24/4/2016 Second of 3 days to Southampton

Today's coordinates are  44 degrees north and 9 degrees west, just about going in to the Bay of Biscay, but not to worry the forecast is calmish, all things considered, so we shouldn't need travel sick meds or sick bags. Can feel how cool it is outside now, so we must be nearly there.

How have we amused ourselves today, apart from eating well?  Firstly we discovered that we had £48 left in our onboard spending account, and as this is non-refundable we were forced to spend it in duty free, for me a glitzy Pandora charm and for Khachik some Bombay Saphire, soon spent.

Our highlight event today was Chris Lubbe's fourth and final talk.   He began with some anecdotes about life with Nelson Mandela - like Mandela drinking the water in the finger bowl at a dinner at Buckingham Palace with the Queen. Apparently HM was most amused. Another tale was about how Chris had learned not to react to celebrity, and how he tried to play it cool when Denzel Washington came to the office, at first declining him a spontaneous audience with NM only to find that he was donating one million US dollars to Nelson Mandela's children's charity.

Then there was the visit of Princess Diana when Nelson Mandela forgot to put his shoes or belt on, and came out in his slippers, something he was forever embarrassed about but reportedly didn't phase Diana.
 He described what a rebel NM was in relation to high security.  Aparently he had been instructed not to leave his vehicle in the US because there was intelligence that armed KKK members were in the crowd. This was fine until NM spotted a baby, and ordered Chris to let him out of the car. This resulted in a cascade of expletives through the elaborate body guards'communication systems, but NM's only tongue in cheek response was "that's why I have you Chris, to take the bullet for me!"  Chris added that it was always the bodyguard who tasted the food, just in case it was poisoned.



Pretty quickly though we were brought back to serious business and reminded of the role of the British and the Dutch in the slave trade, and how those days preceded and fed apartheid.  We learned how a slave owner might like his slave and might share his own name with him and so this is why many South Africans have surnames of their original slave owners. But also there were those who were given the surname of the month they were purchased - and this explains why some South Africans might be called January etc.



The session then went on to chronicle some of the events leading up to Chris being with us today.

The story about him and his dear friend Ashley being chased by the SA police during the Apartheid era and being thrown a lifeline firstly when the police car ran out of petrol, but secondly when an Afikaans farmer took them into his home, covered their car completely with hay, and then sheltered them for 2 months, after which he gave them his own car to protect them from being arrested.  Sometime after that Ashley Kriel was murdered by the SA police. But Chris remembered those times,  and once employed as NM's bodyguard, shared the story with NM and NM tracked that hero down and invited him to the President's residence, where his car was returned by Chris  and Chris was able to thank him for saving their lives.

I am sorry I can't remember the whole story about Chris Hani, other than that he was murdered on the eve of the first democratic election in SA. So NM gave a rousing peace speech.

Chris gave us an insight too into the African concept of UBUNTU - very like Buddhist "interdependence", I am because you are and vice versa, no man is an island, sharing v. greed. Beautiful.  There's so much more but my eyes are getting so tired now I will have to finish.

In my customer feedback form to P&O I have written more about Chris than anyone or anything else on the cruise, because he is so special and because I don't think he realises just how special. When his book The Pencil Test is released in August 2016 I will be  reading it, and sharing whatever I can.

This afternoon I have painted a beach picture, while Khachik watched Leicester beat Swansea 4-1, and then gym. This evening after our final Blacktie dinner, we started to say our goodbyes to the staff who have been taking care of us. Here are our waiters from the Medina, Shakti is on the right.

                                     

Day 36, bloomin eck, that's gone so quickly.

Tomorrow there's an art exhibition and we have to pack and leave our bags outside the cabin during the afternoon so that we can be reunited with them in the terminal before we get on our coach to Manchester.
Bye for now xx

19/4/2016 Sea day to Tenerife

We are well on our way to Tenerife - this morning something serendipitous occurred when I was checking our position, the weather and our speed.  We were at 21 degrees north, 21 degrees west, 21 degrees Celsius and 21 nautical miles per hour. Not much chance of that happening to us again.  What could that mean in the great scheme of things? ;)

Anyway, times have since changed and here they are at 10 p.m. 24 north  18 west  21.5 nautical miles per hour and and 20 degrees celsius.  This means we have crossed the Tropic of Cancer today, have passed Mauritania and are around the same latitude as Western Sahara. We will be saying goodbye to Africa tomorrow and re-entering Europe as we visit Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Madeira over the next 3 days.

