Thursday 4^th April 2013

We’re on board. We’re cruising in the Med. Not on a paying basis.

Val’s here with me and we’re sharing a stateroom. It’s an American boat, just like a block of flats, only it moves. The cabin doesn’t have a porthole. It has a picture window and a balcony. You think you’re in a reasonable enough standard issue 4 star chain hotel type room until you look out of the window and all the neighbour buildings are moving off into the distance.

We’ve had a welcome reception, a welcome dinner and a deeply uplifting address from Randy Azurental, whose core differential is destination emersion. At present we’re being immersed in Sète which means looking at some quayside flats’ blocks in knicker pink from our stateroom.

On waking, Val said, ‘I could face some segments.’ He meant fruit segments, of course. Val is causing a sensation at the breakfast buffet. ‘Throw that coffee overboard, if I were you,’ he bellowed at the helpless Philipino waitress.  Then he conducted a run-down of the early Kings of Provence or whoever and their connection to the Holy Roman Emperors. American ladies of a certain age are hurling themselves at him.  We met a gyne who introduced her husband: ‘He’s a dick doc. Between us we cover from here to here.’ She indicated the area between the waist and the upper thigh. ‘Ah, nienti di syphilis,’ Val cried later for some reason. I think it was because the lady gyne’s story about the elderly man with a flagging penis that been given new possibilities through artifice in some manner only imaginable in America had a happy ending. A number of ladies in a care home, taking pity on the inadequate member, had consented to relations then got gonorrhea. But not syphilis…or anything worse.