Lt Colonel Otton Hulacki 1922- 2023

 

Otton Hulacki made an unforgettable impression on all who met him. He was larger than life, and he treated life as a great adventure, both in his youth and in his later years, when he travelled incessantly across Europe and beyond. A Polish patriot, both a victim of deportation and a war hero, an active community leader and a successful businessman, he won over both adults and schoolchildren, as well as members of his own large family, with his resilience, his charm and his sense of mischief.

He was born in the Polish city of Lwów (now Lviv in the Ukraine) on 2nd of January 1922. His father was a police officer. Even as a boy he was an active patriot, selling stamps for the Polish Maritime and Colonial League, as well as raising funds for the Anti-Aircraft Defence League. Aged just 13, he joined the “Young Eagles” Riflemen in 1935, and soon he became a junior instructor.

In 1939 after Poland was invaded by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, he found himself in the Soviet Zone. Both occupying powers had instituted a reign of terror and had declared that the Polish state no longer existed. Despite that Otton volunteered, as a 17-year-old, to serve in the clandestine Poland Victory Service, a forerunner of the future Polish Home Army, which was the main resistance group against the German and Soviet occupation. However, in the spring of 1940, his father was arrested by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, and imprisoned in deepest Russia. Otton himself was arrested a few days later and deported along with his mother and two sisters on a 3-week journey in primitive cattle trucks to Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan. Initially he worked in a brick factory and later he was cut off from his family and made to work in an alabaster mine.

Following the German invasion of Russia in 1941, the Soviet government came to an agreement with the Polish government in exile in London to amnesty the hundreds of thousands deported and arrested Poles who had survived brutal life in the camps and deportation settlements. A Polish Army was set up in Russia under the command of General Anders, who became Otton’s great hero. Otton tried to join as soon as he could get the Russians to release him. On his way south at Orenburg he miraculously met his father, who had also been released from jail. In their long journey to join the Army, Hulacki father and son, along with a small group of Polish and Jewish recruits, including Menachem Begin, future prime minister of Israel, barely survived disease and starvation.  

In March 1942, aged just 20, Otton reached the army recruiting office in Uzbekistan and joined the 6th Armoured Regiment, the “Children of Lwów”. The army was full of starving emaciated recruits who had survived Russian camps. Otton himself succumbed to a serious bout of typhus which he barely survived, on one occasion waking up surrounded by dead bodies.

The following year the Polish Army and many of its dependents were able finally to leave Russia and transfer to Iran and the Middle East. Here Otton was able to resume his interrupted education while continuing his army training.  Having obtained his high school diploma, he returned full time to his army unit. In 1944 his regiment was incorporated into the 2^nd Warsaw Armoured Brigade which was part of the Second Polish Corps in Italy, still commanded by General Anders. Six days before the famous fourth Battle of Monte Cassino in which the Polish Army took part, he was transferred temporarily from the “Children of Lwów” Regiment to the Advance Tank Supply Squadron. Despite his young age he was placed in charge of a 38-ton Sherman tank with a 2-person crew. His Sherman tank was to take part in opening up the steep and narrow Cavendish Road to enable the Armoured Brigade to muster for an attack up the mountain towards the rear of the Benedictine Monastery. The road had been a former mule track constructed that February by Indian and New Zealand engineers for the second battle of Monte Cassino. It had then been badly damaged by shell fire during an American attack in the third battle of Monte Cassino. It had only just been widened again and cleared of mines by Polish engineers. The first of the two Sherman tanks allocated to this mission, missed its footing and crashed down the mountain side. Otton, who was in the second tank, managed to continue successfully for several kilometres with his tank along the dangerous road without further accident and showed that the road was now passable for the Polish army’s advance. Otton believed, as he explained to me once with his usual chuckle, that he was given that task because he tended to speak his mind too often, regardless of whoever was listening. That I can believe.

After the battle, 22-year-old Otton continued his training as an armoured brigade cadet in Gubbio and finished his studies in April 1945. He returned to his old unit participating in the battle for Bologna and was promoted to sub-lieutenant.

At the end of the war, the soldiers of the Second Corps had found themselves in Italy on the side of the victorious allies, but without a home to return to, as Poland had now been handed over by the Allied Powers to be under Soviet control. What was worse, Otton’s beloved native city Lwów was now no longer in Poland. The British government initially urged many of the Polish officers and soldiers to return to Communist Poland, but Otton and his brother Mieczyslaw, who also served in the Anders Army, as well as most of their compatriots from Eastern Poland, knew what Soviet rule was like. They refused to go. Eventually, the British government agreed for Polish soldiers who did not want to return to Poland to be allowed to settle in the UK. Along with his army comrades Otton spent several years learning English and picking up a trade. After further studies Otton went into the printing business and set up his own successful printing firm. He gained some profitable contracts printing for foreign airlines, and he also moved into property.

He married a young Portsmouth girl, Jacy Stewart, and eventually after two decades living and working in London, he settled on the Isle of Wight, with his growing family of two daughters Alexandra and Wanda and three sons Stewart, Otton and Jason. He has since tragically lost two of his children, Alexandra and Otton, and one grandson Richard, but otherwise his family has grown, and he has 12 grandchildren and 10 great grandchildren, with another one due soon. Jacey is here with us today and is being cared for by her daughter Wanda.

