En route to Singapore

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Sunday 1^st April 2012:

Today we can utter the fateful words “we go home this month”! Thankfully that won’t be for nearly 4 weeks yet but it does show how far we’ve come. It being the first of April, this is April Fool’s Day and Cunard advertised a live dolphin show off the back of the boat. The talk round the ship was all about how the heck do they do that with wild dolphins and lots of people had some very weird ideas about how it would work. Luckily it clashed with the science lecturer so we weren’t going anyway. But however much we couldn’t work it out, we hadn’t clocked that it was the ship’s April Fool’s joke. I bet deck 6 aft was filled with a lot of people feeling pretty foolish.

But joke or not we definitely made the right decision because this morning’s lecture was all about being in space and looking back at the earth. It’s staggering what the satellites can see but then we already knew that because my sister’s picnic table is easily visible on Google Earth. It was fascinating to have a leading scientist talk so eloquently about climate change and how the earth’s magnetism diverts solar flare particles and show how the ones that don’t escape us end up creating amazing borealis effects.

My bug has been pretty unpleasant today so I put myself to bed for a good long sleep. And it definitely helped because I felt well enough to go for a swim and a sit in the sun late afternoon. We’re very close to the equator now so it’s very hot and the sea is flat calm. When we get to Singapore tomorrow we’ll only be 85 miles north so it’s bound to be hot and humid and to add fun to the mix, they’re also predicting some thunder storms.

Tonight we had an excellent pre-dinner show in the theatre. Do you remember Ray Walker from The Comedians and Catch Phrase? He did the show tonight and he was excellent. He’s 72 years old now and still looks great and is every inch the professional. And very funny too. He did an homage to lots of comedians from our youth so he connected well with his audience and got some rousing applause at the end. It was a lovely way to close our relaxing day at sea.

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