Norwegian Pearl Cruise Down The Adriatic

Monday 19 August 2024. Our first cruise for five years. First one with the Norwegian Cruise Line and therefore our first on the Norwegian Pearl cruise ship. First one since I had had to start using a walking stick and the first one since being diagnosed with cancer two and a half years ago. But enough with the grotty side of things - it's our first meeting since 2019 with Tomas and Maris, the entertainers we first met fourteen years ago on Marella ships (they were still Thomson then!) and with whom I've shared a stage so many times in the past.

But let's not jump ahead too soon. It's also our first flights for five years and they come first. We are joining the ship at Trieste in Italy and to get there we have to fly from Manchester UK to Munich in Germany, transfer to a flight from Munich to Venice and then a bus ride to Trieste.

At Munich and with no-one to ask we followed the signs, passed through passport control and found ourselves surrounded by opaque white glass walls with a staircase leading down and a lift with an aircrew member getting into it. He stepped into the lift before we could ask any questions so we followed him in which turned out to be the wrong move... It took us to the Departures section meaning we had to go once more through security - long queue and flight leaving in just 20 minutes.

In retrospect I reckon that some of the panels in the white glass may have been sliding doors but there were no signs to help. Luckily the aircraft from Munich to Venice was delayed and we made it, though not without a few stressful moments! Once at Venice our luggage turned up eventually and we found people to direct us to the busses for a bus ride to Trieste.

Onto the ship with relief and ready and raring for a coffee. We had a nice cabin (9522 on Deck 9) with a balcony and a bed made up of two generously-sized singles pushed together. We unpacked, shoved stuff quickly into drawers and wardrobes and went in search of a drink.

We found the Rose Garden buffet restaurant on Deck 12 which was the pool deck. Staff at the entrances stand by ready to squirt you with hand gel - "Washee washee!" came a regular cry as people walked in.

Later we found Tom and Maris already playing in Magnums bar. It was an emotional reunion, Maris had started dabbing at her eyes from first seeing us and we all exchanged hugs and kisses. You form deep attachments to fellow musicians you work with. It was disappointing that I couldn't join them on stage. My voice just won't stand up to it after years of inaction, and probably neither would my back...

Tuesday 20 August 2024. Overnight we have sailed from Trieste to Ravenna. From here trips are going to Venice, but having done it so many times and being on a new ship, we decide not to join the inevitable crowds and instead take ourselves for a tour of the ship. As you can see there is a bit of rain coming. It ends up being very light and only lasts a couple of minutes before the sun comes out again.

This is the Pool Deck on Deck 12 as seen from Deck 13. There's a jogging track on Deck 13 running around the top of the ship. The joggers must be as tired as we are though... Through the doors at the far end are the spa on the right and through the doors on the left the fitness centre, which we didn't trouble at all during our cruise. I did treat myself to a head, neck and back massage one day though as I developed a sore neck, probably because in all the bars the seating was at right angles to the stage, meaning you had to sit with your head turned all the time to watch the artists.

The red stripe is the jogging track with a one-way system that most people seemed to ignore completely. Fran had run out of black counters so stood hopefully on the corner spot waiting to be crowned...

The Ievoli Shine is an oil/chemical tanker built in 1998 in Livorno, Italy for Marnavi Spa of Naples. Ravenna may have had a beach on one side of us, but the other side looked quite industrial as are so many ports used by the larger cruise ships. The smaller cruise ships are fast disappearing I'm afraid.

The Summer Palace restaurant at the rear of Deck 6. We never actually ate in there, but had a couple of meals in the adjacent Indigo Dining restaurant which shared the same menu.

Another view of the Summer Palace restaurant. Both this and Indigo were waiter service restaurants.

Back on Deck 12 where we spent quite a bit of time during afternoons either when we had stayed onboard or after we had returned from an outing. I did several sketches from there which got quite a bit of interest from both crew and fellow passengers.

The now ancient and decrepit old soul that encloses the young vibrant witless (sorry..."witty", I meant "witty") inner being still trying desperately to break out every now and then.