Otton was initially active in the Polish Students and Graduates Association and was an active member of the Polish community in London. He was a representative in Wandsworth for the Polish National Fund, which raised funds for the Polish Government in Exile. He was a member of the Southampton Polish ExCombatants (SPK) Branch nr 309. In 2008, he became a member of the Executive Committee of the Polish ExCombatants Association (SPK) in Great Britain. After 2012, when the SPK was wound up, Otton was Honorary President of an organization consisting of 15 SPK branches, including Southampton, which wanted to continue their activities, and took on the name of the Friends of Polish Veterans Association (SPPW). Since 2016 he has been a regular participant in the march past the Cenotaph in London on Remembrance Sunday and has appeared in many commemorative events. These included the 75th anniversary of the Battles of Monte Cassino held in 2019 at the Arboretum in Staffordshire, and the Royal Command Festival of Remembrance at the Royal Albert Hall the same year, both organized by the Royal British Legion. On that second occasion he was interviewed live during the performance by the BBC.

In 1997 he was active in setting up the Association of Friends of ORP “Błyskawica”, which commemorated the Polish destroyer, constructed in Cowes, which is celebrated here because of its role in the defence of its own home port of Cowes during a German raid. Every year Otton organized a ceremony in Cowes to celebrate that event, accompanied by representatives of the Polish navy. Otton also set up the fund and the committee which restored  the monument in Kingston Cemetery in Portsmouth, dedicated to Polish survivors of the 1830 Polish November Uprising against Tsarist Russia. That monument is also the site of a regular annual ceremony attended by the municipal authorities of Portsmouth, the local Polish community, with an active participation of Polish schoolchildren from the local Saturday schools. Otton Hulacki also actively contributed to the founding of a Polish Saturday school on the Isle of Wight., and he was a frequent and popular guest speaker at the Polish schools in Portsmouth and Southampton as well.

Despite his age and his disability, as a wheelchair patient, and despite the restrictions of the covid pandemic, he has regularly attended commemorative events not only in England, but also in Poland, Italy, France, Norway, Israel, and has rarely refused any invitation to travel to represent his Polish comrades at such events. He gave many interviews to magazines, radio and television stations in Poland, the UK, and indeed wherever he could travel. He attended the Monte Cassino commemorations in Italy in May every year, up to and including May of this year. His last trip was at the invitation of the Odra-Niemen Association in Poland from where he returned barely a few days before his sudden and sad death aged 102 on September 25^th, 2023, in Wootton, when he succumbed to heart failure.  

To his last days he readily communicated with his many friends by phone and retained his memory of events and his cheeky sense of humour. He had become something of a media celebrity but his continued public sense of service to Poland and its wartime traditions led to his continued promotion over the years, most recently to the rank of Major, and eventually last year to Lieutenant Colonel. He was a recipient of the Polish Army Medal, the Monte Cassino Cross, the 1939-45 Star, the Star of Italy, the Defence Medal and the War Medal 1939-45.

His life was long and eventful, but he will live even longer in the memory of his family, his friends, and the Polish community at large. He had served his country faithfully and his mission, to achieve and promote a free and independent Poland, was completed successfully. May he rest in peace. Cześć Jego Pamięci.

Wiktor Moszczynski

Poland returns to Democracy

 

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                                               Donald Tusk and Szymon Holownia 

 Finally, on October 15^th, with a high turnout of 74.4%, the Polish electorate decisively rejected the authoritarian Law and Justice stranglehold on Polish democracy which had dominated Polish politics since 2015. In the main cities the vote, which surpassed even the election turnout of 1989 that ended Communist rule, resembled a massive carnival, particularly of the younger voters, as whole families turned up with their children to vote and mark what appeared to them to be a day of liberation. The actual turn out in Warsaw, the capital, was 84.92%.

It had nevertheless been an uphill task, as the United Right ruling coalition, of which Law and Justice Party (PiS) was the essential element, had the genuine support of the less affluent members of society, especially in the conservative countryside, whom they could keep on side with generous subsidies and increased pensions. Also, they had stacked the cards with monopolizing state television and the local press, which they used systematically to mock and denigrate the Polish opposition parties and the independent minded cultural elites. Any diplomatic or economic setback was shamelessly blamed on the main opposition leader Donald Tusk, whom they vilified as simultaneously a Russian and German stooge. During the election they circulated government propaganda by issuing four tendentious referendum questions which accompanied the ballot paper. Despite all this, and despite the sustained loyalty of the PiS core vote exceeding 35% of the electorate, the remaining 65% went to parties and coalitions determined to deny a return to power for PiS and its truculent leader Jaroslaw Kaczynski.

The main opposition party, the Civic Coalition, led by Donald Tusk, gained 30.7%, while its two potential coalition partners in a future government, the centre right Third Way and the Left coalition, gained 14.4% and 8.6% respectively of the vote. That gave them a joint 248 seats in parliament against the 194 seats allocated by the vote to PiS. The far-right Confederation coalition gained 18 seats. Similarly, in the Senate the united opposition, organized this time into one electoral bloc, won 66 seats to the 34 that went to PiS. As for the biased referendum, less than 50% of the electorate participated by refusing to pick up the relevant voting slip at the polling booth, so its results were invalidated.

Despite this clear opposition victory, the PiS government is in no hurry to relinquish power. The state television is still in their hands, claiming that PiS has won the election because it has the largest vote, and still churning out its hate propaganda against the opposition. Its journalists remain defiant as, in case of being fired, they are counting on getting jobs in the new right-wing media empire promised by Kaczynski.  The state bank will continue to be headed by the highly politicized PiS nominee, Adam Glapinski, until 2028. Also, the state enterprises which dominate the Polish economic landscape, the Constitutional Court and other legal bodies, and above all the Presidency, remain in the hands of PiS nominees and still follow Kaczynski’s diktat. So does the present prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki who appears to have no intention of resigning. The President has already stated that the Lower House and the Senate will not meet until early November, and even then, he is likely to give Morawiecki several weeks to try and forge a governing coalition, even if such a mission has no chance of success. That is because, even if the Confederacy changed its mind and was bribed into supporting PiS, the right would still be 36 seats short of a working majority in the Lower House.

