I met a hero yesterday here on the Carnival Paradise. His name is Alan and he is 12 years old.
It was a meeting by chance after the show last night with his parents, Sally and Anthony, and their eight-year-old daughter, Megan. They came to see me having recognised me from previous cruises. During our conversation I learnt about Alan and what he had done to earn the title I just gave him of “hero.”
I have never been able to understand anyone of the male species who purchases something for practical reasons. I imagine him to have far too much time on his hands and most likely he is wearing a pair of sandals. How can they spend an entire morning reading online reviews of washing machines? But even worse, who the sodding heck can be bothered to write an online review of a washing machine? They’re all the same. They’re white and boxy and after they’ve finished making your underpants clean, they beep, telling your wife it’s time to empty it and put it in the other white boxy thing next to it that dries the underpants so they are ready to wear for another week or two.
That great English tradition has started – no, I’m not talking about the weather. I am, of course, talking about Wimbledon, arguably the top tennis tournament in the world. Are you excited? Some of you are and many definitely are not because, for some, tennis is about as exciting as reading 50 Shades of Grey with all the rumpy pumpy bits taken out. Wimbledon takes it to a whole new level. Hundreds of elderly English people with their sunburn and their emergency wet weather gear sit there eating their cucumber sandwiches and applaud absolutely everything.
I know this is supposed to be a cruise-related blog and for people clicking on this page for the first time, I welcome you and assure you cruise-related business is the normal conversation here and I will return to it a bit later in this episode.
However, I hope you will excuse me if I put into words something that has been on my mind these past couple of days. The subject is my dad, a subject that I think about every day, more so this past Sunday which, of course, was Father’s Day. For those who may have just joined me, let me mention my dad passed away a year and half ago leaving his bride of 54 years, me, my sister and three grandchildren missing him more than I have the ability to describe. This past Sunday, I had to go into his office/study, something I have purposely avoided as much as I could over the past months, unless requested by mum, to fiddle and check on an insurance file or some banking in one of the files he kept so meticulously.
If you had been reading my Facebook page the other day, you might remember someone writing to me and suggesting that, when people are late coming back to the ship in Cozumel that the staff should walk down the pier and check the bars to see if we could spot someone enjoying a bucket of margaritas, oblivious to the fact that big white thing is sailing away without them and their clean underwear.
It’s not like me to start one of my blogs by being serious and not mentioning my dangly bits or moaning about the state of the world but today I feel I need to.
There have been a lot of comments on my Facebook page about our decision to have bottles of alcohol purchased from the shops on board or in the ports of call returned to guests on debarkation morning. The reason we’re doing this is pretty straightforward. Since we are not able to monitor the consumption of alcohol on the last night of the cruise – which can potentially impact the safety and well-being of all of our guests – we will distribute liquor purchased ashore and from the Fun Shops on the last morning of the cruise. While this may feel to some like an action we are taking to generate more revenue, the reality is just the opposite. Our overall changes to our beverage policy are not expected to result in any additional revenue in the end.
I bet right now most of you reading this are wearing a T-shirt. Yep, T-shirts, we all have them, we all wear them and we all wear them on our cruises. Most are plain or have a fun pattern or logo on them. The T-shirt is the most popular daytime thing to wear and I, of course, love it when I see people wearing Carnival logo wear. It does make me smile when people wear T-shirts with a place they have visited on it, particularly if it’s the exotic-sounding name of somewhere far, far away from where you are at the time. There are some people who do think it’s alright to wear another cruise line’s T-shirt on a Carnival ship and this always makes me giggle.
On June 24, I will be flying to Trieste, Italy, to see your Carnival Vista. I will be joined by Peter the Hair, Jay the Latino and their film crew who will capture the special “coin ceremony” which I will share with you here and on , and I will also be joined by a special guest.
So a couple of weeks ago I mentioned about an incident that happened to me when I was a kid that has given me a pure and utter hatred for anything to do with the dentist. And tomorrow I have my first dental appointment in….and I am embarrassed to say……20-plus years.
I will pause here for a bollocking from you.
Yes, I know. I am an idiot. An idiot with bad teeth. But, honestly, asking me to go to the dentist would be like asking someone who is afraid of spiders to put their head in a bag of tarantulas and have a bird-eating spider shoved down the front of their underpants and not worry about it.
Yep, I am dreading it even though it is something called sedation dentistry, so I will be unconscious but I have no doubts this will be one pair of underpants that I will never be able to wear again…………not without an industrial wash anyway. (more…)
It is almost June which means we are only a couple of days away from Hurricane season. It’s hard to think about hurricane season when you are sitting in your underpants writing from the UK where hurricanes are as rare as finding a Jehovah’s Witness actually inside a house. But at this time of year, it is on our minds and I hope will be as quiet as a mouse with laryngitis. I thought, for the sake of new readers and new cruisers, to explain a few facts. (more…)