Walking with a stick is very limiting too. In a buffet restaurant not only can you only carry one plate at a time but you can only hold one side of it so that any tremor of the hand sets it wobbling and threatening to flick food over anyone passing. Well, yes... it has its lighter sides too! It also means I leave the camera at home these days and make do with my phone. Which is subject to much the same wobble potential. Hence there won't be the hundreds of photos that I was accustomed to take during the course of a cruise. But it's a nine-day cruise so sit back and wait for the next episodes to come.

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Snow in Northern Ireland

Thursday 2 March 2006. I've been in Newcastle and Jacquie and I fly to Belfast, then get a taxi to Templepatrick for a workshop at the Golf and Country Club and Hotel tomorrow.

My room overlooks the grounds and what looks like a compact putting green. There has been a touch of snow.

Friday 3 March 2006. When I look out of my window the following morning, there has been a touch more. Nothing much to worry about though!

We are a few people short on the course and it appears it may have snowed a bit more elsewhere. Then mid morning and into the workshop we are running, I look up and there's a blizzard raging outside. So much so that we wonder if we will be able to get out that night. We are both reliant on taxis back to Belfast and flights home.

In the event, we both get home. My flight is to Blackpool Airport and the plane is only an eight-seater. I'm on the back row here! "It could be a little bumpy on the way home, so keep your seatbelts fastened," comes a cheery call from the pilot.

The wing and engine nacelle shortly after taking off. The weather isn't too bad until we get just off the coast of Blackpool then when we can see lights on the ground I realise we are not just bumping a bit but more like being thrown in zig-zags across the sky. "I'm game if you are!" comes that cheery voice from the cockpit and we touch down to sashay merrily down the runway. Ahhh... home...

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Flight to Majorca to Join Marella Dream

Tuesday 14 May 2019. It's early morning at Manchester Airport and after the initial drowsiness of a very short sleep has worn off, we are looking forward to a week's cruise onboard the Marella Dream around the western Mediterranean.

First though there's a route march to the gate. Manchester have extended Terminal Two. So much so that it really should have been called Terminal Four... The walkways and amenities are not yet installed so it's a 20-minute walk to our gate and woe betide if you thought you'd leave a toilet stop before leaving the main shopping area of the terminal!

We were ages waiting for the last few passengers. This turned out to be because they were expecting assistance which hadn't materialised and they were forced to make their own way along the long featureless corridors. They were all but done in when they reached the plane. However we got going and here we are. This is not the disabled couple... Though it does look a bit like Miss Franny is about to catch up on her lost sleep.

Crossing the Pyranees mountains. Hope it's a bit warmer where we are going! We are heading for Palma in Majorca to join our ship.

Our good friends Tomas and Maris are amongst the entertainers on board. They sing as a duo, 2 Intense, and are the best entertainers in the fleet. Anyway, it became 3 Intense for a couple of songs! Passengers starting their second week had tales of rough seas and missed ports to tell and the itinerary for this week is being shuffled to avoid a spot of bad weather. Although we will get to visit all the ports we were supposed to visit, we will start off in Monaco after a full day at sea rather than in Livorno, Italy. We're off!

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Flying To Corfu and Thomson Majesty

Another gap in entries whilst I drag myself off on another research trip! Believe that and you'll believe anything... Anyway a taxi came round our place at 2:15 in the morning of Friday 12 June and we piled sleepily into the back of it and went round to wake up David and Jeannie for the second world tour of Creeping Bentgrass.

Much later in the day we were doing this, but don't let's get ahead of ourselves... We are taken to Manchester Airport where David gets frisked within an inch of his life - well, let's face it - I would have done too... Then an early breakfast and route march up to one end to the toilets and then a walk all the way to the other end when the gate turns out to be 202...

The sky was not quite so blue at Manchester - this was taken in Corfu, but may well be our actual plane on its return journey to the UK.

A couple of hours later we were flying over the mountains - Dolomites or Alps? Whatever... they were high, they had snow on top!