Under the Constitution, President Andrzej Duda has to summon parliament within 30 days of an election. He could do it in less time bearing in mind that the mathematics of the election result are clear. Opposition  spokesmen claim he is under pressure from PiS to delay the loss of power and to facilitate finding time for its politicians to destroy compromising documentation. He has promised to speak this week to representatives of each electoral list of candidates separately. Initially he will seek to winnow out support from wavering opposition groups to join in a coalition with PiS, but this is unlikely to succeed. The three opposition parties are due to issue a clear joint statement of intent on Tuesday declaring their readiness to form a government headed by Donald Tusk.

The current timetable following the opening of parliament would begin with the election of speakers for both chambers of parliament and be able to elect parliamentary committees dominated by the three democratic opposition parties. These could include commissions to investigate evidence of corruption and breaches of the constitution by the previous government. The President would not have the power to stop them. There would probably be a last-minute attempt by Morawiecki to seek support in the lower house for a PiS minority government, but judging by the current mood this will fail. Ultimately President Duda will eventually be forced by constitutional convention to invite Donald Tusk to form a government. This process could well be delayed until the end of November.

In all that time PiS will still be using TVP state television as a crude method of propaganda, the nomination of rogue judges by the President would continue, and the army and police would remain under the political control of the current ruling party, while the current fanatical Justice minister, Zbigniew Ziobro, who is the initiator of a politically controlled judiciary, remains in charge of the prosecutor’s office. Eventually Ziobro could be replaced by the new government, but any attempts to bring the judiciary in line with EU standards, or to reform the media, could be vetoed by President Duda, who remains in office until 2025. 

Following the election results the Polish zloty strengthened considerably, and Poland’s stock market recorded its strongest post-election opening since it was created. However, there are serious economic problems which the new government inherits. Some of this stems from the government support for businesses during the pandemic, but the problems have been augmented deliberately by lowering state enterprise prices for fuel, dishing out generous social benefits, lowering the pension age and increasing the defence budget, despite inflation remaining at 9.5%, and while there is negative growth in the GDP and a rising public sector debt. Much of the current spending is currently channelled through extrabudgetary funds, which it will be difficult to recover, as these funds are all run by PiS nominees, many of whom are relatives or partners of PiS deputies. Admittedly, there is a total of €60bn of EU funding, including €35bn from the European post-covid Recovery Fund, waiting in the wings for a future Polish finance minister to claim and distribute, but access to it will be blocked until judicial and media reforms are concluded, and these too could well be blocked initially by presidential veto. The opposition parties do not have the required 3/5 majority in the Lower House to overcome these vetoes.

There could be similar difficulties from the President in changing the school programme to drop the  nationalist and compulsory religious curriculums and to reintroduce sex education. It will take considerable effort to introduce a more liberal law on abortion and to recognize same sex marriage. President Duda and the hard core PiS opposition would still be appealing to the more conservative rural electorate to challenge social reforms were they to be excessively radical. In any case there will also be a broad spectrum of views on social and economic reforms within the three parties in the coming coalition. Some opposition leaders have sounded more optimistic about the future, like the new Warsaw Senator, Adam Bodnar, as they count on the President eventually succumbing to public pressure over the loss of EU funding and consideration of his own future. Others hint he could face possible impeachment for breaches of the Polish Constitution during his presidency. The  road to a more liberal and democratic Poland remains pockmarked with many obstacles.

However, whatever these obstacles, the direction of travel is clear. The new government’s goal will be a more liberal and secular political system respecting minority rights and an independent judiciary, that would bring Poland back into the mainstream of progressive and constructive members of the European Union. Also, its commitment to NATO and to supporting Ukraine in its struggle with the Russian invasion is likely to be reaffirmed.  This election is a turning point not only for Poland, but for the whole of Europe, as a successful attempt has been made in the sixth largest European economy to challenge the current trend towards illiberal politics in Europe, and to keep Europe united in facing the Russian challenge.

Wiktor Moszczynski

Poland - Putin’s Unwitting European Ally?

 

The pivotal parliamentary elections in Poland on October 15^th could be a watershed, not just for that country, but for the whole European project. In the first place, however, it is a wake-up call for Poland’s more progressive traditional political and cultural elites who had been in the forefront of the struggle for freedom during Communist rule and have had a strong pro-European pro-Western world picture going back a thousand years, ever since Poland accepted Christianity from Rome, rather than from Byzantium. They face a more authoritarian, nationalist, and Catholic narrative presented by the present government, and force fed to the people by the robust message from a virtual government monopoly on state television, and a bully pulpit in the churches. Will the Polish electorate, and, in particular, its rural and provincial element, stay loyal to the government and shy away from Poland’s earlier Western orientation. The ruling United Right Coalition leadership, headed by the Law and Justice party leader, Jaroslaw Kaczyński, sees the country as consisting of a breed of good Poles, who are nationalistic, family orientated and Catholic, and a breed of “worse” Poles, liberal, atheist, post-Communist, which have to be kept out of power by all means possible. So, any measure that helps the right retain power is good. After all, were they to lose power, many would face charges of corruption or breaching the constitution. That includes a subservient judiciary, retaliatory measures against the remaining independent media, an economic policy based on crude handouts, such as the original 500plus (which initially stimulated the economy and then helped stagnate it), pre-election reductions in state-controlled motorway tolls, petrol prices, train tickets in a period of high 9.5% inflation, higher pension and a constant anti-European, anti-immigrant, ecosceptic buzz in the state media.

