We are off on an unexpected adventure
Carpe diem and all that
I am pleased to share that we have scaled new heights of luxury. I have created a tea station. That is, we have installed a kettle on the landing with rumbling mini Guinness fridge borrowed from Will’s undergrad days for the milk. No more padding downstairs, no more yakking up with a towel stuffed in your mouth against the cat’s litter tray offerings. Once we have had our tea we can face downstairs, although medically I don’t think it would be fair to class us as functional until the moka pot and cornetti have defibrillated us into signs of life.
A few mornings ago, at the crack of mid morning when we were in bed sipping our tea’s, knocking back our meds, doing Duolingo, slapping our foreheads, rolling eyes, and lamenting the state of the country - that is reading the Telegraph, Hugo’s telephone pinged.
‘This is a scam’ he scoffed ‘It’s from Captain Jack. I used to sail with him until Tony sold his boat. Last I heard he moved to Thailand and re-married. No doubt he has now lost his ‘phone in Lagos and needs a ‘small financial rescue package’...’
‘You could string the scammers along for a while… think of something cryptic that only the real Jack would understand?’
‘Bloody hell’ said Hugo a few taps later. ‘It’s actually him. He needs crew. He is a full time skipper on a luxury yacht. The owners are going to a wedding in Capri and he has to move the boat from Rhodes to Capri- in a couple of weeks’
There was a long pause. A deep sigh. Hugo itched restlessly in bed.
Now usually I wouldn’t never be the one to stop anyone doing anything. But last month Hugo’s old business partner called up at the last minute inviting Hugo to a boys sailing trip on his motor yacht from Cyprus to Rhodes. We were planning to be in Henley as usual- Hugo is rower- but Hugo loves his business partner like a brother, and loves sailing bigly. So, with an aura of burning martyr I urged Hugo to go even though this would involve cancelling all plans and condemn me to week home alone.
Whilst Hugo was off on his jolly I spent a miserable 10 days suffering in virtuous silence. Given it was so hot I had to keep the windows shuttered, living interred in semi-darkness. I forced myself to get on with my various most hated jobs- tax returns, horrible work related nightmares. I survived on marmite on toast and tinned chickpeas, went to bed far too late (having made the cushions into a Hugo shape), spiralled sleepless in the dark, worrying about surviving raids from The Northern Usurper on my income and all the ‘what ifs’. A few days in I started going tearfully around the bend trying to war game catastrophe after catastrophe, trying to park things out of my control and …stay calm.
Meanwhile, increasingly brown Hugo was checking in to report how wonderful life was on board the motor yacht, how plump fish were leaping onto the boat encouraged by mere crumbs of bread, and that watermelon with toasted hallumi was a Cypriot evening ritual. That said, I believe in freedom and autonomy and it’s not for me to say what anyone else can, and can’t do.
‘What do you think?’ he said. Capt Jack’s Rhodes-Capri trip was going to be smack in the middle of our time booked out in the villa, without friends visiting as they are booked for September.
‘It’s not on, doing this at short notice and messing up our plans again, it is literally weeks since you last went- I can’t parachute people in at no notice and don’t want to be left rattling around on my own -again.’
I know how much Hugo loves sailing. He knows how afraid I am of boats.
‘Is it another boys trip?’
‘No, his wife will be going’
‘What's she called- the boat, not the wife- Can you look her up?’
Gene, Casablanca, Cwtch (It’s Welsh for cuddle up) Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons, Hemingway’s Pilar, Du Maurier’s Je Reviens in Rebecca. Yachts rightly have whimsical names, considered as deeply the namely of a child. They are after all for most people the fruits of a years of gestation spent in the salt mines. They are the embodiment of longing, the product of commuters thumbing glossy boating magazines fuelling dreams of ‘one day’. They are short hand of adventures and tragedy, the title of memoirs, their names writing history. The Herald of Free Enterprise, the Titanic, Costa Concordia, Marie Celeste, The Flying Dutchman. You could write a poem with just vessels names, each name evocative of an era, a tragedy, and expedition, a love story. They are where human heroic endeavour meets legend, superstition and ritual. Every vessel from rowing boats to tanker should be treasured, nurtured and treated with respect. All boats should be given pretty names, dressed in happy colours, and sparkled to perfection and adorned with talisman. After all an ocean going vessel cradles and protects life from the hostility of the seas as surely as a womb. At the end of the day, if you cannot swim to shore then a hull is all that protects you from the certainty of death. A cherished name, a beloved, well maintained vessel, keeps bad luck at bay.
Hugo told me her name.
