Friday 4th December:

A comfortable night and a lazy lay in before breakfast somewhere around 9am. We team up with Chris & Nancy, our companions from the game drive back in Aquila. A really easy going couple from Florida and Colorado, and dinner planned with them tomorrow evening. Chris is a part owner of a company that makes endless swimming pools, called Endless Pools, must have taken some creative work to come up with that. They lived in the UK in Derbyshire near Ashbourne  a few years back when they opened up the market in England. Having seen Mary Hardwick's endless pool, I wonder is she has one of theirs. The weather is pleasantly warm with a light breeze, and sunbathing on the upper deck is the order of the day. I commit the cardinal sin of not applying sun cream to all of my feet, and they are lobster red by the end of the day. An hour more and they would have been very uncomfortable.

Lorna finishes her first book, Ice Twins, one of those that were not enjoyed but you had to finish it now that you had started. I have settled in to The Last Man is Russia, and glad I persevered. Oliver Bullough describes very well how in order to make everyone equal, a totalitarian/communist state works and holds its citizens in a permanent state of mis-trust and isolation from one another, leaving them sullen, depressed and in an alcoholic haze.. This is the tale of the period after the death of Stalin through the cold war years, the ear of Krushchev, Brezhnev, Andropov etc. Eat your heart out Jeremy Corbyn, is this how you would have us in the UK. Half the book still to go, but hopefully will finish it before the end of the cruise.

The afternoon sees us listening to Terry Bishop again, this time the story of Napoleon, part I. This guy is brilliant, and if he wasn't, would have made one of the great history teachers, His delivery and the graphics that accompany it hold me and all of the audience for 55  minutes of non-stop history. I wasn't particularly interested in Napoleon, but went to hear Terry, definitely wasn't disappointed and will try to get to Part II, if we have breakfast in time.

Our evening starts in Martinis as usual for the now obligatory G&SlimlineT. Our new friends are Rosemary & Ian. She is a very attractive, sassy lady from New Jersey, he is every inch a Scotsman, hailing from Glasgow. It sounds like he was commander of a military regiment as he tells us that of the four kilts he owns, and forgot to pack for the trip, one of them was presented to him by the Queen, some time back I suspect. They are a couple but they live on different continents. However, with half the year spent cruising they do spend a lot of their time together. After a ten day break for Christmas, they leave early in January for a 180 day World cruise with Oceania.

A late dinner and sufficiently tired not to want to go up to Horizons for a Motown tribute session.

We are picking up the news from home as they have BBC World and all the other TV channels here, as well as the UK papers printed on the day, something new. So we are aware that Labour have comfortable held the Oldham by-election, and that parliament voted by a large majority to bomb ISIL in Syria. No one can be happy about this, but we need to show solidarity with the other nations that are taking the lead here, namely the US and France; Russia have their own agenda of course. Another bizarre mass shooting in the US, this time a Social Services centre in San Bernardino, California. More American citizens and been killed by other US citizens on US soil in the last ten years than all the US servicemen and women since WWII, breathtakingly unbelievable. Why fight wars abroad when the biggest war sustaining the most fatalities is at home. The answer is to arm everyone, give everyone a gun from the age of five, and this will ensure that everyone can defend themselves. If all the people in the Social Services centre had had guns, no one would have been killed, right?