. At last I reached my destination.
Not an accurate representation of Costa.
I am not a Costa addict, preferring to visit independent places and I don’t like takeaway cups, but even though the coffee was lukewarm by the time I had checked in with my NHS app and realised you had to ask for sugar, it tasted wonderful. At last I was actually sitting inside on the first day coffee shops and cafes were open properly again. I nearly forgot to take my mask off, that felt strange and I exchanged remarks with the lady at the next table at how excited we were to be in a coffee shop.
What do you do when things go wrong? Scream and breathe fire. Not actually go wrong in real life, just on WordPress; hang on, that is real life…
Happiness engineer says try a different browser,or at least that was the only part of the prompt email reply I understood, so here I am on the iPad missing my huge screen desktop where my real blog is stuck in a word document…. But I must remember my own mantra, widowed and in the middle of a worldwide pandemic, what’s the worst that could happen having problems with WordPress…. I’ll just keep doing test posts and try not to panic!
The first aim of passengers arriving at an airport, especially a huge one, is to get themselves and their luggage checked in; a weight off their minds and shoulders. Next is to go through the portal between normal life and the rest of the world. It’s years since I have flown and I am sure the presenting of passports, getting X-Rayed, confiscating of water bottles etc has been quadrupled in stress with the pandemic, though hopefully far fewer people are flying.
Covid has taken away that other entertainment or ordeal; ‘seeing people off’. In normal times getting to the airport early was quite likely, having left home very early ‘just in case’ and because passengers were told to be at the airport two hours before their flight. This left limbo time to have coffee with friends or family, sad or happy depending on who was going where and for how long, perhaps for ever. One of my Asian colleagues at Heathrow did a wonderful impression of the difference between an English farewell and his relatives and fellow countrymen; he said he preferred the English style… English small group no more than five… ‘right then, goodbye, have a good trip.’ Relative walks towards the portal, turn of head and slight nod, relatives give small wave and he strides forward, never looking back as he is swallowed up into the portal. My friend’s family; at least twenty, plus young children clinging shyly or sliding across the floor and running around; there is wailing and gnashing of teeth as the departing ones walk reluctantly to the portal, stopping and turning twenty times and walking backwards through the barriers.
What happens on the other side? Unless you are a seasoned traveller you will feel lost among swathes of people nervously looking at the departures board every two seconds, then seeing their flight is delayed by two hours; they could have spent more time landside with the relatives. Others surge forward to pass under the sign saying Gates 65 to 97, blissfully unaware that Gate 97 is miles further on. I once saw a poor lady buttonhole a young man in a uniform that had nothing to do with airlines or customer care; she was saying ‘I just can’t take any more’ while he was looking round for means of escape.
But if you are travelling business or first class you can escape this hell hole by going to your airline’s Club Lounge. They vary, some are an oasis of calm, others very different. I ended up as a lounge assistant after Cyberspouse’s attempts, while patrolling Heathrow, to find me a job that earned more than working in the local playgroup and didn’t involve computers. He came home and announced he had found a job where all I had to do was make coffee.
My interview, if you could call it that, was with a very nice manager and with hours 11am to 2.30pm in the Qantas Lounge catering for one morning flight, it sounded a dream; what I didn’t know was that the woman I had to work with was a right… and a real…
Qantas Lounge Terminal Three at that time (end of the twentieth century ) was down a quiet corridor, up some stairs, down an even quieter corridor. The Qantas staff on the desk were very pleasant and our job easy. Making coffee was simple, filter coffee dripping into a jug. We put out biscuits and served up ready made sandwiches at eleven o’clock. The passengers were friendly and of course spoke the same language. It was a homely place to be, a medium size business lounge with a quiet first class round the corner; lots of passengers bumped into friends.
Passenger/customer service is easy, all you have to do is treat them how you would like to be treated. The pettiness of my ‘colleague/boss’ was soon brought home when I made a tray of tea; teapot, milk jug, sugar. I added a pot of hot water so they could adjust the strength or top the pot up, which irked her greatly. Why? Passengers had paid plenty for their fare and a drop of hot water was no trouble for anyone. Fortunately she spent most of her time draped over the front desk chatting to the ‘the girls’ or on the phone in the kitchen chatting inanely to one or other of her twin daughters. I was happy to get on with all the table clearing etc. by myself.
