Thursday 30 August 2007. We have had a good brisk walk up Las Ramblas in Barcelona during the morning and it is now around one o'clock in the afternoon.
So we arrive back at the Island Star and head for the Beachcomber Restaurant in search of some lunch. Lunches for me during the week were mainly salad with a bit of cheese and some fruit. I actually lost 4 pound in weight whilst we were on holiday! (Pauses to cheer!) Cissie and Ada are sitting at a table. Ada starts chatting away but Cissie is strangely quiet.
"Are you alright?" I ask brightly. A grin comes over her face but her mouth is still tightly clamped.
"I can't chew my meat!" she eventually confesses. I can't remember whether it was beef or lamb but anyway it had gotten the better of her.
We have some lunch and then together with the ladies we take our usual places again on the Pool Deck. We are chatting about previous holidays and it comes out that the ladies had apparently been cruising on the Carousel around the Canaries as had we.
"We met up with this couple," says Cissie, "he had no voicebox, he could only make noises."
"Did he not have an electronic voice thing?" I ask, remembering a wonderfully lively 86-year-old on a weekend trip to Paris.
"No, he could only make little squeaking noises but you could normally tell what he was saying," Cissie continues. "Anyway we had all got sloshed one night and we went down to our cabins and his wife walked past their cabin and he got all excited and started making these noises really loud and it was just like squeaks. It was so funny I couldn't help myself and I laughed that much I dribbled all the way to our cabin!" She breaks off looking at me in a hypnotising manner, worried in case I haven't got her meaning. "You know? I was weeing!"
"Yes, Cissie, I've got the idea!"
"Well, he or his wife must have had the same problem because the next morning he knocked on our cabin door and gave me a huge pile of incontinence pads!!!"
Both Fran and I as well as Cissie and Ada are invited to a special Captain's Reception for returning cruisers that night. We go down early to get ready so that we can watch the ship leave the port and then not be rushing to get ready. The ship pulls away from the quayside and then... "We're going back!" says Fran. The ship indeed heads back to its mooring, after having swung both ends clear. We wait a moment and an ambuance can be seen heading along the port road. This is the second such night - in Marseilles a crew member had to be put ashore into an ambulance. Tonight it is a woman who is stretchered off and into the waiting ambulance. She has a drip feeding into her arm. We both think the same.
"She's had too much sun!" Fran said it first. It had been an extremely hot day and it would have been all too easy to have gotten too much sun up on the Pool Deck. I can't recommend it simply as a way of getting value from your holiday insurance...
The ship has another go at leaving Barcelona and as we get to the harbour wall we have to chuckle at this graffitied farewell!
The Captain's Party is being held in the Bounty Club on Deck 7. We hadn't been in there too much but the entertainment in there was a mix of nightly bingo, dancing to SP3, the resident band, and recreated game shows such as Mr and Mrs, Deal or No Deal and The Generation Game.
Fran with Cissie (right) and Ada (centre). Waiters are bringing trays of nibbles; canapes mostly. The ladies weren't for trying them. "He'll have some!" Cissie told each and every waiter or waitress, waving at me as though I were some ravenous canape fetishist.
By the time the party is over and it is time to head for our evening meal, all I can manage is a few crackers and cheese...
