The Coral Sea

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<strong style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Saturday 10^th March 2012:

Today marks the half-way point in our 4-month long sabbatical and it’s been a lovely, sunny, lazy day. We’re now in the Tropic of Capricorn in the Coral Sea and the humidity level is rising significantly. Over 60%!t(MISSING)oday and it will get wetter yet. It made our time in the gym somewhat less than invigorating this morning. Just knackering!!

We went to a lecture today … and quickly regretted it. It was by the Fiction Reviewer of the Sunday Times and he talked about various journalistic critics – theatre and book reviewers. But he had no visual aids and I don’t know about you but I can only listen and pay attention to someone talking for about 7 minutes and then I drift. He talked for 50 minutes solid in a pretty monotone voice. Thank goodness the seats reclined so I was not the only person there to have a snooze. I think the only reason some people didn’t walk out was that they’d fallen asleep!

But this afternoon was much more fun. Queen Mary 2 is the only ship with 3D cinema capability so we went to watch the latest Transformers film. It ran for over 2½ hours and was a feast of special effects which 3D made even more exciting. It was a very good dollop of escapist fun. Just for your information, the goodies won despite the overwhelming superiority of the baddies, the guy got the girl, America saved the world yada yada – you can fill in the gaps yourselves.

Last night was formal night on board and lovely. But tonight was formal night again and we get fed up with too many of those so we slobbed out in the self-service restaurant. And it was great. One of my all-time favourites was on: cottage pie. And for pudding we did something we haven’t done for years and years and that was spread (diabetic of course) marmalade on some Jacob’s cream crackers. Yum!

We are now heading towards the deepest waters on the planet – the Challenger Deep – which James Cameron, the maker of Titanic, is going to explore solo in his own submersible later this month. We should be there around 14^th of March. Good luck to him, we intend to stay firmly on the surface!

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