Soon after completing the previous entry I was summoned to the first Gala Dinner and Captain’s Cocktail Party. It was a grand and luxurious affair with many wonderful ball-gowns and tuxedos on display and lashings of champoo, but unfortunately this is only second-hand reportage via Milord. I spent approximately seven minutes at the dinner table before legging it for my cabin and spray-painting the bathroom with my lunch. This has been the pattern thereafter. Sea-sickness tablets have helped but heavy seas and gusty sou-westerlies have not.

Cadiz was quite a relief. Stepping ashore and hearing the familiar tones of andaluz voices was a real tonic, and I’d completely forgotten how much I love that city. We disembarked just after ten and the place was still deserted. The city sticks out into the Atlantic, the shape of a light bulb on a shadeless lamp and is circumnavigated by a road with wide pavements lovely for promenading. It must be 15 years or more since I last visited and those years have been good to the place. It has lost the crumbling, down-at-heel and slightly forgotten-about feel that it had back then. Many houses and most public buildings appear to have had major renovations and yet retained their original appeal.

We did nothing very much, apart from breakfasting and wandering and (me at least) waiting for the nausea to subside. Back on board again, the toll of all that inactivity sent me to bed without supper.

Sunday dawns warm(ish) but blustery. I manage a breakfast of fruit and muesli and succeed in keeping it.

Morning quiz time is becoming a little embarrassing. Milord and I have now accumulated the following: an MSC Cruises tape measure, tie-pin, mouse mat, bandanna and an object that would have been better employed as a prop in a ‘What Is It?’ quiz round. It’s stumped us. Here’s the dilemma. Should we stop entering and give everyone else a chance? But, God knows, quizzes are the only entertainment activities on board that I have any desire to participate in. I’m not keen on quoits, bingo, musical hats or learning the capoeira and I have no desire to brush up my origami skills. Should we enter but get things deliberately wrong? Or do what I did this morning, do the quiz but leg it before they announce who’s won? Is that very cowardly?

Returning to my cabin I discover that in rough seas the sole porthole is not watertight. No, not at all, by no means. After hanging my books up to dry in the bathroom, I mop up the shelf below the window with a hand towel and enjoy (!) visions of being trapped in a sinking ship with the sea gushing in at my leaky porthole, slowly, slowly filling the cabin with deadly brine while I jam my head up to the ceiling and gasp a last lungful of air, desperate to live and yet certain of an oxygen-starved, watery death.

I believe that the anti-sea-sickness pills may provoke vivid dreams.

The next, and more cheery, I hope, instalment will be coming to you from Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Stay warm!