Twenty-five

It’s ten minutes to midnight on the 4th of May as I write this, and tonight is my birthday. Twenty-five, kiddos. There’s a lot of yack I could put down about my feelings on this day and all that, but I find this kind of talk works much better when I’m getting drunk, so I’ll leave it aside for next time I meet you. Because if you’re reading this, then the odds are, we’re going to meet, or meet again. I’m like a bad penny, you know.

I’d like to discuss a couple of things that have been going on in my life, something which I normally don’t do on this blog if not in humorous terms, because they’re relevant to this page. For a long time I have wished to work on the sea. Not necessarily as a career for life, but at least for a few years, I wanted to become acquainted – personally – with that entity by the side of which I have grown up. It is true that I spent most of my early life in Rome; but it’s also true that my grandmother used to live in the countryside by the sea, and since we’d go to her place almost every summer, my childhood was spent in touch with the Mediterranean. When I grew up and came back from Spain, the score did not change. I used to spend my summers at my grandmothers, an exile which allowed me to spend all my time reading and writing. Again, the sea was always by me, be it in the early-morning walks after a night spent writing, or breaking on the rocks where I’d sit with a copy of some obscenely hard and boring book, battered by sunlight and obstinacy.

Though it took a while before I could put my aspiration into practice, when coming back from the glitz of Paris I decided it was time to give it a shot. I gave myself the time for the journey through India, which had the effect (among others) of utterly draining my finances. Then I started looking for jobs at sea. It was an incredibly frustrating task and I went through several ordeals which I really have no patience to recount, but finally, and mainly by luck, I was offered a place as steward on a cruise-ship (I look so snazzy in those suits it’s something you would not believe).

I have no idea what the hell this is, it looks like a Julia set with marine colours (a notion I find really, really beautiful).

I am saying all this because working on the ocean, all sources agree, is hugely taxing, especially on a cruise ship. It does pay very well, but it leaves little time for much else. I am giving up my football journalism for it; hell, I won’t even be able to see the matches of the upcoming World Cup. My cooking is going down the drain as well. I will cut down on all of my writing but the poetry, which I do not intend to give up. There will be no articles for any sites, no opinion forums, sparse letters to my friends. And there’s good chances that I’ll have to shut down this blog as well.

I’m hoping that this is not the case; and I reserve judgment for when I actually get on the ship, that is to say, the 17th of May. I embark in Portugal. I have a plane to Lisbon in just about two weeks from now, and from there, we sail across the seas of Northern Europe: North Germany, Denmark, Scotland, Iceland, and all of Scandinavia (a personal dream of mine). Then the second season will take me to South America, assuming of course that I’ve survived the trial period of the first two months.

Once I do embark, I promise to post at least once more. I will see how life is like on the crest of the spume, and I’ll find out whether it allows me to keep posting on this page, for the which I have developed no small measure of affection. If I can, then I shall continue posting from the surface of the waves. If I cannot, then I shall put up a farewell post, and it will be time to shut down the blog.

In the meantime, I hope you are all well. I am enjoying these last days of vacation, and I am looking up at the stars a lot. Astronomy is one of the few things I will not have to give up once I’m on the sea. If anything, I should see clearer skies than anywhere else in the world.

Cruising the Caribbean, Part 2

The following day is probably the most adventurous. We have decided to go and visit the Moon Springs, a set of small waterfalls lost within the pluvial jungle. The bus trip alone gives new meaning to the word ‘tight’ as I am crammed in a bus where I literally cannot move, since I am crushed between the wall, the abysmally low roof, and a woman the size of a shark from the Jurassic. I am cemented in a position which is almost comfortable what with the fact that I am bottled and curled up without having to stress any of my own muscles, until more or less halfway through the trip my left testicle sees just how much more fulfilling its existence will be if it starts itching like a maniac for as long as my bag is kept between my arms and my legs. Delightful. Thankfully the trip is not that long and I manage to extricate myself from the bus half an hour later (by which time the testicle has stopped itching, of course). I step down, so does the gigantic woman (to the driver’s relief – throughout the journey, he looked doubtful that his vehicle would make it up the mountain), and so does Calum.

