Red Sea, between Saudi Arabia and Sudan

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Monday 16^th April 2012:

We have had a brilliant day today with wall to wall sunshine and blue skies. Just after 8 o’clock this morning the Captain put out a tannoy call saying we were enjoying “close support” from the Australian navy in the shape of the frigate Melbourne and she had agreed to do a full circuit of the QM2 and put a helicopter up in the skies for us. It was brilliant: we had a ring side seat with the most perfect view of the Melbourne being over-flown by her own helicopter which then landed on her aft deck in easy sight of our balcony. And it didn’t even make us late for breakfast!

Later this morning we went to a lecture given by the Dragons’ Den guy, Richard Farleigh. His talk was absolutely brilliant: energetic, fascinating and packed with interesting stuff. He was very candid about his atrocious upbringing in Australia as one of 11 children with an alcoholic dad. He was put into foster care at age 4 or 5 where he was due to stay for one month but didn’t actually get away until he was aged 17. He described his time in the commercial banking world, his time helping some of the uber rich get even richer, then some of his business successes and some of his outright failures. He was self-deprecating and amusing and shared lots about his 2 series on Dragons’ Den. He was the guy who backed, with Peter Jones, Levi Roots and his Reggae Reggae Sauce. We will definitely make a bee line for his other lectures as we thoroughly enjoyed every minute of this one.

After our afternoon swim – how are we going to break that habit when we get home? – we went to the cinema … again. This time it was to watch War Horse. I don’t think there was a spare seat in the house and very few dry eyes at the end. But we loved it. Good old Spielberg; he really does make some very good movies.

PS - I’ve just worked out how we’ll break the afternoon swim habit. We’ll be out of 90º heat and needing to work for a living instead of dossing around all day. Reckon that’ll do it!

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