Speaking of which... Three and a half hours of him flapping his arms ("it might help us get there quicker...") we got off the plane and apologised to the couple sitting next to him, the aircrew, cabin crew and bemused Greek ground crew and then ultimately the bus driver who quite understandably wanted to sit in the front seat himself...

I may be exaggerating a little here, but only because I need to prepare you for some of the wilder moments he had during the week. I need to fit him with one of those beep-beep devices for when he decides to reverse without looking. Let's just say that it was a miracle that he, a motorbike rider, three tourists on Segways, two Turkish purveyors of genuine fake goods, countless passers-by and a herd of camels survived following his ability to step backwards fast and blindly rather than zoom out his camera...

But eventually we reached the cruise terminal at Corfu (where he walked into the middle of the road to take a similar photo to this but with a large bus approaching). Thomson Majesty had taken Fran and I from this very spot on a cruise around Italy and Sicily last year, but it was David and Jeannie's first time up her gangway.

That is, after David had told Misses Fran and Jeannie to "stop and turn around" - a phrase we were to hear at least three dozen times a day from now until the flight back.

Ok... we are here! You know what this means by now - a week or so of entries dealing with our antics as we partake of the delights of the Hellenic Classics cruise which will take in the following ports/days: Corfu > Day at Sea > Mykonos Town > Kusadasi (for Ephesus) > Piraeus (for Athens) > Chania > Kalamata > Corfu. I'll be featuring many of the 350 photos I took, most if not all of the small number of sketches I did and almost all of the... what...? you're joking...? ...a few of the 2000+ photos David and Miss Jeannie took...! Before it gets dark I'll have drunk more alcohol than I normally do in the rest of the year... The Cocktail of the Day is called a Bon Voyage and contains vodka, Galliano, apricot brandy, orange and pineapple juice. After five or so of these, interspersed with glasses of wine, I'll be lucky if I recognise when the voyage starts...

Hellenic Classics Index

Flying at Blackpool

Blackpool made an early investment into powered flight. As early as 1909 they held an Air Pageant at Squires Gate following a suggestion by Lord Northwick, whose newspaper, the Daily Mail, put up money for a prize for the highest altitude attained. Blackpool Corporation themselves put up a Grand Prize of £2000.

The Grand Prize was won by Henry Farman who had flown 24 circuits of the fledgling airfield, covering over 47 miles, only giving up when the strain of controlling the aircraft in Blackpool's winds became too much physically.

The event would have been Britain's first flying pageant but for Doncaster Corporation at the last minute hastily publicising and staging an event 3 days before Blackpool's event opened on 10 October 2009.

Two years later, however, following another similar event in 1910, the land at Squires Gate was leased and a racecourse was established with the first meeting drawing crowds of 20,000. This early success was not sustained and by 1915 the site was in use as a convalescent home for soldiers from the First World War, the home continuing until 1924.

From the end of the war A.V. Roe operated pleasure flights from the beach immediately in front of the Pleasure Beach, which was itself literally on the beach at that time.

I suspect that the postcard is a fabrication, almost all of the postcards showing the Illuminations were taken in daylight and then darkened and painted with shadows from people and objects and the fact that most of the light bulbs would be the size of footballs giving the game away.

But whilst no aircraft could be lit as is suggested here, there is no doubt that they were a regular sight at Blackpool as many of the Edwardian postcards of Blackpool were obviously taken from aeroplanes flying a good deal lower than any plane would be allowed today!

The Corporation decided to ban flights from the beach after a short while, although the spectacles had also included, for a time, a flying boat called Progress (Blackpool's town motto) which landed on the sea and taxiied onto the beach to load and unload passengers to and from the Isle of Man.

Flying reverted to Squires Gate for a few years until the Corporation, eager to establish a municipal airport, were persuaded to buy land east of Stanley Park for the purpose. This land needed levelling and the Ministy of Labour "trained" unemployed men for two years on the site to develop the airport.

It included a clubhourse with restaurant and bars and an observation tower which still exist and can be seen in the background to this 1983 view of Blackpool Zoo, which was developed on the site in the 1970s.

Despite the success of Disney's Dumbo, elephants do not make good flyers and one here is being attended to by a mate after crashing and rolling on landing...