Kaczynski is acutely attuned to the prejudices and fears of poorer families which he can play unchallenged, dressing up the resulting campaign in patriotic national colours. He has a rock solid 30% to 35% electoral support which gives him the key to power, while the opposition parties remain disunited with smaller parties in danger of not crossing the minimum threshold to win parliamentary seats.

At the European level, it is the threat of another illiberal Central European government maintaining its hold on power and, in tandem with Hungary, working to challenge and eventually undermine the European Union, over its immigration policy, which increasingly haunts the EU. Poland has made clear that, unlike the British Brexiteers, it does not want to leave the EU, but intends to undermine and change it from within. The current Polish prime minster Morawiecki has talked of his mission to “rechristianize Europe”. This is made worse for the EU because of the relative size of Poland which makes it the fifth largest in the EU in population, and  sixth in the size of its economy. On the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, Poland was seen, and even admired, as Ukraine’s greatest friend in Europe, absorbing more that 1.3 million Ukrainian refugees. It has increased its defence budget dramatically and boasted that it wants to double the size of its army in the next two years. Poland has been in the forefront of the European frontier states pressing on their Western colleagues to ensure military and political support for Ukraine and a promise of EU membership when the war is over.  They have supported the controversial slogan of Ukraine joining NATO, which is such a provocative challenge to the Russian Federation.

This stand reflected the country’s mood and had the support of all the opposition parties with the exception of the extreme right-wing Confederation movement. In fact, the Polish government built no camps to shelter the refugees. They did not need to, as Polish families, Polish institutions, and schools, and churches, offered that hospitality spontaneously. It was only after a few weeks that the government got round to offering benefits to Polish families accepting refugees. Poland was the only country to keep an Ambassador in place in Kyiv from the first day of the invasion. President Duda, normally a political cipher for the United Right government (called the “fountain pen”, as signing dubious government legislation was his regular routine),  was admired in Poland for the political support he offered Ukraine in NATO capitals, for admonishing the German government for its slow response, and for regularly visiting Ukraine.

So why was it that in September Poland was at the forefront of blocking Ukrainian grain exports and then declaring that they were sending no more arms to Ukraine? Why did President Duda accuse his “friend” Zelensky, President of wartime Ukraine of “drowning and clutching at straws”? Why did this elicit joy in Moscow as the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov gloated over “a split between Poland and Ukraine that will only grow”? Had the Polish government really chosen to reverse its long-established alliance with an independent Ukraine, which had been a constant factor in Poland’s foreign policy since 1991, when Poland and Ukraine first became independent?

The answer was that this was not a reverse in policy, merely another twist and turn in Poland’s turbulent internal struggle to retain power in the pre-election months. To the current Polish government foreign policy is merely an instrument in the government’s battle for survival. In fact, Kaczynski and the initial party leadership did not know any foreign languages and were completely oblivious to public opinion abroad. The only Western leader they could identify with was Donald Trump and they were among the last to recognize the last U.S. election results. They have consistently challenged EU directives and European Court of Justice rulings, and have kept up a negative campaign in their media against opposition leaders who share the EU’s liberal values. They have maintained a consistent negative campaign against Germany, whom they treat with almost the same hostility as Russia, equating the EU’s challenge to Poland’s judicial reforms with Germany’s bid to dominate Europe and subjugate Poland’s sovereignty. They also equate the opposition leaders, and particularly former EU statesman Donald Tusk, with being German agents. In order to embarrass the opposition, they dug deep into Poland’s wartime trauma of German occupation, to present Germany with a £1.2tn bill for war reparations. This negated Poland’s earlier agreed settlement of war claims. The government hoped that the opposition could be manoeuvred into appearing unpatriotic by opposing the claim. (It didn’t.) In doing so it completely ignored the German reaction and its impact on the growing strength of Germany’s right-wing opposition.

This issue with Ukraine had blown up suddenly after a Polish state enterprise foolishly chose to buy in cheap Ukrainian grain being shipped through Poland for third world destinations. Once this grain flooded the markets in Poland, Polish farmers had been sufficiently aggrieved to demand that these cheap grain shipments stop, in order to protect Poland’s native agricultural produce. Initially, the EU, which is responsible for all trade policies in Europe, put on a temporary ban, but after a few weeks the ban was lifted. The Polish government proudly followed its regular game of “patriotically” defying EU rulings and continued the ban along with Hungary and Slovakia. When Ukraine complained and threatened to appeal to the World Trade Organization, Poland retaliated with a torrent of verbal accusations of Ukrainian ingratitude, a statement by Morawiecki that Poland will stop providing weapons to Ukraine, and would now “re-arm itself” and not Ukraine, and that benefits to families helping refugees should be withdrawn. The fact that such language from a hitherto firm ally would please Russia, upset Ukrainian morale and split the allied solidarity over Ukraine, was immaterial. The government could on no account lose farmers’ support in the coming election. Nothing else matters.

A further scandal emerged recently within the Polish foreign ministry where hundreds, if not thousands, of Polish visas had been sold illegally in precisely those third world countries, whose immigrants, the Polish border guards were holding back, often with great brutality, on the Belarusian border. Polish visas give immediate access to the EU and also to Mexico, from where refugees pour across the U.S. border. The U.S. is demanding an explanation and Germany is discussing the possibility of imposing immigration controls on the Polish border, possibly undermining the Schengen open border agreement. It adds to the Polish government’s anti-German and anti-European persecution complex reflected in the election campaign.

