Today’s Daily Programme can be found here…
Today is our first sea day for what seems like an age but is only 4 days, so after a good nights sleep it was back to planning my morning. First we had to get breakfast out of the way so we had a quick shower and headed up to the PG restaurant for something to eat. After the Bircher muesli I’d ordered a mushroom and chilli omelette with a side order of black pudding, when it arrived it was indeed an omelette, with mushroom and chilli, but with a slice of something that certainly wasn’t black pudding, our waiter tried to persuade me that it was, but I’m a lad from Lancashire and we know our black pudding. It turns out that it was white pudding, which I didn’t know they even served on-board, and not unpleasant so didn’t make too much of a fuss. I’m hoping they haven’t run out of black pudding because, although I haven’t had a Signature breakfast yet, I will be wanting one and black pudding is a cornerstone of that.
After breakfast we headed up to 12 to relax before I had to depart for my Insight lecture at 10 am. First up was a lecture on the Venetian and Ottoman conflicts by professor Andrew Hopkins as well as German wartime atrocities in Cephalonia in WWII. The lecture was a bit disjointed and although I enjoyed it it felt like I wasn’t learning much other than the Venetians ruled the Adriatic from the 1420’s until Napoleon stuck his oar in in 1797.
After that it was John Hutchinson and his lecture on his career progression from RAF recruit to Concorde Captain. That was a more structured lecture beset by technical issues, which didn’t cause too many problems. After that I went to find Jane up on 12 where she had a lady lying on the sun bed next to her, when I say next to her I mean the beds were touching. She had asked Jane if the bed was free and although Jane intended it for me, I wasn’t there yet so said it was and instead of moving the bed away from her the lady just lay on it. Some people just have no filters when it comes to personal space and it just left Jane feeling uncomfortable until I arrived and I suggested we went to a pair of free beds across the deck.
Ricky came around at 12:30 beaming as usual with a selection of sandwiches for lunch. But we were going to eat in the dining room, bratwurst was on the menu and I really like bratwurst, it’s a shame they never came with curry ketchup as that would have made my day.
Lunch over, it was back to some serious sunbathing. Jane took a spot on the Grills terrace outside the lounge while I finished off my blog, and there we stayed until it was time for the progressive trivia quiz. I’m sure we’re getting thicker the longer the cruise goes on, we had another 12/20 day which isn’t going to win us anything. After the quiz I had another Zoom call. This was much more successful than the last effort, as the internet signal does seem more prone to interference when in port. My meeting was uninterrupted this time, although that cannot be said about the TV signal, the India/Afghanistan ODI was constantly interrupted.
It was the Red and Gold gala evening and Jane was having doubts about getting into a lovely red Karen Millen dress she had planned on wearing, it’s a fair way into this cruise and she’d not managed to wear it on the Barcelona cruise because of the dreaded “sea air shrinkage” issue you find on cruises. She needn’t have worried she got into it and looked splendid, unfortunately you’ll have to take my word for it as I forgot my phone so have no pictures. Dinner was an excellent Beef Wellington followed by Crepes Suzette.
After dinner we retired to the Grills Lounge for a Brandy Alexander and a glass of Old Thumper before heading to the Winter Garden where we’d arranged to meet our table mates for the Red and Gold Trivia – A much better showing on this one 17/20.