The site was fairly successful, but could not expand and by the 1930s, aeroplanes were much faster and bigger and required longer runways than could be provided.

Another company re-opened Squires Gate as an airport and won contracts with larger airlines and also to do mail runs to the Isle of Man.

The Corporation eventually sought to take over the site and transfer operations from Stanley Park, the expansion at Squires Gate causing the route to St Annes and Lytham to be suddenly halted at the Halfway House pub but the Second World War saw the site used for military purposes. A huge factory was established to build Wellington Bombers. Parts of it survive as trading and industrial estates. In the 1970s on first moving to Blackpool I worked at Warriners Cash & Carry, housed in one of the units created by the division of the factory space.

After the war there were plans for a ridiculously large airport, including a lagoon for the landing of seaplanes near Southport with road and rail tunnels under the River Ribble providing fast connections to the main Squires Gate site. None of this came to fruition as the Government kept control of airports through the Ministry of Civil Aviation following the departure of the RAF at the end of the war.

The factory turned to making Hawker Hunter jets in 1953 causing yet more Blackpool-Lytham roads to terminate and requiring the building of the current non-coastal route - Queensway - to take traffic around the new long runway required for jet aircraft.

Despite the success of the Isle of Man traffic, international and domestic flights at Blackpool continued to be outshadowed by the successs of the pleasure flight industry.

In the late 1970s and early 80s the airport was quiet enough to allow large Air Displays to be held there. I took the photo of the Flying Fortress making a low pass there during an event in 1978.

Air displays are still a feature of Blackpool's calendar, but although many aircraft use the airport as a base for the event, the displays take place over the sea. These inevitably are against the sun (if it makes an appearance) and are free to spectators as there is no way of charging people to watch over several miles of beach and Promenade. Present displays are flying displays only though, with spectators unable to walk around static displays of historic aircaft apart from very limited displays on the Promende.

Blackpool retains some of the older hangars and buildings and in the 1980s Air Atlantique were still flying DC3 Dakotas, to my mind one of the most beautiful of aircraft on a par with the Spitfire. Two of them were used in 1981 to make a TV series called Airline. Starring Roy Marsden, the series was so successful that a second series was made.

Today the airport has been expanded again. For a while Ryanair operated a twice-daily service to London Stansted which was well used, and although many bemoaned the withdrawal of the service, the improvements to the West Coast rail services made the journey to London much faster anyway.

Whether the airport's fortunes will wax or wane in the future remains to be seen. Which can be said of almost any business!

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Pleasure Beach at Night 1981

Taken during October 1981 here are a few photos of Blackpool Pleasure Beach at night.

This shows one of the very early rides of the Pleasure Beach and certainly the oldest still in existence, the Hiram Maxim Flying Machine. Maxim was interested in flight which was in its infancy at the time and he built several of these machines which must have given thousands of people their first experience of what it must be like to fly in an aeroplane. As it spins, centrifugal force lifts the gondolas outwards from the base.

It has recently been announced that the Magic Mountain ride is to be demolished to make space for a more modern attraction. A fairy grotto dark ride, it was built on the southern half of the Pleasure Beach at a time when this space was reserved for children's rides.

I rode this myself as a young child in the 1950s and used to love watching the robot, an animated mannikin figure that "played" an organ console at the front of the ride. It's visible on the photo if you look hard. The ride dates from 1934 but sadly 76 years is all it will get.

And from the older rides to one that was bang up to date when the photo was taken. The Revolution was Britain's first looping roller coaster. It was (and is) a short track. Riders climb to the starting point on a level with the top of the loop and the ride goes down a dip, around the loop and up the other side then repeats the journey backwards. In order to have the power to climb as high as the starting point there is a catapult mechanism at either end to give it a boost.

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Childhood in the 1950s and 60s

Another page from the old Nostalgia website.

