Technicalities

I am of course a technical whizz, apart from a few instances. I set up my email this morning to send out auto-responses if anyone contacted me, but it has been sending my 'away from my desk' message to everyone who ever sent me an email in the past. This is embarrassing and time-consuming. If you get one of these messages, please just laugh.

The weather has also been playing tricks - rainbows, sunshine, squalls, heavy downpours. This is merry enough to observe from the comfort of home, but may not be so attractive when we are boarding a ship. Heigh ho.

I feel I should also say I have a kind of inner sadness about all this, going off for a jolly holiday when the news from Gaza is so awful. While I was dressing I heard a doctor talking about the kinds of injuries he had lately been dealing with in one of the hospitals there. This is an intense conjunction of something I have been thinking about for a long time. Years ago I wrote a short story about how tourists would go to various destinations for sun, sand, sea, sex, etc etc, quite ignorant of how they were in fact constrained by borders and barbed-wire keeping them from the warzones nearby. In many places in the world now, this association is horribly true. The hot sun and sand seem to attract both activities. Actually all landscapes can suffer this monstrous co-existence. This morning in my bedroom I had both sets of facts in front of me: my suitcase full of holiday gear and the radio describing the intimate details of children blown to bits. All these things are connected. It was not a mistake when I called our ship the Amoral, in my last post.

However, I cannot by myself alter anything, even though I can describe how I feel about it. I can also describe the problem I now have of trying to fit too much stuff into my suitcase. I need those shoes, I do. And that sweater... And....

So we are leaving the house in the care of our good friends Nick and Paddy who are ex-SAS. They are going to have some R&R after a bereavement.