At long last we get back to cruising
Winter, a time to disappear from the Scottish cold and damp, the incessant down pouring of rain and the lack of light. After all, you awake in the dark and by 3.30pm the shadow of night looms again.
For the past umpteen winters we have managed a sojourn, a break from the drab, an escape into longer brighter days. In the form of a floating paradise that sails you away into an unreal and exciting adventure. Well that is until that bloody great C thing overtook our small planet.
So for the past two winters we have hunkered down to await the arrival of longer lighter days and the possible reintroduction of the gold globe in the sky. Spring when a joyous explosion of buds emerge and bees and birdsong fill the garden. The ability to at long last, turn the well rotted earth, with that invigorating aroma of life kicking off once again.
After numerous cancellations, our pre booked P&O Iona cruise materialised. In fact two cruises. First to the Canaries over Christmas and New Year, followed by 12 days around the Iberian peninsula. Visiting ports in Portugal and Spain.
It was stupendous, albeit totally different to our normal cruising experience.
Just being afloat, having the sun on our backs, sea breeze in our hair. Copious amounts of pampering and gorgeous food and drink on tap. What’s not to love.
That is, once the fear of catching covid is managed. But P&O did everything to ensure the safety of its passengers was paramount. But more about that later.
Back to the dark winter effect on my mood. After reading an article and listening to a podcast on a book called “Wintering” my mind tries to recall what it was like as a child. Did the dark nights affect me? Especially prior to the advent of tv and before my hormones kicked in and my mind was drawn to the fairer sex.
Most childhood recollections are of never ending summers spent outdoors, good light hearted days full of fun and adventures. Pure blissful innocence. Swallows and Amazons in reality.
But winters, what were they like. Delving back into the old grey cells, memories of deep white snow come to mind. Snow ball fights, making igloos and the proverbial snowman with scarf and carrot for a nose.
Fingers and feet frozen but swiftly forgotten, as they are toasted in front of a roaring fire. Not to mention the cubs and scouts, model railway club, mucking about with model aircraft, tinkering with gloplug engines and winter fishing for pike. So totally relaxed and occupied.
Perhaps l need to embrace winter. Settle down in a comfy chair in front of the log fire delving into a good novel, get back to splashing paint onto canvas, watching a film on Amazon Prime at 3 pm on a Saturday, baking a delicious Basque blackened cheese cake and going to bed early with a hot water bottle.
Judith seems to have fallen quite easily into the principals of Wintering.
Yet realistically, you can only do so much hunkering down. You still need to inject the pampering of a cruise to summer climes.
Had plenty of time on Saturday morning. We were told not to arrive before 3.15pm. So visited Tesco, located next to the hotel, and purchased wine at a ludicrous price. £70 in total for 18 bottles, most of which started out at £11+ a bottle, can’t be bad.
Received a text at 11:45 from the car parking company explaining we had to drop off the car by 2 pm at the latest. Considering the fact that we need to go to have a test prior to dropping the car off, the possibility of achieving that seemed insurmountable.
The Internet showed traffic backed up with accounts of people being bumped into car parks if arriving early, to await their scheduled boarding time.
So what started as a very relaxing day turned out to be a race against the clock. Sped along the motorway travelling the 45 minute journey in 29 minutes.
Although the traffic into the port was at a standstill. Judith was panicking, as was I, although being a man it’s not cool to show it.
Judith was worried we were in the wrong lane, missing the Covid check-in and heading straight for the luggage drop-off. Sweat trickling off my brow, body overheating, we eventually came to a human who was directing the traffic, splitting the cars into various lanes. To our absolute amazement we were directed straight through to the terminal. Offload our cases and head to the Ezy parking bay in the short term car park.
From here we were directed to the testing bay and into the departures hall.
Within minutes our negative test came through on the phone and before we new it we were walking onboard. Amazing
Based on deck 5, to get to the running track on deck 19 you have 26 flights of stairs to crawl up before you even start on the track. My pulse often shoots up to 135bpm. Exhausting . By deck 12 the face mask is sucked so hard, extracting every inch of available oxygen.
Something we have to get used to, wearing your mask when in public areas. Although they can come off in lounges, bars and of course restaurants.
Brilliant movie theatre, four in total all showing different films every day. Before entering, a screen outside shows you all occupied seats. Great for determining wether or not you want to be exposed to the possibility of other human contact.
watched Nomadland starring Frances McDormand
All about a woman in the 60s losing her job in the great recession and embarking on a journey through the American deep West and living in her van
Christmas movies, Home alone & Arthur Santa
Jungle cruise
Today it’s New World with Tom Hanks
He is a civil war veteran who agrees to deliver a 10 year old girl taken by the Indians to her aunt and uncle, escorting her through the harsh and unforgiving plains of Texas.
