Sunday, January 15th, 2023 Queen Victoria, at sea

Counting the days until “day 6” of Sandra’s isolation which could be next Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on when the count is started. We are doing remarkably well, staying reasonably sane – it’s worse for Sandra as she can’t get out at all. Last night our friends Ray and Christine dropped by, and we had a good chat through the partially opened cabin door, with them standing out in the corridor and Sandra sitting on the bed back in the cabin – it really perked us up. I attended a couple of lectures today, wearing my N95 mask of course; the first was given by author and journalist Lynne Truss whom I recognized her from her book about punctuation called “Eats Shoots, and Leaves” I really enjoyed reading this book (many years ago), it was very funny. Lynne’s talk today was actually a monologue that she had written for radio, she read it out, was very witty. The second lecture was entitled “History of the Guitar: Jimmy Hendrix” and it was given in the Queens Ballroom by Paul Garthwaite who intermixed Hendrix songs with a few words about his life and career. Paul is a very good guitarist and managed to do some great renditions of Hendrix’s famous songs. I think the overall performance could have been improved if he had someone else to do the singing and also a helper to work his background music machine, which he had to reboot several times during the performance. Despite these problems it was a very entertaining show. The purser’s office called again to check that I had done my daily covid test, it was negative again – so far so good. They called back again several hours later, and Sandra had to speak to them, they asked how she was doing – but I think they are really just checking to see that she is staying in the cabin. Sandra tested again and continues to be positive, though the line on the test kit was more narrow and lighter than yesterday – we’ve read varying theories on this, some saying it can indicate a lower concentration of antigens and others saying it means nothing; we like the former theory, so we are going with that.