Tomorrow we are on an excursion called "Northern Panorama", a half day in the afternoon by coach with very little walking to help me deal with hip ache, instead taking in the views.  It is only 3 months since our last visit to Tenerife, so we remember Teide by cable car very well, and didn't really want to spend a day on the beach either so this one sounds new and interesting.  I am reluctant to promise live contact via wi-fi, but am more hopeful than ever!  Let's see.

Just a quick update on our sea day activities today: super healthy breakfast on the windy deck (force 6), painting a Cape Verdian woman bearing fish on head, roast turkey dinner for lunch.

                      

Our high spot today was another inspirational talk by the most wonderful Chris Lubbe, a repeat of his first talk for those who had missed it with a few extra explanatory slides and a BBC feature about race classification during apartheid. A couple of times Chris alluded to the pre apartheid times and the segregation that pre-existed 1948, the colonial times, and the embarrassment it might cause us to to know that the British started it.  Here's a timeline - it might help to clarify.

The BBC world Service has whole projects about African History to support Chris's talk,  and the extract below is from there

"A large number of laws were passed to establish the apartheid structure of government. The three most important blocks of legislation were:

• The Race Classification Act. Every citizen suspected of not being European was classified according to race.
• The Mixed Marriages Act. It prohibited marriage between people of different races.
• The Group Areas Act. It forced people of certain races into living in designated areas.

The apartheid regime had a number of pseudo scientific tests for classifying people as belonging to one of four main groups: White, Black, Indian, Coloured (mixed race). One of these tests involved putting a comb through hair - if it got stuck, that meant the person being tested was identified as African.

Every year, people were reclassified racially. In 1984, for example:
518 Coloured people were defined as White
2 whites were called Chinese
1 white was reclassified Indian
1 white became Coloured
89 Coloured people became African"

Chris gives personal perspective to the following table showing the inequality,  taken from http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~cale/cs201/apartheid.hist.html.  He speaks of the day his family's land was confiscated, resettling in a squatter camp with no possessions, attending a school with 60 pupils per class and no books, having to scavenge rubbish dumps for discarded books.



After Chris's talk I went to a second art class while Khachik went to gym, then an afternoon nap for me, just because I can.  Tonight there was another 5 course dinner and a thoroughly enjoyable Shirley Bassey night with a rather good west-end musical performer called Clare Bonsu, with all the arm, eye and hip drama you'd expect from Shirl, two Beatles numbers, two Bond songs, Big Spender, I am what I am and everything!

Until tomorrow, so hoping to get some pictures up and chat! Bye for now xx

15/4/2016 Day 5 of 7 Sea Days to Cape Verde

It's Friday.  Love and peace  especially the Ashpital family who need it more than ever.

Yesterday I talked about that wonderful speaker Chris Lubbe who had survived torture, repeated imprisonment and witnessing the murder of a man he was trying to help, rising above retaliation with the help of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, choosing a non-violent path.  His generosity of spirit and his words are still going through my head. He said things like "some of you are suffering pain and ill health, but you will get through it." and "if I got through torture, you will get through this"   "We do not have to accept the world as it is."  "We need to do our part to bring about change".   "Don't look back on bad things that have happened." "Find a way to make the world a better place".
And that has given me and I think hundreds of others lucky enough to have been on this cruise so much hope.

Since writing yesterday we have covered another 450 nautical miles, crossed the Equator and are heading North West, from the live info on screen it looks as though we are just south west of Liberia, (Hello Adrienne and Winston, thinking about inspiring people!). Our coordinates are 2 degrees north and 10 degrees west, so as predicted back in the Northern Hemisphere. It's 31C today, and cloud cover is classed as 5/8. The heat has advised us indoors again, firstly to paint a humming bird with a background produced by putting a wet on wet wash under a sheet of Clingfilm. I love the effect the wrinkles make. I went to two art classes actually.


Then we lunched, heartily again, listened to a Historical Murder Presentation, one of a series presented by an ex- policeman who has researched them, and now tells the stories, presents the evidence before the audience becomes the jury and then hears the outcome.

Today at lunch we were accompanied by a pod of dolphins for several minutes.  Beautiful shiny dolphins jumping, playing, friends.  It was so lovely to see them.  I am amazed that considering where we are we hardly see any sea life, so its a real delight when it happens.  The flying fish have come back again too, so we watch them from the balcony too, and enjoy beautiful sunrises, changing seas and skies.