Tuesday 21st
Everyone on board has to take a antigen test, ours is set at 8am
Expected queues, but it was so efficient, straight in and out of the Anderson’s library bar. Really well organised
Wednesday 22nd at its Madeira, although at one point thought we wouldn’t make it.
At 10 past midnight they phoned our cabin to say Judith was positive and they were sending a nurse to give us a PCR test.
She eventually arrived at 12.45. We were advised that we would need to pack and move into isolation if it proved positive.
Prior to the pcr test, we tested ourselves and it was negative, but understandably, Judith was still in a state of panic.
Just before three they phone to say the results were negative. God what a shock, then relief.
No wonder we were late getting off the ship.
Most are permanently found lounging in the ice cream parlour. In the mornings you can see them diving into gooey cream delights at the Costa cafe onboard
But temptation stares you in the face at every turn, even for me, when such delights as NY baked cheese cake lines up alongside carrot cake, lemon meringue pie and numerous other delectable teasers in the chilled display cabinet next to the coffee machine.
Up to now have managed to get away with half a chocolate muffin with my first cup of coffee in the morning, the odd pain au chocolate and the delicious hot pudding with custard on the buffet.
Prefer savoury to sweet. My weaknesses are suet puddings. Had a bloody gorgeous steak and kidney pie/pudding, so old school it lacked only a mortarboard and ink well. Served with firm mashable potatoes, a lid somewhere between shortcrust and suet pastry, it was brimful of grey brown gravy and simply rammed with kidney, the high smell leaping out as I dug into the pastry and filling my head with happiness. The meat was plain chuck steak, tender and sweet but the kidneys were clearly of lamb, being small and sweet and grassily aromatic.
Words with their hearts on their sleeves:
secretary: a keeper of secrets.
wardrobe: to guard/ward our robes.
freelancer: a knight free to use his lance for payment.
holiday: a holy day.
alphabet: the letters alpha, beta.
disease: lack of ease.
duck: a bird that ducks under water.
Richard Branson was considering using it for his space tourism, but now the former top secret Scottish military installation is being investigated for use as a green datacentre.
With underground bunkers, watchtowers and Europe’s longest runway, it’s little wonder why some online forums describe it as Scotland’s version of area 51.
The former RAF base Machrihanish in Kintyre could soon have something other than special operations, stealth bombers, and reputedly NASA aircraft. The secretive military installation which was used by the US military at the height of the Cold War is one of a dozen sites selected to host a legion of green data centres powering the tech sector.
It has been described in a scoping document as a strategic datacentre location which with its proximity to Port Rush in Northern Ireland and Kalala in Ireland would offer an inexpensive new subsea connection to Ireland and the USA especially with Amazon building a wind farm adjacent and an existing solar farm with ample room for expansion it has access to plenty for sources of local green clean energy.
Wonderful article in the Times on why Franglaise reopened a festering wound between two countries separated by a few miles of water. Seems that we are both as bad as each other.
In the long and venomous history of Anglo French insults Boris Johnson’s injunction to the French to “prenez in grip”in the row over the Australian nuclear submarine deal may seem a little more than a pin prick, a lazy franglais side swipe, disdainful but hardly mortal. Yet by telling Paris to “donned-moi a break” and calm down after Australia forge the Aukus pact with UK in the US and scrapped a $48 billion submarine deal with France the prime minister was pressing on a bruise that goes back centuries. There are two aspects of this national rivalry that raise Gaelic hackles faster than any other. The French language, and the sensitivity of the French military status in the world.
This willingness to give, and take, offense ranges across every corner of culture, food, literature, sex, and personal hygiene. A poll taken to celebrate the anniversary of the entente cordiale in 2004 found that among the British the worlds most commonly used to describe the French were untrustworthy, treacherous and cowardly.
The French conversely regarded the British has isolated, insular and selfish.
In the franchise Britain is Carthage to France’s cultured Rome, and boorish , a nation of brutal shopkeepers with poor dentistry, bad manners and inedible cuisine.
French often say we can’t trust people who have such bad food.
Queen Victoria spoke for the nation, and centuries of stereotyping when she described the French as fickle, corrupt and ignorant, so conceited and foolish that it is hopeless to think of their being sensibly governed. I fear they are incurable as a nation, though so charming as individuals.
France is a country that invented sado mechanism, insist that flagellation is strictly Levisa on glaze. We name our contraceptives after one another. A French letter is in France a letter Anglaise, a slur accompanied by appreciation for superior British manufacturing in 1749 Louis the 15th asked the British embassy to provide him with 300 English made condoms.
But nothing ignites the French fury so quickly as language and war. Johnson’s insult works precisely because it’s untranslatable into French. His casual mangling of the language is not a deliberate insult but an instinctive one, and therefore doubly offensive.