We take a trip through the springs, and they are indeed beautiful, but also very hazardous. At one stage I’m climbing under a waterfall to reach a beautiful lake and my feet are trying for holds on the submerged rocks. ‘Watch out for the hole,’ Calum tells me from behind, and one second later I hear a sound as of a large animal crashing into the pond, and I turn to see Calum sitting down within two feet of water in the position of a Zen monk with the waterfall drumming on the back of his neck, looking strangely meditative as he tries to get the camera out of the water. I find the view hilarious, and I laugh protractedly and with gusto, so hard in fact that I end up losing grip from those bloody stones and my legs go wheeling under me as I slip nipples-first into that tadpole-bonanza. When me and Calum step out of the water, we get in an argument. I cannot remember what the reason was, but that’s some wrung underpants if I’ve ever known any.

We go back to the ship, change, and spend the rest of the day on the beach.

We repeat the latter process for a few more days. It seems that the best way of spending your time in whatever island of the Caribbeans you’re sojourning in, is to spread a towel on the sand, lay your back on it, and get roasted like a cod for six hours. Absolutely amazing. After the fourth day of this I’m feeling quite tired so I go to sleep early.



It is a silent, lovely night. Calum has gone to enjoy some air on the deck while the ship sails through the darkness. Stars are gleaming through the night and I doze off to sleep with the gentle message of the waves whispering in my ears. At around two a.m. I am woken with a start by the sound of a giant walrus vomiting in our toilet while banging its head on the walls, or something which sounds very much close to it. ‘What the hell?’, I think. The door to the bathroom opens, and Calum staggers out, looking three sheets to the wind. The fact that he has awakened me seems not be a cause of concern for him, the pecksniffian bastard..

Despite the bags under my eyes, the curiosity gets the best of me.

‘Well, what’s up with you?’ I enquire, slurring.

‘Those English girls are fitbirds of the prime category... Oh Christ, I’m dying...’ he says, beating me to the slurring competition.

‘You pulled?’ I can’t believe it.

‘Aye, commander.’

‘With those English girls I was speaking with the other day?’

‘Yeah. The very ones.’

‘Well, I’m not surprised you vomited, then.’

‘Oh, that’s right, I forgot I was speaking with Erik Von Markovik.’

‘Bloody hell. You must have been drunk like an Irishman to snog one of those. Even the sea-gulls stay away from our ship when they’re taking a walk on deck.’

‘Bitter grapes, eh?’ he sneers. The son of a bitch. It’s true I wouldn’t have minded some salsa while on this cruise, but certainly not with those warthog-faced gals I met the other night. They looked like they had been pulled out of Warhammer. I’m about to tell him that when he reaches his bed and dozes off in the space of six seconds.

I am thinking of getting a proper eight-hour sleep now, especially as the next day we are expected to dock and reach home at last, so there should be no further reason to get up early and go exploring, yet at seven in the morning a bell goes off like a thermal nuclear alarm and everybody gets up and starts yapping. Me and Calum sort of stagger towards the bridge, and a sailor explains to us that it is a drill, selected for this day in a ‘clever move’ by the captain, who did not want to interfere with our holidays when we were coming to the new islands. We should wear the inflatable jackets, we are told, and wait by the rail. I turn down to work the fiddle, and when I look up I realise that my comrade is nowhere to be seen. ‘Hullo,’ I think. ‘I wonder where he is.’

I discover the answer five minutes later, when the same sailor drags him by the arm to my side, him looking very pale.

‘Where have you been?’ I ask.

‘I was vomiting,’ he says, almost out of breath, ‘off the other rail. Then this idiot came along and started ranting that I was supposed to stand on the opposite side of the ships. I almost threw him overboard when he grabbed my elbow. Never heard anything so absurd in my life.’

I tell him: ‘If the ship is sinking, you think they’d wait for you to finish vomiting?’

‘If the ship is sinking and I vomit in the safety boats, I’m going to be thrown to the fishes anyway. Might as well close in dignity.’

He has some logic himself, the poor lad. So that’s pretty much how we closed with our own cruise – high-flying our flags of dignity. Oi begorrah! Onward ye masses!

