Saturday

At sea

Evelyn Waugh, on a cruise around the Mediterranean in the 1930s, described a glorious sunset in Sicily in very colourful and detailed terms over a whole paragraph and then concluded by saying that “In all of art and nature I don’t think I have ever seen anything quite so revolting”. I thought of these words last night as we sailed away from Honolulu; the sea was glassy and the twinkling lights of the buildings stretched out along the seafront reflected on the surface of the water. Then the clouds parted and the gibbous moon which had just risen over the dark mountains behind the city cast its pearly glow over the ship and the ocean. It was all just too perfect to be immune from ridicule. Waugh had a wonderful sense of humour and although often depicted as a misanthrope it was just that he didn’t suffer fools at all. In the 1920s and 30s he wrote some wonderful travel books; the best of these writings are available in books called When the Going Was Good and Labels (at least I presume that they are still available; it must be 15 years since I last read them). On a visit to Monte Carlo he watched men who were shooting birds from the terrace of a hotel (real pigeons rather than the clay variety); he overheard a British man describe this activity as “not really cricket”, and Waugh said that this was the only thing that made the activity attractive to him. And speaking of senses of humour, I am at least on an hourly basis, when not in my cabin, presented with further conclusive proof that the world is divided into two groups; those who are funny and those who aren’t.

By the time I woke up this morning we were 240km from Hawaii; a morning with high cloud and a balmy 28C. You’ll be pleased to know it was too late for me to take any more sunrise photos.

I find that I’m a bit sunburnt from my wanderings around Honolulu yesterday; but only on my lower legs where I obviously did not uniformly apply sunscreen. It looks like I have some rare tropical disease, but only to mid-calf. Wandering around the ship this morning I could see people looking at me and then changing direction to avoid getting too close in case it is contagious.

I have been to two talks today; one ostensibly on the Pacific Ocean by a woman named Gloeta Massie (which sounds more like a medical condition that can only be cured by invasive surgery) and the other on naval battles in the Pacific in WWII. I found Gloeta a bit tedious and should have been forewarned by the lecture synopsis that stated that she “mixes in a considerable amount of humour into her lectures”. After 25 minutes of waiting for this considerable amount of humour to appear and finding that the content of the lecture was only peripherally related to the Pacific Ocean I got up and left as I suddenly remembered that I had a pressing engagement to go and lie down on my bed.

This afternoon’s talk on WWII was altogether more satisfactory; although after my visits to the Museum of the Pacific War in Fredericksburg Texas two weeks ago and and to Pearl Harbor yesterday I feel that could have given the same talk extemporaneously and with a little more animation and a lot less reading from notes.

At 12.30pm each day we are at sea the Captain or the Officer of the Watch makes an announcement over the public address system to tell us the noon position (latitude and longitude) of the ship and how far we have travelled in the previous 24 hours. After this factual information there is added a piece of nautical information; I’m not sure that this is a good idea. I was having lunch the other day when this announcement was made and the passengers around me, most whom probably think that nautical is a derivative of naughty, looked utterly bewildered as the Officer of the Watch told us the purpose and effect of the bulbous bow on a ship. It reminded me of the story about the English barrister F.E. Smith (later Lord Birkenhead) who was appearing before the House of Lords and was interrupted by one of the Law Lords who said “Mr Smith, I have been listening to you for an hour and find that I am no wiser”. Smith replied “Perhaps no wiser my Lord, but certainly far better informed”. So all of us on the ship are each day becoming far better informed.

The ocean beneath the ship is currently 5800m deep. This means that each square meter of water that I can see from my balcony has 5800 tonnes of water beneath it (a cubic meter of water weighs a tonne; I’m ignoring the difference in mass between salt and fresh water) and each square kilometer of ocean contains 5,800,000,000 tonnes of water between the surface and the sea bed.

Have just been to see the evening entertainment; an hour of songs from the 40s, 50s and 60s. Each evening there is a string quartet playing in the Neptune Bar, an acoustic guitarist or pianist in the Piano Bar, shows at 8pm and 10pm in the theatre and then the HALcats band and singer in the Crow’s Nest until a time later than I stay up to. I saw a comedian in the theatre the other night. All his material was what could be described as “Dad jokes”, so naturally I laughed a lot. An example: two men are out walking their dogs and decide to drop into a pub for a drink. There is a sign at the door to the pub that says “no animals inside”. One man says to other “do what I do” and walks into the pub. A staff member come over and says to the first man “you can’t bring that dog in here”; the man replies “it’s a seeing eye dog” and the staff member looks at the Labrador and says “ok”. The second man is stopped and he also replies “it’s a seeing eye dog”. The staff member says “you’re kidding me, your dog is a Chihuahua”; the fellow says, very surprised, “They gave me a Chihuahua!”