There was one task I found myself doing which was certainly outside my comfort zone. One of the Qantas staff asked if I would mind ‘popping down to fetch the papers’; I innocently agreed. The incoming morning flight brought ‘The Australian’ newspaper, but to collect it involved going down in the pair of old lifts that I always avoided. Not only do I hate lifts, but I had seen them being mended enough times to not trust them. Even worse, like something out of Doctor Who, I was given the secret key that allowed the lift to go to depths passengers must not go. When the doors opened there was the bundle of newspapers waiting, but this was not the basement. There was a strong smell of kerosene; this was the outside, the real outside airside where planes park. I was terrified of being stranded down here, trying to reach the bundle of papers while keeping one foot in the lift doors so they wouldn’t close. When I finally made it back to the sanctuary of the lounge my colleague was ready with acid remarks that I was not supposed to have gone as it was not one of our jobs.
As usual at Heathrow things were changing and after a couple of years Qantas was moved over to Terminal 4, their passengers to share the British Airway Lounge. I didn’t lose my job, we were about to be absorbed into a different company and I was about to work longer hours and meet a lot more people.
A footnote. Qantas now has a new dedicated lounge in Terminal Three and from the pictures it looks a lot different from the old one.
Every Saturday in the middle of the Weekend ‘I’ ( Independent ) newspaper you will find lots of the regular daily puzzles, but Sudokarrow only appears on Saturdays. Ordinary sudokus are boring, which is probably why a host of mathematically challenging puzzles have evolved. Each week I look at this puzzle in its pristine condition determined I will finish it correctly – and neatly. I think only once have I succeeded and by the time I’ve got it wrong it looks a complete mess. My young next door neighbour asked me if I read real paper newspapers, but it turned out he wasn’t interested in which newspaper (political views) or how many puzzles I managed to do – he just needs a supply of paper to light his wood burning stove!Do you get a newspaper for the news or the puzzles?
This was the picture round in our Zoom Quiz last week. Just say what you see. eg 17 is ice cube. I got 18 right and I can’t recall the answers to the ones I didn’t get, so I may not be able to help if you can’t get them all!
Quiz Planet is an on line quiz that you can play with friends who haven’t got anything better to do or with complete strangers who don’t have anything better to do either, it is quite addictive. If it’s your turn you get to choose the subject; science, music, body and soul etc, but the downside is that your friend will see what stupid wrong answers you got. If they challenge you they may pick topics you have no chance of answering, such as celebrities or beauty and fashion. I do better than Zoom quiz as the questions are multiple choice and some answers are so stupid you can pick the right one even if you have never heard of the person or place.
Here are some examples for you to try, with the advantage of not having to answer in ten seconds like the real quiz.
Who was the previous president of the USA? 1. Ghengis Khan 2. Vlad The Impaler 3. Donald Trump 4. Abraham Lincoln
Which of these is an insect? 1. horse 2. whale 3. grasshopper 4. cat
Who played Maria in The Sound of Music? 1. Sharon Stone, 2. Julie Andrews 3. Whoopi Goldberg 4. Megan Markle
The capital city of Australia is 1. Canberra 2. San Francisco 3. Oslo 4. Beijing
If you had an appendectomy what would you have removed? 1. finger 2. appendix 3. leg 4. head
And here is one I got wrong earlier, somehow missing the obvious…. Which star is closest to the earth 1. Alpha Centauri 2. Sirius 3. Epsilon Eridani 4. THE SUN
Here are the correct answers, but not necessarily in the right order; appendix, Canberra, THE SUN, Donald Trump, Julie Andrews and grasshopper.
My experience of cruises is limited to sailing from Poole to Cherbourg, a five hour trip on the Bar Fleur, for days out or holidays in France, and our one trip to Bilbao, northern Spain.