Cruising the Caribbean, Part 1

I'm going to take up the subject of the Caribbean again, if only to close it (also because I was picking up steam before I started yacking about Avatar). This time I will speak about my experience as I visited all the local islands. I reasoned that being in the Caribbean wasn’t going to happen to me that often throughout my life, so I might as well see all the islands I could while I was at it. So one day I walk up with one of my fellow students, a guy called Calum, to a ship which tours the islands, and we get a cabin for a week.

On the day I set off, the man comes over with a neatly trimmed beard, Ray-Ban sunglasses and ironed clothes. I for a change am hungover, and the truth is impressed upon me that spending time with Calum is going to be something very different from living with Jack. The Welsh bastard has turned me into something of a slob (not that I was a disciple of Mary Poppins before that, but I didn’t live in the bogs either), while Calum looks like a cross between Clark Kent and the gingerbread man. We are given a cabin the size of a sardine tin which has been thrown under a steamroller, but given the prices we are paying, we can’t complain.

Couple drinks too many on the night before departing, maybe. Whoever drew those moustaches on me, if you're reading this, you can go fuck yourself

‘Please put that light out,’ he tells me on the first night, while I’m trying to read. It turns out that he has sleeping trouble – he can’t doze off if there’s a fly dying in Mexico or something. Grand. At least he should be organised as to the journey.

On the first day, we disembark on an island (I hate to be generic, but if anyone can go through five of those islands in five days and remember their specific names four years later, then they deserve the Legion of Honour as far as I’m concerned). We walk into the village, and it takes twelve seconds before we end up in the market and are assaulted by twenty merchants trying to sell us fruit. There, we negotiate with a ferocity which we never would have expected to possess on the price of a sack of pineapples, spending forty minutes in the act of bartering and shouting for our rights, only to get swindled ten minutes later by an old lady selling us pizzas. As the afternoon deepens, my interests and Calum’s display some divergence, so we part ways. I decide to walk on my own to see the sights out of the village, without really taking care of my direction, and I get lost. I turn back and start walking towards the sea in the hopes of finding the boat, and soon I am scrambling with a herd of goats which surfaced out of nowhere and appears to be going in my general direction. I suddenly understand why goats follow their shepherd (or ‘goatherd,’ or whatever the fuck he’s called) so intently. There is something so unspeakably inspirational about him. He looks like someone who really knows where he’s going, strutting about with that satisfied gait of his. Eventually he turns and sees me amid his goats. An exchange follows as to the whereabouts of the port, one of no great wit, in truth – for all of his military poise, the man is disappointingly dim.

On the second day, as we dock into new land, the sun is glorious. We wake up and look at it through the glass, and Calum looks particularly jolly.

The best way of spending your time in the Caribbean, by a mile and a half. Click on photo to see it fully.

‘What do you say that we take a dive?’ he suggests, and I respond with enthusiasm. Then I start rummaging in my backpack, and it turns out that of all the things I could forget, it was the swimming suit which earned the privilege this time. My friend takes it philosophically.

‘You fucking dickhead!’ he yells. ‘You go on a five-day cruise through all the beaches on the Caribbean and you can’t think to bring a rotten swimming suit? What are you going to do, swim in bollocks?’

So I have to go to the village before I can dive, and there I get assaulted by the men of the local market to sell me fruit, because obviously I can’t live without it. That night, Calum has gone to bed early, while I am on deck, chatting with some English girls who are also taking the cruise. They’re the kind of girls who require about twenty years in prison before they start looking attractive, and seeing how I’ve never been behind bars, this limits my interest considerably. After a few drinks together, I take my stuff and go back to bed.

The next day, Calum is flustered. ‘If you come back in the dead of night from your escapades,’ he informs me, ‘can you at least not do so like you’re banging together a pair of drums in the process.’

‘Calum,’ I inform him softly, ‘to begin with, it was more an encounter of the third kind than an escapade. Secondly, the only thing I did before going to sleep was brushing my teeth. If that equates to bongos, then you want to get some sleeping pills, mate.’ The man does not agree, and a small discussion is had on the right of a human being to sleep without being disturbed.

This is getting too long. I'll post part 2 tomorrow or the day after.