Days Six, Seven and Eight

Sorry for the delay in posting. We did indeed visit Tenerife and it was closed. Last Monday was the Spanish Constitution Day holiday, so all the shops and tourist attractions were shut. Had you not booked an official excursion the only thing to do was wander the deserted streets of Santa Cruz in search if a wi-fi hotspot and take a long lunch. I decided to take a long lunch and then search for a wi-fi hotspot. What I found, on one of the very few, lovely colonial-style streets of the old town, was the best meal I’d eaten since the brother’s Sunday roast eight days previously. From this you’ll deduce that I’m not much enamoured of the ship’s catering services. I’ll go into detail later; I promised you a more upbeat entry this time.

We’ve made a few friends, particularly Amanda and Malcolm from Bodmin Moor who form the other 50% of MEPHISTO, the baddest-ass quiz team this side of Tristan Da Cunha. We’ve taken 7 out of 9 daily prizes between us so far. On the outside I try to display the graciousness of the Queen Mum on being presented with yet another photo of her and hubby on the site of an East End Luftwaffe raid. On the inside I’m torn between cringing embarrassment at my own pathetic competitiveness, and a sneaking pride at making all these cruisers my trivia bitches.

The morning after Tenerife, frustrated for a second time in serious beach apparel shopping, I am looking forward to Cape Verde tomorrow when Maddy (multi-lingual but totally unintelligible cruise director) comes over the tannoy and informs us that owing to high teas and adverse feathers we will not be stopping in Mindelo, nor indeed any other port within the Cape Verde archipelago. We all swear a lot and grumble even more at the way the poor quality Earl Grey has stolen away one of our days of shore leave. We now face nine straight days at sea without setting a foot on dry land. There are three compensations to this: firstly, I’m no longer feeling nauseous the entire time, big plus; secondly, we’ve been offered 100€ compensation for missing our Mindelo landfall, that’s going on cocktails; and thirdly, we are being tended to by the lovely Monique and Roger, chambermaid and cabin boy, both from Madagascar. These two could not be doing more to make us happy and comfy. Well, they could do more, but that might get them decommissioned.

Now, a little more about life on board, this is how the average day looks: wake around 7.30 and do 15 minutes on the treadmill in the ship’s gym or around the jogging track on the uppermost sun deck. Breakfast is taken around 8.30, and I have learned from unsettling experience to avoid the sausages and bacon, so it’s fruit and cereal and juice and something with which they shame their Italian heritage by calling coffee.

Morning quiz time is 10.30. Many people have already done pilates and mad crepe paper flowers and origami boxes by this time, but I’ve never been an early-adopter. After winning the quiz, Milord, MandyMalc and I take out leave of one another and I tend to head for the forward observation bridge to watch the waves for half-an-hour or so. I find that despite there being virtually nothing to look at, I never get bored just alternating my gaze between the swell and the bow-wave, and the far horizon, trying to catch sight of points of land that are clearly too distant to be visible. I try meditating this way and it works for a while, but then a flying fish bursts from the surface and blows the concentration.

If the weather is clement, I’ll then take a book and do a little sunbathing. I am the World’s Worst Sunbather. My joints these days are so creaky that there’s no way I can apply cream to all the necessaries and I’m not about to request a stranger discover the full blubberiness of my abused physique, so I’m resigned to burning a patch of skin pink within 20 minutes. Equally awkwardly, I only really have one comfortable reading position: on my back, slightly reclined, book vertically above my face almost at arm’s length. This too guarantees no even-all-over bronzing.

After lunch I’ll take a siesta and recharge the batteries after all that matinal activity and that’s usually when I’ll try to find a quiet spot to write the kind of drivel you’re reading right now. I’ll then log onto the (World’s most expensive ever at €18/hour) Internet to post such blather, so not only is all this codswallop, it’s really pricey codswallop too.

In the late afternoon, another 15 minutes of jogging or static cycling might assuage my guilt sufficiently to allow me the temerity to order cocktails before dinner. Let’s draw a veil over dinner; I’m storing up my epithets and hyperbole to produce a suggestion box submission that would have made Emile Zola appear non-committal.

After “dining”, we might take in a “show”. I do hope you’re reading as much into these quotation marks as I’m writing into them. We may be offered Maddy’s Karaoke Night; I’ll Name That Elvis (Impersonator’s) Tune Night; or an evening of Italian variety with the multi-lingual ventriloquist (that’s Maddy again, btw), the contortionist (who doesn’t speak Italian and comes from Moldova!) and the Modern Beat Trio who do sing in Italian, even when they think they are doing so in English.

I repair to my cabin well before midnight to wrestle once more in the embrace of Margaret Attwood and Monique’s very tightly tucked bed linen. I just know that you are all battling valiantly with conflicting feelings of jealousy and schadenfreude. I’ll leave you to it and wish you goodnight.

The next entry will be shipped to you from the Equator. Bom noite.

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!