The Polish government’s sophisticated internal electoral machine is very much in contrast to the spasmodic infantile outbursts of its foreign policy relations. Yet, when viewed dispassionately by foreign policy analysts they can see an agenda of hostility to Germany and Europe, a sympathy for Trump, a right-wing illiberal pro-family social programme, and a slowdown in support for Ukraine, which is common both to Polish and Russian current policy. Certainly, western countries are holding their breath over the coming election results, in the pious undeclared hope that the disunited opposition parties can avoid fratricidal conflicts and topple the United Right’s  majority in parliament and bring back sanity to Poland’s future foreign policy.

Wiktor Moszczynski                                        01.10.2023

 

Improving ULEZ

 

Picture of Ella Roberta Adoo-Kissi-Debrah

Letter to Editor of "i"

Published 30th July 2023

Dear Editor,

The easiest way to undermine the “Stop ULEZ” Campaign is to arrange more generous assistance to those individuals or small businesses struggling to upgrade their cars, and to rename the whole scheme as the Ella Surcharge, as a reminder of the nine year old London girl whose cause of death was recorded as being caused by the toxic air of London. Not so easy for Tories or the Labour leadership to campaign against that.

Then

Letter to Editor of "The Observer" (unpublished)

Three steps to make ULEZ more acceptable to an outer London electorate during a cost of living crisis. First, ensure that for the first two years care workers, medical staff, teachers, and other specific key workers remain exempt from the extra daily charge if their cars are non-compliant. Secondly, give small businesses with three or less employees  with non-compliant vehicles  an interest free loan facility for one year to purchase one compliant vehicle. Thirdly, announce these changes at a relaunch event in which the name ULEZ is supplemented with a new name more clearly identifiable with its ultimate purpose, such as the “Clean Air Tax”.

Did Pope John Paul know?

 London Tuesday 23rd May 2023

Unpublished Letter to "The Guardian"

Dear Editor,

In relation to your article "Did the Pope know?" I am one of those many UK Poles who loved Pope John Paul II for his vital and subtle role in the liberation of his country and for guiding the Polish state in the first decade after it had recovered its sovereignty. I have often quoted his maxim about the need to keep patriotism and love of one's country separate from nationalism which he always condemned, and I admired his bold steps into healing relations between Judaism and the Catholic Church worldwide. He had immense charisma and was truly a highly respected international figure. 

It does not mean that he was perfect. He was a figure of his time with conservative views on marriage and abortion and with the same traditional centuries old reaction to evidence of paedophilia among his priests. He certainly felt the need to defend the good name of the Polish Catholic Church against the perfidious attacks on this institution by a totalitarian Communist state. Also I would be very careful about utilizing any information based on the doctored files of a  corrupt and mendacious organization like the Polish secret police. 

I think that the current nationalist government in Poland is doing a disservice to the memory of this Pope by making any criticism of him an electoral issue. It serves simply to stifle an open and fair debate about Poland's past and gives the false impression by the monopolized Polish state media that the opposition parties are in some way responsible for running a campaign to blacken his character.  

Yours faithfully

Wiktor Moszczynski

ReplyForward

Southampton

 Southampton  Saturday 13th May 2023

The disembarkation went like clockwork. Borealis docked at 5am. Breakfast at 7.30. The last items were packed away in our two rucksacks and we left the cabin at 8am after leaving a thank you note to our cabin maid. People were being asked to leave in organized waves which were distinguished from each other by the colour of our luggage labels. As usual it was brilliantly organized. Our label was blue which was a reference to our corridoe of cabins on the port side of Deck 6. Previously all those living in suites on Deck 7 with different coloured labels had already been summoned. 

I took a last look from the Observation Platform on Deck 6. It was cold, overcast and Southampton Dock was a iserable looking place, with no exciting object on which to rest the eye except for a large white dome which looked like a mushroom top. There were two other passengers vessels in the docks. They were two gigantic glass warehouses, purporting to be cruise ships, with some 5 or 6 decks each above the level of the life boats, the kind that has a whole shipping centre and a complicated waterslide over the pool to cater for its 5000 or so guests. Give me  the Borealis any day with its 1300 passengers. At least it looks like a ship. As I was watching a giant Hapag Lloyd container ship glided past us towards a further berth. I returned to the cabin.

Now it was our turn at 8am. Clutching our two pieces of hand luggage, as well as the plush little sloth Albina bought for herself during the cruise, we made our way for the last time to the Neptune Lounge on the starboard side. Our names were checked off on the list as we queued to go in. We then went forward to a lovely young lady from the UK Border Force. I showed her my passport and held the toy sloth while Albina rummaged in her bag for her passport. The Border lady waited patiently and smiled at the sloth. "We got it in  Colombia," I explained. "No," intervened Albina, as she showed the lady her passport. "I got it in Costa Rica." God knows what the Border Force lady thought about that. Perhaps it was, spoilt cruise passengers, who can't even remember where they've been?

After showing our passports we were given a red card showing that our passport had been inspected and we proceeded for the last time to Deck 2 where we handed in the red pass. presented our yellow key cards and finally disembarked. After a struggle we eventually found our cases scatterd all over the area earmarked for the bags with blue labels,  and after grabbing two luggage trolleys we pushed our way out to the cargo terminal exit. There had been no customs checks for anyone. 

It was a cold morning. Albina waited in the waiting room, chatting to Rafal and Iga and to another Polish couple, while I hunted for our Addison Lee limousine outside. I finally made contact with the driver and he arrived somewhat late just before 10 am when we had been ashore on Horizon Terminal for almost 2 hours. Just minutes before, I had caught a glimpse of Ranald and Sharon entering a taxi and had a chance to exchange a wave with them as they whisked by for their return to Dunblane in Scotland.  

The limousine had originally been booked with Rol Cruise when we made that fateful booking in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. Now we returned home along the M3 motorway, through the welcoming green fields of Southern England, happy and contented, with our six suitcases, 3 bags and one plush soft little sloth.

