Thanks to the rolling sea!
My two-week quarantine came to an end on Saturday only for the new Covid-19 restrictions to start on the same day. Being confined felt like being at sea. If you’ve never worked on a ship or an oil platform, then just imagine a total lockdown with no chance of stepping out of the door even for food shopping.
I was lucky that there was enough fresh food and also lots of leftover meals in the freezer but I really missed going out for a bike ride.
Speaking of being at sea, my first maritime adventure was a two-month stint during the Summer of ‘77. A Greek Sunderland Poly classmate of mine invited me to work during our holidays on a ship his cousin had bought off the French coastguards.
It had been caught carrying contraband cigarettes and alcohol. Nikos and I joined the M.V. Chaton in Brest (Brittany) where she had been moored. The starboard side just above the hull was peppered with bullet holes. The pirates had tried to get away. We stayed at a hotel nearby while repairing the ship, patching up the holes and scraping barnacles off the hull.
As there were only half a dozen of us, we took it in turn to do the cooking which meant that you escaped the harder jobs. One day I decided to make my mother’s famous lamb tagine. The chief officer kept telling me to make it hot. I said: “Of course it will be hot.” Having only been in the UK for just over a year, I didn’t realise that he had meant spicy. As it happened the tagine was packed with fragrant North African spices but it was not hot. I think that, although he ate every single morsel of lamb and licked the bowl clean, it must have been disappointingly bland for him.
Nikos invited his Sunderland girlfriend to spend a few days with us. She offered to cook us fish and chips. As I was the only one who spoke French, I accompanied her to the supermarket to buy the ingredients. We couldn’t find fresh cod so we decided to buy some salt cod.
Little did we know that it had to be soaked in water for twenty-four hours to get rid of the salt. The eagerly awaited British favourite was so salty that we ate the chips soaked in malt vinegar and left most of the fish.
We all were glad when the next day, Michalis the Greek cook arrived from Athens to take charge of the kitchen and all was well after that.
It was a memorable summer not just for my first naval adventure but also the sad passing of Elvis Presley on August 16th.
The first thing I intended to do after my quarantine finished was to go out for a bike ride. Saturday was too wet and would’ve been more of a washout if it hadn’t been for the Hartlepool v Aldershot match being streamed in the afternoon when Pools won the first game of this weird season 2-1.
The forecast for Sunday morning was much more favourable and I went out early for my first bike ride in what seemed ages.
A welcome return to the “new normal”.