That's me on the left, playing with a jigsaw with my brother Frank, with Great Grandad (known as "t'other Grandad") sitting in the chair. It must have been a family party occasion - on the left of the photo a folding chair awaits a late visitor who has missed their place on the settee (always called a "couch" in those days!) The jigsaw looks to have wooden pieces and would have been moved onto after having mastered the wooden cubed blocks with 6 different scenes to be put together. The paint used would probably have been highly leaded and would have made us ill had we sucked on them too much... In those days kids were expected to eat a certain amount of dirt, dropped toffees were washed under the tap if a grown up saw it fall, or rubbed on a sleeve if not...

The open fire looks and probably is unlit, as a wire mesh fireguard would have been in place to stop us burning ourselves otherwise. A set of fire irons would hang on a stand and include a poker, set of tongs for picking up lumps of coal, small brush and a small shovel. Smokeless zones came in later - we still burned coal which gave off a thick smoke at times and always seemed to require a vigorous poke by grown-ups whenever there was a boring lull in conversation. The coal was delivered by incredibly blackened rough looking men who tipped sacks of the stuff into the coal bunker outside the back door. They would have a wagon full of sacks that quite often was still drawn by a horse, though flat-backed lorries were starting to replace the horses.

Rag and bone men still wandered the streets with a horse and cart, buying odd bits of furniture or old clothes and shouting "Rag'n'BOOOOAN!" - a call that we kids loved to imitate until the rag and bone man got fed up of us and threatened to call a policeman. Now, in case you think "what a stupid, wet thing to try to stop kids shouting", let me tell you that such a threat would be enough to send most kids flying home on the verge of tears! Policemen were "Bobbies" and were partial to giving any troublesome kids a clip around the ear. If you were stupid enough to tell your parents why you were crying then they would give you another for getting into trouble with the police. Don't even attempt to tell me this was cruelty and that it's better now that we can sue anyone who touches us. We learned what was right and what was wrong and we rarely gave cheek to strangers. Well, unless they looked as though they couldn't run fast and there was no one else around...

Toys were either unmoving things requiring imagination or were purely mechanical. I had one of these Merit driving games and the "gear lever" style stick operated a scissor movement underneath the playing field, moving a magnet about that would move the model car on the carboard playing surface. It was nowhere near as big as it looks in the illustration!

Magnets were a favourite tool of the toymaker - we had magnetic soccer games with long poles to move our players from underneath the playfield table and I had a bus that ran along a track until it zoomed into the "depot building". When it came out it would have been converted from a double deck to a single deck as the roof stuck to the magnet in the depot. A loop of track and it went back into the depot travelling the other way and would pick up the roof again. Magic to our minds!

Here I am, Christmas 1961, age 7 and 3/4, playing with my own magnetic fishing set. Kept you rivetted for almost 5 minutes...

Speaking of magnets and magic, there was the Magic Robot which had a swivelling base. You slotted the robot into it's base on a board and swivelled it until a rod it held pointed at a question. You then stood the robot on a different part of the board, surrounded by lots of answers and it magnetically twizzed round until it pointed at the answer to your question!

We had a collection of model soldiers - plastic models were starting to replace the tin ones. Tinplate cannons had a spring action that you could use to shoot matchsticks out to knock over your opponent's soldiers.

Dinky and the later Corgi toy cars were eagerly collected. In fact I still have some of them! The early ones had no windows or interior fittings and until we were a bit older things like opening doors, bonnets and boots were unheard of! Matchbox cars were fun and cheaper than the larger Dinky or Corgis! Dad still had his Hornby clockwork train set - the scale was such that you could only have a very simple oval track.

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He later bought us a Hornby Dublo set - it had three rails as the engine picked up the current from the middle rail. When we eventually got a more modern Hornby set, we had to replace lots of metal wheels from this set as they shorted out the current which made great sparks but not a lot of movement!

Cowboy programmes were all the range on television and so almost every boy had guns and holsters and would play for hours shooting each other and flopping down on the grass to play dead! Christmas 1961 again. The guns were obviously fake and no one ever worried we were being seduced into lives of violence. If we could afford it we would spend a penny on a roll of caps which exploded somewhat unrealistically in the guns, but were also good fun just thrown on the fire or hit with a stone!