Poole Harbour – not the Bar Fleur
Our voyage on the Pride of Bilbao was one of their three-night weekend mini cabaret cruises, off peak season in October, with vouchers Cyberspouse got people at work to cut out of The Sun newspaper, a paper I never let him buy! When we boarded at Portsmouth all the other passengers looked like Sun readers. On the Friday night we went to watch the cabaret and were not surprised that when it was finished the entertainers reappeared in their crew members’ uniforms.
Our inner cabin was like a prison cell; I took the top bunk, not wishing Cyberspouse to crash down on top of me.
But the next day was sunny with plenty to do on board; relaxing in the lounges, taking part in Whale and Dolphin watches on deck or from the observation lounge, going to wildlife presentations in the ship’s cinema with the resident wildlife officer from the Biscay Dolphin Research Programme.
After our second sleep came our early arrival in the port for our six hour turn around. On board we could book one of three coach trips; there was a lot of port and industry between us and Bilbao town, so you couldn’t just get off and ‘have a look around’. The fishing village outing was off, not enough takers. We had plumped for the Guggenheim Museum, but regular passengers told us it wouldn’t be opening for another hour, so we changed to the trip into town with hot chocolate and a snack at a quaint tiled coffee house. We spent the remainder of the time wandering around a nice department store near the coach pick up point, because it was cold and also I was worried we would not find our way back or be late for the coach!
That day’s sailing was very pleasant, sitting in the sun lounges, reading or writing and listening out for summons to see whales – we only ever saw distant sprays of water. I decided I enjoyed cruising. On our last night we slept well and were surprised when the next morning the Captain said we had been through a Force Eight ( or was it Sixteen? ) Gale; the Bay of Biscay is known for rough seas. I might have thought twice about going if I had known that, but it seems our inner cabin was far more stable than the better cabins.
The elegant Queen Mary 2 – the world’s only ocean liner, not a cruise ship
We have been on trips to Southampton and crossed Southampton Water on the ferry, so we have seen plenty of cruise ships and most of them look like huge floating blocks of flats, how do passengers find their way around? We never could afford seriously considered going on a proper cruise.
One of the strangest remarks after Cyberspouse died was from the reclusive retired couple in our little road. It’s not that they don’t talk to us, just that they don’t engage much with the rest of the neighbours. Pre Covid He spent all his time in the driveway and garage making things, while She was always out playing golf. He had been over once to say how sorry he was to hear Cyberspouse was ill. I was in the front garden one day and surprised to see them out together and coming over to chat. When he asked how I was getting on I thought he meant as a widow of over a month, but it turned out he had missed the dying part and thought Cyberspouse was still isolating indoors. He then compounded the awkwardness by asking if I was going to do anything exciting… adding like going on a cruise! I can imagine what his wife said to him when they got indoors!
The other day I was watching an item on the news about P&O Cruises offering round Britain cruises for UK residents who have been vaccinated…
Sailing at reduced capacity and with new health protocols, the line will offer round-trip short breaks on Britannia and week-long cruises on its new ship Iona from Southampton from June 27 until September 19, 2021.
For a moment I was tempted, they won’t actually be stopping anywhere. After so long with Covid constraints, many of us will need the security of not being able to do what we like. If the ship never docked anywhere I would also be saved the tedium of queueing up to disembark with lots of old people and their walking frames ( so I have heard ) and of course my fear of getting lost and not getting back to the ship in time. I could stay in my cosy cabin writing or stroll the decks looking out for familiar parts of the coast we have visited. Perhaps I would pretend I was a famous writer going on a great voyage…
Not a P&O cruise ship
Then the presenter asked if the crew would also all be vaccinated and the answer was No, they had crew from ninety ( or was it sixty ) different countries. Then I remembered how in pre Covid days cruise ships were always having outbreaks of Norovirus – yes the vomiting etc one – and I would probably get lost on board; even in Premiere Inns, where the corridors are like being on board ship, I always turn the wrong way out of the room. So perhaps I won’t go, perhaps they are already booked up …a blogging opportunity lost.
Times and Tides of a Beachwriter 