Saturday 2^nd April – Fit the First

Listen very carefully. I shall say this only twice. Today is Saturday 2^nd April. Tomorrow is also Saturday 2^nd April. Sunday 3^rd April is the day after tomorrow. Still with me?

Spent lunchtime trying to explain it to Dad. How we are going from 11 hours ahead right now, to 13 hours behind tomorrow (which the newspaper has described as putting the clocks back 24 hours), and so, will essentially live the entire day again. It means we ‘get back’ the day we lost in February. It also means that events are referred to as taking place on 2^nd April (first) and 2^nd April (second). No way that is going to get confusing, oh no.

Fruit, Quorn stir-fry, Sudoku, siesta.

Did not swim today. Got into the cozzie, but the roof was closed, due to expected rain (which I don’t think ever actually materialised), and it wasn’t really warm enough for the getting out again part, so I skipped it and went for a siesta. Which overran massively and meant Dad had to come down from dinner to wake me. Oops. Although, in my defence, going from sound asleep to sat at the dinner table on a formal night in under eight minutes was probably a personal best…

Spent dinner also trying to explain the time zone thing. It helps a little that the newspaper for tomorrow is headed Happy Groundhog Day (although they didn’t show the film, which seems a missed opportunity)! Bizarrely, the clocks flip at midnight, but then go forward an hour at lunchtime as well, which seems to be pushing things somewhat. But, hey, what do I know? The fact that we have eight days to do this in would suggest to me that it doesn’t all have to be done at once, but maybe they know better. *shrug*

Call me picky, but could the BBC not find any newsreaders that can actually pronounce the word ‘nuclear’ correctly? What with the current issues of the day (the Nuclear Security conference thingy), it’s being said an awful lot, and very rarely correctly. It’s quite irksome.

I don’t know a great deal about round the world yacht racing, but the deaths of two people on the same boat in the same race would raise eyebrows from where I sit. I hope someone is going to take a look at this. I am aware of the risks, which are pretty self-evident, and, of course, long-term followers of this blog will know that we have taken part in search and rescue for someone knocked overboard from a yacht, but that was an educated amateur. These were both professionals – experts, one would hope. How can it be that they aren’t tethered? How can those in charge be so lax that they can kill two members of the same crew? I hope Sir Robin Knox Johnson will take a long, hard look at this bunch. Telling them you want them to complete the race is all very well and good, but is that really fair on the remaining crew, to be left at the mercies of clearly inadequate management, procedures and systems?

Thank you, Panorama, for doing a bit on Zaha Hadid.

Saturday 2^nd April the Second – I think…

Missing: one noon announcement. All very puzzling. I appreciate today is different to any other day, but still… It eventually turned up six minutes late – for “operational reasons”, apparently.

So, here you all are (well, most of you) waking up to a UK Sunday morning (7am), whereas, I’m sat here, approaching Saturday evening and getting ready for dinner (6pm). This is all very complicated. I THINK we are 13 hours behind, but please don’t quote me on that. I don’t actually have a clue anymore.

Lunch was a special one – green salad, asparagus risotto, fruit. Lovely, and the company was also lovely – Pauline and Geoff, who shared some recent space photos from NASA and Tim Peake.

Free drinky poos at the Round the World do. Not much gin in that tonic, but I had two, so that helped. This followed dinner, oddly – drinks events are usually before dinner – which was, itself, pretty shambolic. Every table is served by a team of two waiters, and they do half a dozen tables or so. Our senior waiter, Kevin, is currently bedridden with back pain, so we have had a stand-in helping out. It was chaos. We got the wrong foods, the wrong cutlery, the woman at the next table had a full glass of wine tipped into her lap and they didn’t even change the tablecloth. She had to go and change, but on the plus side, it was red wine onto a dark red skirt, so it may survive. I don’t know what is going on, but today was embarrassing. I expected chaos at lunch, because the waiters don’t know us, and will undoubtedly not have read our pre-orders, but at dinner, we have regulars and they should be on top of things. Not impressed at all. Still no avocados, so I had vichyssoise to start.

We accidentally discovered at lunch that they have salt beef on board! Dad ordered “cold brisket” and salad, and what arrived was DEFINITELY salt beef. So I had that for dinner. It was very salty indeed, but I have had such bad cramp for the last two nights, I probably need it.

All these Cuba programmes on the BBC have one thing in common, and it’s something you don’t see much anymore – except perhaps recently in China and Japan. And that is that no one speaks English. For a country so close to the mainland United States, this could present a significant limit to the growth potential afforded by the easing of sanctions. Granted, in Florida, many people are bilingual, but I would have thought that it will be difficult to expand your future if you don’t speak the language of your potentially biggest, and definitely richest, and closest, country/ market. I hope I’m wrong, obviously, but I have a horrible feeling that I’m not.