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Published: September 26th 2018
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We awoke as we were making our way through the Firth of Clyde to our port in Greenock. We had a leisurely brekkie and prepared to go ashore. There was a marquee set up on the dock of the cruise terminal, for both customs and security, and also for tourist and clan information. We were looking at a clan map on a board when a little man came over to assist us. Well, didn’t he have his work cut out for him? Of course he had a wealth of information on James Watt, and his grandparents who had been the ones to leave the Watt clan land and come down to Greenock. He also had a wealth of information on Tom‘s Cummings, Murrays and Bapties and my new Davidson and Rhind families. The Davidson tartan is beautiful! We spent ages chatting with him. He’d come out to Australia with his parents in 1950 as £10 pound poms, but found that his father’s dentistry quals were not recognised and after their compulsory two years they returned to Scotland. What he found though, was that in Scottish schools the history all stems from England, not Scottish history at all, whereas Australians were taught
Australian history, even though we were part of the commonwealth too. He returned to Scotland seeking Scottish history and wanting it to be taught in schools.
We then made our way through the container terminal to the township, stopping to chat to the security men along the way. One of them spent some time working security for GOT in Belfast and he was saying that the photographers became so bad that they hired a whole stack of shipping containers and built a temporary wall around the area they were filming that was 6 containers high! The photographers then used drones, but the film company bought a drone to capture them, returning them but confiscating the film. The shipping containers at this port were 95% filled with whisky! We were disturbed that some of them had toppled from their towers and one had a huge hole in its end, from where the corner of another had fallen into it. One of the men said they’d been playing dominos with them, but they’d actually been toppled by the storm last weekend!
The township was not terribly enticing, there were some interesting things we would have liked to have seen (e.g.
the memorial to James Watt) but the weather was turning, the nasty storms on their way, so we returned to the ship for roast lunch and a warming Irish coffee.
As I returned to our suite after lunch (Tom was checking out the DVD collection for our old-style entertainment unit) I noticed our next door neighbours had their suitcases out. Our Aussie neighbours, from Perth, were leaving to spend an unplanned week in Edinburgh before flying back to Perth. The lady doesn’t do well in rough seas. Further inquiries to staff informed us that 38 people had left the ship today, choosing to avoid the upcoming rough weather.
After a bit of a kip in our suite we went down to trivia where Colin the cruise director (born in the Orkneys, raised in the Shetlands and older than us) is always entertaining.
From there, we both went to the enrichment lecture given by the Aussie professor - this talk was about clans, kilts and tartans, and very interesting. The captain warned us over the PA system that we would be expecting 12-15ft waves after midnight tonight.
We then changed for dinner and ate in the restaurant
- crayfish for entree, pork chop with a jus for main and GF carrot cake for dessert, with champagne.
Then a single malt in our suite to help us sleep!
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