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We had originally booked this tour as a future prospect of a bright future event to comfort us during the pandemic and to celebrate 50 years of living together. It had then become a nightmare as the costs spiralled and we expressed doubts about whether we could survive such an ordeal. Albina saw it nevertheless as a chance to finally have a rest and have no domestic responsibilities and a chance to spend time with me away from my busy social and literary responsibilities. I saw it as a terrible ordeal of 80 wasted days being irrelevant and responsible for nothing. At least I imagined the cruise would have relevance as a recreation of the magic of Jules Verne's book. Albina looked forward to the cruise, while I dreaded it. When friends and office colleagues asked if I was excited by the cruise I looked at them in bewilderment. 

However, eventually I cleared away my social rsponsibilies in the Polish community, one by one. We  made the necessary medical preparations, and I cleared the unexpected length of this holiday with my employers. I took up the initiative of finding my reevance again by writing a blog. We paid the final instalment and we made ready to sail. 

At the end of the day, we both got what we wanted from the cruise. Albina wanted the rest that she desired so much in a warm climate, and I got the relevance I crave, by writing the blog, giving a lecture, making some friends and living one long dream of effortless travel in countries I had mostly never seen, and never expected to see.  It was a time of good living and a sea passage free of any storms or disasters. Finally, Albina came back to tell her friends that she got the rest that she wanted and had gained four extra kilos, which would please her doctors at the hospital. I too came back having had an enriching experience and a blog that could get published, if I can polish it up correctly. And I too had gained four kilos in weight, which is definetely four kilos too much. Most important of all, we both came away knowing each other better, flaws and all.

We got back to our falt in Brentford by non. Everything was left spick and span by our cleaner, the balcony was still under assault by the pigeons, the waiting corrwspondence of some seven domestic bills was waiting for us, of which all had been paid during the cruise, the promised bridge to Brentford Station had been built over the canal, my place at the Warsaw Book Fair had been booked for the end of May to promote my last Polish book, my blog had been completed and was awaiting revision, and I will be back at work at 9am on Monday.  

And now to get on with the rest of our lives................... 

The English Channel

 

Borealis Friday 12th May 2023

The day started just a little acrimoniously. Albina decided to cancel her massage appointment at the Spa. As usual I made a mess of announcing it to the Spa at 8am and they were not too happy about it.

 The morning evolved slowly as we searched our room to make sure everything will be packed. We will submit 6 cases and 1 bag as luggage which we will have to leave in the corridor for collection before 2am. We know now that we will all have our passports checked on board. As we have blue labels allocated to our luggage and we are housed on Deck 6, we are likely to be in the second wave of disembarking at around 7am. The vehicle is due to collect us at 10am. We will then be collected from Horizon Cruise Terminal by Addison Lee whose representative will arrive with a placard bearing our name.

Albina ate breakfast in our cabin, while I went upstairs for a hurried breakfast and lunch. Perhaps it was just me, but I felt there was a febrile attitude in the buffet restaurant as if they wanted us to leave quickly. At midday the Captain announced that we are now off the Lizard in Cornwall and therefore in the English Channel. The waves seem a little higher here than in the Bay of Biscay but it is hardly felt at all on board. However, the weather is clear and the temperature currently around 14C.

I went to the last lecture by Roy Paul on the history of Fred Olsen, with plenty of in-jokes. At least it is clear now where Canary Wharf got its name. It came from the Fred Olsen owned warehouse which stored bananas from Canary Islands. 

That afternoon I visited the Craft and Pottery Exhibition in the Arts centre in the same room which previously displayed the passengers' best paintings. In fact many of the paintings were still on the wall, but now acting as a back drop to a table displaying a colourfest of grotesque clay masks and another  dotted with the motley multicoloured display of clay parrots (or was it toucans?).  Another table was covered with sumptuous collages relating to highlights from the cruise, including an extraordinary display picture, showing a bright woollen red and white balloon floating over what seemed like a background of stormy sea and cloudy sky, created from strips of mohair and attached by a rope to an elephant's trunk. The final touch was a happy looking woollen Loch Ness monster emerging from the sea. Other exhibits included masquerade masks and dolls and two extraordinary detailed bound chronicles with every page containing the most colourful memento of the cruise with a page dedicated to each of the 26 ports we visited. I looked through them thinking that perhaps their version of the voyage may have more substance and be a worthier depiction of our glorious 80 days than my meagre and very wordy written offering. Sharon was at the Arts Centre as she moulded one of the horror masks and I came across her chatting to Lisa. I gave Lisa her customary hug and kiss. Sharon simply erupted. "Well I like that," she called out, "we've been friends for months of this voyage and he's never kissed me." Hastily, I gave the lovely Sharon a close hug and explained to a laughing Lisa, "You see, we'eve never actually been properly introduced." Now we have been.

 There was a melancholy concert of classical music in the Neptune Theatre with a Spanish guitar player interspersing some of the haunting Lennon-Mccartney numbers with Spanish and Latin tracts from Segovia and his XIXth century predecessors. It was such a calming atmosphere and there were not too many in the theatre to appreciate it. Still some of my fellow passengers who came were taking a rest from frantic last minute packaging and jumping up and down to close their suitcases. While our six suitcases were standing to attention around our bed, all appropriately packed and labelled, Albina was just finishing off our final bag. She had bought it hastily in the Borealis shop last month when she sensed that some of the extra clothes and the presents might be a little excessive in terms of the amount of luggage we brought into the ship. 

