Days 5, 6 and 7 at sea

Thursday, Friday and Saturday 11th, 12th and 13th January 2018

As this marks the end of our first week just thought an idea of what is on offer for our days at sea, these are packed with activities for us to choose from, including:

• Beginners Bridge Lessons
• Croquet
• Short Mat Bowls
• Paddle Tennis
• Introduction to Apple Mac OSX
• Line Dancing
• Insight Lecture - today happens to be ‘Princess Diana’s Love Affair with America’
• Arts & Craft Class
• Watercolour Art Class
• Trivia
• Intermediate Bridge Lessons
• A World of Art Talk
• Insight Lecture - today ‘Lies and Excuses’
• Yellow Emerald Seminar
• Killer Darts
• Table Tennis Tournament

And this only takes us up to 12.00 Noon

As you can imagine we don’t join in everything, time wouldn’t allow even if we had the inclination.  So it’s mostly trivia and guess the melody plus Insight Lectures where subject matter interests.

During these last three days Henry Blofeld, “Blowers”, of Test Match Special fame gave a most amusing talk, even though it was mostly aimed at advertising his new book, recounting his life experience liberally scattered with famous name dropping and cricket anecdotes, not all of which would be considered as terribly PC these days.  It’s amazing how fast a hour passes by one man waffling on about nothing much, but then when it rained at the cricket the commentators managed to fill eight hours or so with nothing but waffle.  Sad to see the days of “Johners”, “Aggers”, etc passing as retirement comes to all the old stagers.

Also managed to fit in a very nice chat, whilst having morning coffee  in the buffet, with a group of regular world cruisers who meet up year after year.  Full of stories about their time spent on board and who they have met, another world from us relative newbies.  Later, at the World Cruise Cocktail party, found out that a couple of them were 3rd and 5th most cruisers on board, with 2164 nights and 1605 nights on Cunard, amazing, most cruised passenger has 3289 nights, and that’s just about nine years!

This Cocktail Party was the third of four we have attended this week, all formal dress nights, with visits to the main restaurant while we have got togged up, this is getting to be a habit, one that must be broken, must be time for a burger and chips!

Evening entertainment has not attracted us much except “The 4 Tunes”, a four man group of singers, well, three actually, one being quarantined with some sort of lurgie, who gave us a fine performance of songs mainly from West End stage shows.

Weather has been pretty good despite the Captain’s fears, or maybe because he has diverted around problem areas, and though often rather windy and occasionally a bit rough it has mainly been bright and even sunbathing weather on occasion.