Christmas

When we were packing, Janet told me that P&O's Health and Safety Gestapo had banned Christmas decorations on cabin doors and so there was a chance that Fred Olsen would be doing the same. I briefly wondered if the Guinness Book of Records would be interested in how many Health and Safety regulations I could break on a single door. In the end I settled for the less confrontational approach of a “Santa Stop Here” poster with a few unbreakable baubles and some tinsel. Obviously the tinsel could choke a baby but you'd have to make them eat most of it. Before we went for our Christmas Eve Dinner we hung our stocking on the door under the poster. Tradition has it that your stocking is filled with sweets and chocolates during the evening by passing passengers. When we got back after our midnight complimentary port and mince pies the only thing in the stocking was a, thankfully empty, sick bag. Tradition isn't what it used to be.

Between dinner and the mince pies we went to the Crew's Carol Concert. It's a very moving occasion with a choir of about a hundred crew leading the carol singing. The crew are mainly Filipino and they have to spend Christmas thousands of miles away from their families working incredibly hard for what we would consider to be a pittance. It does make you wonder why Christmas Cruises are so expensive,

On Christmas morning we awoke to a strange yellow light shining through our windows and opened our presents. Janet had expensive Swiss perfume and lipsticks which would have been Grade A presents if she hadn't had to buy them herself at Geneva Airport. I did offer to wrap them but by that time they had already been packed. Unfortunately, as Janet is in charge of packing, the only surprise present I could have sneaked in with them would have been jewellery and she's already got loads of that. Janet brought me a slightly inappropriate book on shipwrecks and a weather station for the garden, although I only got the control panel to unwrap and the rest of it is at home. I think I may have remarked that the Met Office are completely useless at weather forecasting once too often.

The strange yellow light turned out to be the sun and the picture shows us on the balcony soaking up the rays. It was really difficult to take because the self timer, like the rest of the controls on our camera's state of the art touch screen, is invisible in sunlight. Still you can't expect manufacturers to think of everything and I mustn't grumble. It's been a lovely Christmas.

Dave