I watched the crowd at dinner as passengers hugged both each other and members of the buffet restaurant staff, posing for joint pictures and handing out generous tips, whether discretely or not. Inthe case of gratuities, discretion is vital here for good order.  I certainly don't feel that other waiters or cooks should be discriminated against by seeing their colleagues getting a gratuity which is denied to them. By all means have your favourites, but do not make it public. I much rather preferred the discrete method of Fred Olsen handing out the gratuities in accordane according to a hierarchy that can still be tweaked with discreet particular payments. Of couse if you want to thank someone in particular for special service, then do so with a few kind words, whether spoken or written, but if you want avoid ill feeling among the staff then give your handouts through the company. I still had the odd cash payments given quietly to some staff, like the chap who brought us canapes each afternoon and described their contents to us with relish, or the guys who delivered a morning breakfast to Albina in the last of couple of weeks. I remembered to leave something for the staff picking up the luggage on the last evening to deposit it on the quayside tomorrow morning, particularly as we had more luggage than most. That is impersonal and for that they will be pleased and feel pride that their work is appreciated.  

Certainly over the last months I noticed more and more passengers were calling kitchen and waiting staff by their first names, and this was reciprocated. I feel a polite distance should be the norm as too much over familiarization undermines the quality of the service. Close friendships between guests and staff may be permissible, but should be the exception, rather than the norm. If you try and befriend tham a present of money for their service could demean the friendship. And if your relationship has deeper emotional connotations, as I know in some cases with fellow passengers it did have, than a final tip could be considered an insult, and would make the recipient feel cheapened, if they had any self respect. 

The exception should be the professional relationship with your housemaid. They see you at your worst, or most slovenly, The saying is that no officer looks like a hero to his valet, even if there os mutual respect. If the maid has done a good job then give her the biggest tip of all, certainly a good few hundred pounds after an 80 day service. But you can also ask her about her family, if she wishes to tell you the details, and you can disclose your own little family secrets to her. But unless she saved your life, or looked after you during an illness, then respect her professionalism and her time, and don't wallow in overfamiliarization. 

The nine mmbers of the Borealis Theatre Company put on a final dramatic and colourful show, based on an antholgy of some of their earlier numbers. They gave a rendering of an operatic uet called Barcelona. In fact it was Anya from yesterday who sang the female part, and her voice was as strong and passionate as during last night's solo performance. They also repeated at least two songs from their wonderful Paintbox presentation. But again, it is not just the attractive physique, the grace and athleticism and the rhythm of the dancers. Nor is it just the wide range of voices of the vocalists. Success lies in the whole package, including the choreography, the lighting and the extraordinary costumes into which the performers change four or five times in any one 45 minute performance. And to that should I should add the fact the all the performers appear to be enjoying what they are doing, their expressions nearly always smiling (unless the material requires something more sombre). That enjoyment and energy imparts itself to the audience. And let us not forget that they put on this energetc performance twice in a night, after barely four or five days of rehearsals between the shows. The Theatre Company is one of the best features of the overall excellent service provided by Fred Olsen on this cruise.  

We all five turned up for our last General Knowledge Quiz. The actual theme was the voyage itself, a subject on which I personally should have done much better. I failed to reread my lecture notes, for instance, which would have given me half of the information required.  Sure, we knew, or at least could calculate, how many stops there were on the tour, and what stop came after Hong Kong, and when the Borealis was built, but I should have remembered the number of passengers on the ship, and the number of crew, particularly after my visit to the bridge. We only got a sad 8 out of 15. But we mostly just sat there absorbing the fact that this was our last time together. This was helped by the fact that this time we were no longer suffering the distracting music of Howard Johnson, who for the last 80 days, always drowned our conversation in the lounge with his noise, immediately before and oimmediately after each quiz. Now we could talk, and reminisce and simply enjoy each other's company just a little lobger, before we finally kissed and hugged and went our separate way.

This may sound a bit unfair to Howard Johnson, primarily a guitar playing rock singer, who had spent the entire cruise as musical wallpaper in the Morning Light Lounge, singing in the background every evening. He had also laid on special appearances at every on board festival held at the Poolside, and held late evening concerts at the Observatory. He had recently completed a series of one man shows singing all the published songs of Queen. He had his fans, who included Sharon, and I take my hat off to him for his resilience, and his willingness to broaden his genre by singing ballads or even Scottish country sings when the occasion required it.  It's just that I have never been, as they say, "into" rock music and he was always scheduled to play when all I wanted was silence to be able to talk and listen to my friends. Nothing personal, Howard.

Before turning in I went up for one last time to party and dance for half an hour or so at the Obesrvatory on Deck 9. It was already 11pm and I knew Albina would be waiting and watching TV, but I just wanted the last night to end with a bang. Sammee and Tom had doffed their entertainment manager roles and were singing a series of lively dance music. I found myself dancing with the girls from the Borealis Theatre Company. It is great how after a single drink and with the accompaniment of the right music such a farewll party become emotionaol as you hug and kiss people to whom until now you had merely been polite and exchanged small talk. Suddenly you feel how nice it would have been to have spent more time with each and every one of them, and now that opportunity is gone. You can then sample the rich sweet sauce of an aching regret, to give your future nostalgic memories about the cruise that much stronger a taste. The last person I hugged, just before I left the room, was Sammee herself, the queen of entertainment and most certainly the most charismatic outstanding personality of the cruise. 

I made some notes of the day and put out our six suitcase plus one bag out in the corridor.  before 12 they were gone. We would see them again tomorrow waiting for us on the quayside.  

 

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The Last Ukelele

 

Borealis Thursday 11th May 2023

The morning looks promising. It is colder now at sea, but the clouds are intermittent and the sea is calm.