The Danes had yet to unleash Lego on us and the most popular building toy was probably this one - Bayko. Judged as hideously dangerous now because of the metal rods that had to be pushed into a plastic base so that bricks could be slid down between them. I can't honestly remember anyone losing an eye, but I did hurt myself a few times with them I suppose. We just learned to be more careful. As can be seen from the illustration, the houses you could build were definitely not the sort soon to be earmarked for slum clearance...

Our house was not this fine, but neither was it one of the many terraces - for the moment anyway! Even so there were terraces and there were terraces! Not all were slums. All sorts of card games existed - special packs for "Happy Families" and the excellent "Speed" or we would play rummy and chinese patience... At school we would play football, cricket, hopscotch (our junior school had squares already painted out in the yard - that was seen as a bit sissy!) The best hopscotch grids were drawn by scratching a stone on the pavement! Chalk was sometimes used, but not essential!

Dad and his brother, Uncle Geoffrey were keen model aeroplane enthusiasts. Radio control was unheard of at the time. They made gliders, models powered by rubber bands and control-liners with a real engine. These had wire cables to the wing tip attached to the rudder. You unrolled control wires about 50 feet to a handle and then the plane flew around you in a circle and by tilting the handle you could make it go up or down until it either crashed, ran out of fuel and crashed, or you got dizzy, fell over - and it crashed...

They had engines that used ethanol or diesel fuel that you started by flicking the propeller with a finger. You had to be quick or the prop would whiz round when the engine fired and whack the back of your finger hard enough to draw blood and hurt a lot! The photo shows Dad and Frank in 1982 having a bit of a reprise of this activity.

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An Evening in Istanbul

Thursday, 19 August 2010. We are back on board the Thomson Celebration and looking over the side of the ship as dusk approaches.

This gives us our final view of the Hagia Sophia and Blue Mosque on the hill opposite the ship. It clearly shows the six minarets of the Blue Mosque. There is a story that when built, this was as many as the mosque at Mecca itself and that to avoid criticism the Sultan had a seventh minaret built in Mecca. Nice story but untrue - there was already a seventh minaret in Mecca at the time.

Another story, perhaps not so nice, concerns this tower, the Galata Tower. In circa 1630-1632, Hezarfen Ahmet Çelebi strapped on some sort of false wings and flew or glided from this tower over the Bosphorus to the other side, nearly six kilometers (four miles) away. The story goes that the Sultan, far from being pleased that his country should be so advanced in scientific thought and example, was miffed at the thought that Çelebi was trying to be more important than himself and had him killed... The wings were thrown into the Bosphorus and it would be another few hundred years before anyone managed to do the same.

We went into the Horizons bar to listen to the superb sounds of entertainers Tomas and Maris. We managed to sit close by the stage this night and introduced ourselves and got to know them a little. Lovely people and a great sound. I knew I was going to come home to a weekend of 3 gigs with the band and joked to Tomas that I needed to borrow his guitar to keep my fingers hard - you can tell a guitarist by the layers of corn on the finger tips of the hand that fingers the neck and strings. He immediately grabbed my hand to look for the evidence and from that moment we were firm friends!

The ship was in port until 5:00am tomorrow so on leaving the Horizons bar about 11:00pm I collected the camera again and took a few more shots over the side. The Thomson Celebration (and its sister ship the Spirit) has a steady vibration that can be felt all over the ship - something to do with twin generators being out of synch with each other so we were told once. Anyway, it does make it almost impossible to take a long exposure photo and of a dozen or so, I only managed to get a few that are worth keeping.

Above is the bridge over the Bosphorus. It links the continents of Europe and Asia. Despite the hour it is still very warm and people are still sitting out on the rear decks. In fact on several nights we made the lower pool deck our final call before going to bed as we could sit there with a last mug of coffee and talk over the day or plan the next day. Very relaxing!

Just at the side of the ship over the roof of the port buildings was this mosque. I've no idea of its name or whether it is in any way important, but at night it looked spectacular with the floodlighting and the lights on the minarets.

Tomorrow, standing on deck I, along with many other passengers, will shed tears. But for now all is peace.

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