Fruitless efforts by the Academy français to protect French focus exclusively on the threat posed by English, the intrusion of words from other languages is irrelevant there is only one linguistic enemy.
A Frenchman speaking bad English is merely funny, but an Englishman riding roughshod over the language of Racine and Moliere is an assault on France itself. The English often feel free to pronounce French in an English accent and if still misunderstood, to shout.
The 19th century writer Astolphe de Custine complained bitterly that when speaking to British people it is not enough to say the words in English to them, one actually has to pronounce them in a certain way that suits them.
When Anglo-Saxon linguistic contempt is coupled with a military setback, the effect on French amour propre is explosive. Anger in France over Aukus can only be properly understood against the background of Agincourt, the Royal Navy, the Great War and the sinking of the French fleet at Mer el Kebir in 1940.
During the conflict that raged across Europe between 1688 and 1815, Britain’s military spending as a proportion of gross national product was five times that of France. The result was naval domination, military triumph, a vast empire, booming trade and profound French resentment.
In French eyes exclusion from the nuclear submarine deal is just the latest evidence of Albion’s perfidy, a ruthless willingness to further British interests at the expense of France. Writing about the French army, Charles de Gaulle condemned Britain’s coldness, ruthlessness and duplicity, and omitted to mention Waterloo.
His antipathy to Britain pre-dated the Second World War and during it, according to one advisor, he had to be constantly reminded that our main enemy is Germany. If he would follow his own inclination, it would be England.
As always Sir Humphrey in Yes Minister put his finger on the essence of the Anglo French military relationship. If they’ve got the bomb, then we must have the bomb.
The intensity of the one up man ship is of course a reflection of the profound similarities between Britain and France, formerly great imperial powers with important global links along military tradition and aspirations to worldwide influence. Our two nations, all but indistinguishable in terms of population, wealth and influence, each believe we have a civilising mission, which makes us take ourselves and our differences far more seriously than others do. The Aukus dispute is about command of the seas, wounded French pride and perceived British doubledealing. It is rooted in an enduring combination of enmity and hostility, a mixture of envy, admiration, shared values, antagonism and a high regard. The rivalry is how both countries measure themselves diplomatically in the world. It is as important to our self-image as the relationship with the US, and just as special.
Its latest eruption comes at a time when, behind all the furious rhetoric, Anglo-French relations and cooperation have never been closer. But that has always been the way with this uniquely intimate enmity. The first world war brought Britain and France into the closest military alliance, yet in 1919 the foreign office declared our relations with France never have been, are not, and probably never will be, sufficiently stable and friendly to justify the construction of the channel tunnel.
AMATEUR hunters should be allowed to shoot deer on public land as part of an annual cull, say experts.
They want to establish more opportunities for trained stalkers to manage the animals on stateowned land in their area.
The plans come from a partnership of 11 groups involved in deer management.
It's been said that despite Scotland's deer population being about a million, many licensed stalkers struggle to access hunting opportunities in their area.
The group claim this is because culls on state property are carried out by contractors, hired at significant cost to the taxpayer.
Forestry and Land Scotland (FLS), which manages nearly 10 per cent of the country's land mass, paid PS10.5million on deer contracts in 2019.
Members of the partnership, which is being led by the British Association for Shooting and Conservation (BASC), believe this is "needlessly expensive".
They said there are lots of local people who would be keen to take part in deer management. There are 26,300 firearm certificate holders in Scotland, many of whom may already be involved in deer stalking.
But the number of stalkers involved in deer management at a local level is much lower, with many paying to shoot on sporting estates instead.
Ross Ewing of the BESC and a spokesman for the group said the management is a fundamental and legal obligation, and where possible we must find more economic, sustainable and localised means of controlling Scotland’s deer. Community integrated deer management will effectively capitalise on our rich, growing and free resource of trained recreational deer stalkers. Deer undoubtedly pose significant environmental challenges, but they are also an iconic natural resource and should be manage respectfully. Community integrated data management provides an obvious realistic sustainable means of achieving this.
The group wants to establish a pilot community stalking scheme where a local recreational syndicate would pay a small fee to take on data management obligations. Venison could be sold locally, minimising the carbon footprint.
BASC and the British dear society have also said they would run discounted training courses for recreational hunters. The partnership is also recommending a 250,000 year management training fund be set up.
It would enable them to deliver the basic level deerstalking certificate to more than 1000 people free of charge over an eight year period. Ewing said we will be relying on the training of individual deerstalkers, but we provide the day management training, we provide it vigourously and we are confident anyone embarking on these schemes going forward will be trained to the same standard as the contractors.
A considerable impact could be made if they were given the chance to hunt deer locally, says the partnership.
FLS said it would be keen to consider proposals that could assist proactive deer management.
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