Good evening...we have successfully eluded the Pirates...although being a great white sailing island with a small settlement aboard I am pretty sure we were visible to anyone who wished to spot us. Not the least the US helicopter that some passengers said hovered overhead seeing if we were who we said we were.

I have spent some of the time the last four days dipping into books I have on my Kindle . I have to thank you Val for putting Christopher Hitchens "...and yet" on our book club agenda. I have started with his pieces...some book reviews and some essays...on writers we have read. So I have read "Che Guevara: Goodbye to All That" moved onto "Orwell's List" and "Gertrude Bell: The woman who Made Iraq".

I loved the opening sentence of his book review of "Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert". "On the cover of this book is an arresting photograph taken in front of the Sphinx in March 1921, on the last day of the Cairo conference on the Middle East. It shows Gertrude Bell astride a camel, flanked by Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence. She wears a look of assurance and satisfaction, perhaps because--apart from having spent far more time on camelback than either man--she just assisted at the birth of a new country, which is to be called Iraq." He gets it all into three sentences...and also hooks you.

Garth...you would appreciate his essay entitled "the True Spirit of Christmas" . He quotes a line of Tom Lehrer's anti-Christmas ditty "Angels we have heard on high, tell us all to go out--and buy." He adds "In their already discrepant accounts of the miraculous birth, the four gospels give us no clue as to what time of year--or even what year--it is suppose to have taken place. And thus the iconography of Christmas is ridiculously mixed in with reindeer, holly, snow scenes....There used to be an urban legend about a Japanese department store that tried too hard to symbolize the Christmas spirit, and to show itself accessible to Western visitors, by mounting a display of a Santa Clause figure nailed to a cross."

Val I have read his three essays on The Limits of Self Improvement. I lol...and had to read Gary bits. Barb has already told me that this blog doesn't accept words she was using to describe her first two weeks of recovery so I don't think I ought to quote much of his descriptions of himself or of his attempts at SPA improvements! He does start off ..."The subject (himself) has good genes on both sides of his family and has been mercilessly exploiting this inherited advantage for some decades" and goes on as he moves down describing his body ..."The upper part of this chest, however, has slid deplorably down to the mezzanine floor, and it is our opinion that without his extraordinary genital endowment the subject would have a hard time finding the d... thing, let alone glimpsing it from above." Good read as the Arabian Sea rolls by.

You must tell me how the book discussion goes Val...to answer the questions...I loved it and I learned a lot...about how a good writer turns a phrase and how interesting he portrays the people....like Che Guevara, Orwell, Salman Rushdie and Orphan Pamuk. And of course I went straight to his essays entitled "The Politicians We Deserve" and "On Becoming American."

I switched gears slightly to go back to where I had left off in "Startle and Illuminate . Carol Shields on Writing". The book is really well organized and is a compilation of her advice to her students and fellow writers. There are nuggets throughout. So yesterday I was re-reading Chapter 3 entitled "Boxcars, Coat Hangers and Other Devices". On writing she says "...remember....long pieces of writing are made up of short pieces sewn together. It helps to have a structure and an image of what those pieces are. Your structure serves as a scaffold. The structure could be months of the year, days of a week, boxcars lined up on a track, wire hangers on a coat rack...".

This made me think of the hours of the day...and since they seem to float along effortlessly here on the Arabian Sea I thought I would try not a written account of a day-in-the-life-of but just take photos though out a typical sea day on the Emerald Princess. So the photos which accompany this blog are taken of us at certain moments....and then when I went on a casual photo walk around the ship. I know...but someone has to do it in October!

Love
Doreen!

Ps Gary and I are still speaking after 4 sea days and neither of us has had to retire to the opposite end of the ship....will let you know after 6 sea days!