Friday 7th February

Already over two hundred miles south of San Francisco and still the weather is gloomy, so gloomy that the ship’s foghorn was activated for a period this morning, but back a sea and on our way again this time to Honolulu. Another lazy day. We have two new series of Cunard Insights Lectures. First by Scientist Gloria Barnett on the diversity of life beneath the waves and the second by Geologist John Pett on continental drift. Yawn? Definitely not! The way these Lectures are put together is reminiscent of the BBC Horizon series, professionally presented and slickly supported by videos and animated slides. The introduction on Life Beneath was very good but for me the continental drift had the edge. If only because it made me glad we had left San Francisco. How anyone can live there and not worry is beyond me. Glad I saw this one after we left not before. What is going on beneath the surface of both the sea and the land is fascinating. Each lecture is only 45mins but they seem much shorter. Carol went to see the film which she had heard was very good – Blue Jasmine! When she came back, I had to chuckle, I asked how was it? Load of rubbish! Was the short answer, when prompted she said I only stayed because I thought it was going to get better, but it got worse she said people were laughing but it was at things like when Prozac was mentioned.

Later, just before we left for the gym, the cabin phone rang! Uh? Wrong number? Who knows us to ring the cabin? No! it was a charming young lady who invited us to dine with the ships doctor. Bloody hell! was my first thought, what’s on the menu tonight, that we need the doctor there when we eat it? I’m not touching that Japanese suicide fish whatever they say, no way!

I needn’t have worried, it seems that the doctor had heard of my wide experience of various tropical complications and wanted to benefit from that 😉 . What you want the real reason? Well OK then, it seems that world passengers occasionally get invited to dine with various senior officers and our name came out of the hat to dine with the senior doctor Peter (from Belfast) and his wife Billy (from Germany). We were a table of ten and it turned out to be a really nice evening, the wine flowed and stories told ‘the craic was good’ as they say. And so ended another day.