Many of you who will be joining us here on the Carnival Splendor will be looking forward to spending a few days before or after the cruise in England’s capital…….London. So much so that I have been sent quite a few “Please Reply “comments regarding what to see and do there.

The problem is I don’t spend much time in London; in fact I had not been for nearly a year. However, a few weeks ago I went to London to conduct interviews for Entertainment Staff there, and do you know what…………….it had gone.

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The last few days there have been meetings…………..lots of them……………a few with actual real live people present but most of them conducted using the dreaded “conference call.”
I had one such call yesterday……………this is what happened

There were about a dozen or so people on the call expressing their opinion on a particular subject, and each of these opinions was completely different. Then someone said …….“Well, we’re outside the box here and at the end of the day we will not know what the result will be until we’ve run the venture  up the flagpole and seen which way the wind’s blowing…………….do you agree John?”

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Every now and then some glossy magazine produces a list of the best cities in the world, the places you’d most like to live.

Last year I remember the winner was beautiful Vancouver, with judges saying the quality of life is good and the threat of terrorism low. I can add more. The cafes around the harbour are lovely, there’s a good mountain backdrop and lots of lap dancing clubs……………….allegedly..

Other cities that have won……Vienna, Calgary, San Antonio, and the sleepy and somewhat boring city of Zzzzzurich and so on.

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So, where are you going for your vacation this year? Europe? The Caribbean? Ohio? The list of possibilities is seemingly endless. But it’s not as long as the list of places you don’t even consider. Luxembourg, for instance, or Algeria. I bet you never really thought about Haiti either, or Chad.

Don’t you think that’s a bit weird? I mean, most of the places that don’t stack up as tourist resorts fail because you’ll be shot or because you’ll come home with an interesting new disease…..yet take these aspects away and you have some amazing vacation destinations.

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It’s been a tough day and as I write to you at 5:30 pm I feel very tired.

My exhaustion has nothing to do with work but with the fact that the work has been done in temperatures of 80 degrees plus inside an iron box with no bloody air conditioning.

This is normal procedure for a new ship as everything has to be tested including the air flow system. However, why couldn’t the engineers at Fincantieri have watched the Weather Channel where they would have seen that yesterday it was 15 degrees with showers forecast and that today it would be 300 degrees in the shade?

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There are some scientific breakthroughs that are trumpeted from on high, while some are never given the respect they deserve.

A couple of Dutch inventors, for instance, have developed a new kind of cloth that could be used as a television screen. So pretty soon you’ll be able to watch Free Willy on my underpants.

Then we have the British satellite that can spot rainfall and vegetation growth in Africa. As a result, farmers there will be able to bring some shock and awe to the locust breeding grounds before the Larry and Loretta the Locust’s rumpy pumpy gets going.

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My bottom hurts………..thanks to one of the two most uncomfortable seats I have ever sat on. The first was a few years ago at my local cinema. Heidi had dragged me kicking and screaming to see Cold Mountain…………not the Brokeback version but the one with Jude Law.

The seat was so hard and my bottom had not suffered that much since it was beaten with an old slipper by my High School Headmaster who had discovered Sid Ruse and I putting superglue on the toilet seats.

As we were treated to yet another smoldering shot of Jude Law mincing his way through the swamps of North Carolina I spoke – not for the first time  – out of my bottom and the words were loud and clear “Bloody hell, get on with it .”

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Whenever an actor is asked to slip into a toga he sees it as an excuse to go all swivel-eyed and bonkers. When it comes to the Romans, no speech defect is too preposterous, no gait too far fetched.

We’ve had Derek Jacobi with his clubfoot and his stutter, and Malcolm McDowell helping himself to every bride, groom and farmyard animal in Rome. Oh, and let’s not forget the one with the funny mouth who stabbed Russell Crowe in Gladiator. ………can’t remember the actor’s name.

If you believed everything you’ve seen about Rome on the silver screen, you’d wonder how on earth they managed to find the lavatory in the morning. Let alone work out how the Turdus Maximus thingy might be flushed and be carried away in a sewer system the like of which the world had not seen before.

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Traveling. The scourge of the modern age. It’s time-consuming and it’s irretrievably boring.

In the olden days, no one wasted their lives by traveling from A to B, because B was too far away. Now, though, people are quite happy to spend 10 hours in an aluminum tube, watching all their veins clog up and to breathe in the gaseous remains of other people’s lunch……………………….. just to get a tan.

When you are on a plane you are achieving nothing and you are not enjoying yourself, so you are wasting the most precious commodity you have: time.

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I had a few jobs before I went to work for Lloyds of London and eventually in 1987 Carnival Cruise Lines. I worked for H.M. Customs doing something in an office…………I don’t remember much about that job except if I looked out the window in the morning I had nothing to do in the afternoon.
Then for three months I tried to forge a living selling vending machines to offices and pubs etc. This was something I was not designed to do.

Imagine Richard Simmons working on a building site and you’ll have some idea of just how bad I was.

God, it was a lonely existence. All day I was in the car on my own with nothing to look forward to except a lonely dinner and then bed in a faceless and grey hotel.

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