‘What- she’s called a ..number like a cow with a tag in its ear?’
There was no point asking who would baptise her such an heartless name as rule number one around wealth and celebrity is not to be so gauche as to enquire. At least it wasn’t 13, unlucky in the Britosphere, or 17 which is fiercely unlucky in Italy as it is written in Roman numerals VIXI, Latin for ‘ I have lived, ie, my life is over/death’ or even 666.
Hugo showed me a picture.
‘Crikey. Are you sure it’s a luxury yacht? It looks like a gun metal submarine with masts. Are you sure they aren’t drug running? ’ If I were a mafia drug runner I would want a low, sleek greyhound of a boat in with a couple of decoy masts and crew that didn’t ask questions. This boat does not look as if anyone has ever dangled fairy lights all over her, she is a slinky, in and out James Bond boat.
‘Maybe I could go too?’ I said rashly weighing up fear of boats/organised crime with an eternity of a fortnight worrying myself sick. Again.
‘You would come?…You have form...’
I have sailing rap sheet that goes back decades. We went on a luxury fully staffed Turkish gullet, which was wonderful, except I got a vomity bug before we even left the mooring. For days I was pretty much hanging over the porcelain or laid out on the ensuite bathroom floor to the extent you could have outlined my body in chalk. Eventually I staggered back on deck and took one of the canoes out as I could see turtle heads bopping in the distance. Only it turned out that they weren’t turtles but turds and I was literally up shit creek with a paddle.
Then when we were in the Bahamas on our ‘writers retreat’ to the US Captain Tom, merry on rum, bounced us over the shallow shark infested waters way too fast for my land-lover anxiety. I held it right up until the moment when I could hold it no more and totally freaked out spraying tears like a centrifuge. As a result instead of seeing the swimming pigs we danced our socks off at Nippers (If you can’t beat them, join them) I would like to say that these are isolated incidents but the reality is that I have very bad form on boats and it is not unknown for me to bail and find another way home.
However, in recent years, having forced me onto the Channel ferry, and it not having sunk, I have relaxed my total ban on boats and agreed in principle to a cruise provided it is on a river and I can swim to shore without getting my hair wet. I quite fancy a Nile Cruise Agatha Christie style so have not vetoed that (even though I don’t fancy my chances swimming chased by crocodiles and flesh burrowing bilharzia snail fever parasites.)
BUT.
Grits teeth, what happened to the girl who used to fly into war zones with knees terribly so much I could barely walk? I used to love skiing, my diet adrenalin and fear until I ripped my knee apart and limped for a year. When did I let being scared rule my life?- and by extension impact Hugo? We are in that golden decade where that triangle of happiness is just about able to stand up- we have health, time, and just about enough money. But the clock is ticking, the certainty is that one corner of the triangle will collapse and we will be done. And if The Usurper from the North carries out his threats to tax debt (the ‘wealth’ tax assumes equity, as if every house in the south has been magically bought without a hefty and expensive mortgage) that is collapse is imminent so f**k it, Carpe Diem.
‘I’ve had my terrifying skirmish with breast cancer- I don’t want to die of cancer if/when it comes back. And I don’t want to die in bed of dementia - I sit by my mother’s shrinking body, see her robbed of speech, the light of recognition fast fading from her eyes. So, you know what? If this boat kills me, so be it’ And for a second the engine that used to roar sparked up in this old trouts belly.
Capt Jack pinged through a route. It looks amazing. The plan is to stop at some islands en route, slide past Santorini, brush between Calabria and Sicily, in the Straits of Messina, then the Sicilian islands until finally reaching Capri. Assuming the super volcano in the bay of Naples doesn’t blow (there have been rather a lot of recent earthquakes) - stop, rule number one is not to worry about things outside my control.
‘We will be out of sight of land- there will no light pollution, we might see the Milky Way and it will be the Perseid shower’
‘St Lorenzo’s night of shooting stars’
‘Almost every minute’
So… I for the purposes of this Bloglet I am renaming our vessel the Carpe Diem. As she is being informally given this pseudonym, rather than a new name (and because I assume Poseidon isn’t on Substack) I hope to do this without incurring bad luck/the wrath of the Gods for failing to adhere to renaming formalities. She will be polished and gleamed like royalty and we are on an odyssey of sleepless nights counting shooting stars.
(Or have our mugshots starring in the headlines if it turns out that gently aging retirees are the new naive drug mules. A la Bridget Jones)
I hope you have enjoyed my little bloglet. Do please subscribe to follow our adventures on life between Tuscany/Surrey Hills and wherever the wind blows us and if you could restack so much the better.