Ginger’s Bright Idea - Stage 2
26 July 2021 | Covid safe, full body condom by Gucci
Stuart Letton
Well, we’ve made it to Paris. This is my first 2-part blog so I’m sorry if this is going on. I’ve been warned to keep posts short and pithy but there’s bugger all else to do, so, you’ll do well to get to the end.
Regular readers will know that my tolerance waters finally broke after eighteen months hanging around aimlessly at anchor. (Which reminds me of the time the heavily pregnant woman who went into labour at home and called the emergency services when her waters broke.
“Stay calm Mrs Jones. The ambulance will leave immediately. Where are you ringing from?”
“I’m wringing from the knickers down”.
Sorry about that bit of off-piste. Anyway, as you may recall, the “route through Iceland” strategy popped up on our radar a few weeks ago. Avoid UK quarantine in those shitty hotels, have a mini-break and get home to see the winkies. And, sssshhh. do a motorbike tour of Iceland.
One of the cruisers in Seychelles is a pilot with Emirates, spitting image of Endorphin Colin - just a bit younger. He flew somewhere recently - a long haul flight, and his only passenger was a cat! We were inspired and motivated. And indescribably bored. “There’s nobody flying. It’ll be great”. However, two flights down and on both you couldn’t swing a cat.
If only I’d thought it through fully. You see, for the last three years , every time we’ve flown back to see the family it’s been at least a twenty four hour trip give or take a few lifetimes hanging around the glorified shopping malls that are modern airports. Fourteen hours from Sydney to somewhere in China followed by another epic to Canada or Scotland. Twenty four to thirty hours of travelling and the same number drop in Celsius and we, the prodigal grand parents, returned to bless our offspring with our presence.
And so, when I saw Seychelles - Doha (wherever that is) - Paris - Iceland in twenty four short hours, I thought, “that’s not too bad”. What I didn’t fully appreciate was that in Seychelles, we were already half way home and for half of that twenty four hours we would be sat in the aforementioned airport shopping malls, trying to lay out in those chairs some miserable engineering git has spent hours designing so you can’t lay out.
We hauled the boat on Friday, 7.45 metres into a 7.8 metre hole in twenty knot cross wind, great start....., propped it, cleaned it, packed it away and made a dent in the “must do at haul” jobs list. And forgot to lock the hatches. “Michael............ fancy a ride to the yard?”
We had our ludicrously expensive PCR lobotomies, and, clutching our negative result, set off yesterday evening. Which already seems like twenty four hours ago.
I started this masterpiece in Doha airport after a slow and socially distanced disembarkation from a busy four hour flight and tried to kill time ‘till the Paris leg. I won’t tell you how long the layover is here. Suffice to say, I may download War and Peace. All of this travel while masked up, socially distanced, thats a joke, compression socks feeling like you’ve a boa constrictor on each leg, and sanitised at every move.
Some of the Asian travellers, who, let’s face it, have been wearing masks for years before this nonsense, have had to up their game and are wandering around masked and clad in full, top-to-toe Tyvek Hazmat suits, including hood.
Now, if I’d been wearing one of these yesterday when I was giving the antifoul a bit of a sanding, maybe my arms and legs wouldn’t be on fire right now.
All of which is to say this whole thing may well be another of “Ginger’s Bright Ideas”. But as Anne just said, “first time in months we haven’t been sweating.” And I’m all caught up on Al Jazeera.
Finally. Top tip for travellers - if the zips on your rucksack or luggage are corroded and jammed, WD40 will free them in a jiffy. You on the other hand will get your collar felt when your bag goes through that sniff test in security.