Over the course of a lovely dinner we talked to the couple from Scotland we dined with two nights ago, Margaret and Alan. We covered some ground! Family, teaching, South African politics, hip replacements, world travel, this cruise. They were lovely and so easy to talk to.   We discovered that Jimmy James hadn't been allowed to disembark in Cape Town to travel on to his next cruise ship gig. He apparently didn't have enough blank pages in his passport.

For a few days we have been back on UK time, but tonight we will put the clocks back an hour, and possibly one more time before we turn right after Cape Verde and head north eastwards towards the Canaries and Madeira. Two more sea days yo land...

Early night for us - all this on board activity and inspiration can be tiring. Bye for now x

14/4/2016 Day 4 of 7 sea days to Cape Verde

Still thinking all the time about Grandad Roy. Love to all the Ashpitals xxxx

My oh my,  we can feel certainly the equatorial heat today. Definitely in excess of 30C. An indoors day was needed today, even breakfast on the deck in the shade at 9 this morning was a bit too hot for us Brits (not all I have to say, some are still getting roasted and turned out on their sunbeds. There was at least one casualty of the heat today, as one man collapsed on deck 13. He was stretchered away.)

So we have entertained ourselves indoors, more art, drawing and painting a monk seal.  Pam Carter is the name of the art teacher, quite eccentric at the same time as being an inspirational woman and artist, and as if that wasn't enough, cancer and stroke survivor. She is accompanied by her husband, a former rugby player now confined to a wheelchair as a result of his career, for whom she is also a carer. Maximum respect to them both.


On the subject of inspirational we then went to Chris Lubbe's third and final talk, this one was about the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission ( links to a BBC feature narrated by Fern Britton) after apartheid, and the appointment of Desmond Tutu to chair the commission using a restorative justice and amnesty approach.   The Commission had three functions: human rights, amnesty and reparation.  Hearings took place between 1996-1998, starting in the Western Cape.
  How to forgive was at the heart of the work of the commission, but in needed full disclosure and engagement of the perpetrators. How to be listened to as part of  catharsis for the victims and their families. There is a SA government TRC site for background and ethos.  On You tube there are full hour long broadcasts of the interviews by the TRC (warning of horrific details) for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRE_eM_LtR4
 Today's talk was really visual - clips of state sanctioned violence, in particular an event referred to as the Trojan Horse Massacre, where police hid in a container and then just burst out opening fire on everyone peacefully demonstrating - I have now linked to You Tube.  He showed us photos from the commission, and added profoundly moving narrative.  There are still so many things I would like to know, but it will have to wait until I am at home, with access to libraries and internet for research. I have found another documentary which gives a more information (if you watch please be prepared for the reality), and I have also found the following 21 minutes of summary really helpful.




There was time for a few questions and answers today too. One was to ask about the presence of segregation before apartheid was enshrined in law - eliciting an uncomfortable response about the regime imposed by British and Dutch colonialists. One was to ask why there's so much inequality even now 20 years on. The answer was respectfully that 300 years of inequality cannot disappear in one generation,  I have learned so much from these three sessions and feel absolutely privileged to have been here at this time. Two of these 3 sessions are on a loop on channel 2 in our cabins now too, so I will be able to review the details I may have forgotten.

Tonight after dinner we decided to go to the Curzon theatre to watch the Headliners Theatre Company perform "Blame it on the Boogie", but unfortunately there were some technical difficulties and the show was cancelled just after it started.  The "pit lifts" went down below stage level, and as it was a dance performance it was too dangerous to carry on.

We are now back in the cabin watching parts of Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy interspersed with Liverpool v. Borusia Dortmund. It's a great thing to be able to study the map of Africa in our cabin and to learn where we are in relation to Gabon, Cameroon and Nigeria, and how we will be sailing towards Cape Verde to the west of Ghana, the Ivory Coast, Liberia and Senegal.  They were just place names, and I never really placed them on a map before.  I hope I remember all this. A few years ago I learned all the locations of all of the USA, I think I'd be hard pushed to remember even 10 accurately nowadays. Losing what I don't use unfortunately.

Our current location after another 440 nautical miles towards Cape Verde is 1 degree south of the equator and 6 degrees west, so we didn't cross the equator overnight as I had expected.  Instead we have been told it will be overnight tonight, and then we are back in the Northern Hemisphere for the final stretch, visiting the Islands - Cape Verde, Canaries (Tenerife and Gran Canaria) and Madeira before returning to Southampton.