Albina has resumed her packing and she has a further 3 cases packed. All our smart clothes have been packed already, including my winning champagne, the mezcal from Jack and the model of Borealis. That is 6 cases in all now. But initially we arrived on the ship with 6 just suitcases. We still have extra goods to pack so, not only have we gained in weight, we have gained in material possessions as well. I went to Roy Paul's lecture on the history of Fred Olsen. It was interesting to hear how this sensible unshowy company which was founded in 1848, had developed from a local vessel on the North Sea run to a fleet of tankers, planes and cruise ships. I introduced myself to Dr Paul, as he knew of my earlier lecture, and his earlier talk on Jules Verne had filled a gap which he acknowledged had been partly already filled by me. 

That took up the whole morning. When I eventually left for lunch I got there too late to the buffet restaurant and settled for a fresh portion of fish and chips at the Poolside. I then slipped into the Art Room on the rear of Deck 9 to view the paintings and etchings by various passengers, including Lisa's husband, Steve. It was great to see the hidden u sung talents of so many of our fellow passengers. They must have spent many quiet hours in the remote Arts Centre on the ship, often completing projects suggested by their art adviser, and drawing fromthings they saw and experienced on the route. 

                            

So each one had their version of the Taj Mahal, or the Pyramids, or of Japanese cherry blossom, or    Colombian ladies in costume. The most interesting were the sketch books of some of the artists with priceless gems hidden inside the pages. Here too was another hidden world, revealed like the wall paintings in Tutankhamon's tomb only when the exhibition was opened.

At 4pm we had the much heralded Guest Ukelele Concert in which Sharon and some thirty other ukelele minstrels put on a show, despite their instructor having earlier left the ship. This was followed by a final performance of the choir with Sharon again participating. Both groups had played songs connected with world travel, to the extent that when the choir played the Japanese tune Sakura, they showed slides of the cherry blossom season in Japan, individually photographed by choir members.

Everything seemed to be rolled up in some kind of denouement, as we all contemplated the end of our voyage and searched for mementoes of the last 80 days in whatever form it could take, whether as a play, a concert, a ukelele production, a photo competition or a painting display. 

However, one fresh item on the programme for today was a series of Broadway musical songs by Anya Spencer-Turner, one of the Borealis Theatre Company vocalists. She was appearing at 5.30pm in the Observatory on Deck 9. As I left the cabin on Deck 6 with Albina now packing an extra bag, I could hear the sound of her voice coming down the staircase four storeys above, a bit like the voice of Doris Day drifting up the staircase of the hostile Embassy. Anya’s voice was clear and powerful as I mounted the staircase and eventually reached the Observatory. She had just finished singing “The street where you live” from My Fair Lady. The audience was no bigger than thirty people, of whom ten were from her Borealis troupe. But then it is quality and not quantity that counts. She continued with her numbers, consisting of quite sophisticated difficult songs from lesser-known musicals. Each song met with the exuberant applause of the audience She sang a song about a girl living in Flat 14 g, whose peace and quiet is being disturbed by a singer practising in the flat above, and another in the flat below. Her song covered the voice of the timid girl and the loud cacophony of her awkward neighbours. It was at this point that I interjected that her voice could be heard four storeys down, which amused everybody.  She performed for half an hour ending with Barbra Streisand’s “Don't Rain on my Parade”, another difficult song. I wish her well in her career.

At dinner I met a "young" couple in their sixties who had enjoyed the cruise, mostly hiring cars for each port, and travelling with their own programme. I was surprised initially that they were retired at such an early age, but then it transpired that the lady had been a Colonel in the British Army, at one stage the most senior woman in the British Armed Forces. They revealed that that very afternoon, people on the Observation Platform had spotted a whole school of whales, which they had observed more than half an hour. Ah well, another sighting I had missed. 

Albina had stayed in the cabin all day and again I brought some food own for her. I was late getting to  a Variety Showtime, which included performers who had got on at St Kitts, and whom I had been too busy to watch until now. Baritone Gordon Cree and female singer Cheryl Forbes did a fine duet singing songs about the moon, before making room for the cheeky ventriloquist Jimmy Tamley. I find these variety shows somewhat bewildering as each artist does not have time to deliver a rounded memorable performance. Obviously they have other their own performances as well, but this is more like watching a frustrating series of film trailers, rather than the film itself. If you import these performers all the way from Britain to appear on stage, then surely you get your money's worth with a series of full dedicated shows. Obviously, I am being too picky, as other guests appear happy enough with this arrangement.

It was a near thing again with the General Quiz. We were in full compliment again and we gave 14 correct answers out of 15, guessing that Obama taught at the University of Chicago, that Toronto was the most populous city in Canada, and that a stapler was drowned in jelly in an American rendition of The Office, which none of us had ever watched. The only one we failed to get was a question about the makers of butterfinger biscuits. There was one other team which also got 14 out of 15. The tiebraker was a question on the height in centimetres of a Turkish peasant who was the tallest person in the world. After arguing among ourselves we settled for 265 centimertes amd the other tram offered 240. The right answer was 251 so we lost by just a couple of centimetres. Nothing to be ashamed of, but still another bottle of champagne missed us by an inch, literally. 

We decided to make an early night of it. In bed before 12.

 

The final formal night

 Borealis Wednesday 10th May 2023

A day like any other. Alone at sea with no land and no ship in sight. Sea calm and weather overcast but possibly improving. Temperature 17C. Spent the whole morning in the cabin writing while Albina was sleeping all the way to 3pm. 

At 4pm I went to the Neptune Theatre to watch the show Astound the World in 40 Minutes that Helen, Sharon and Ranald and their colleagues in the Borealis Amateur Dramatics (cryptonym BAD) put on as a spoof of Around the World in 80 Days. It was a recreation of the story but with hilarious reinterpretations of the interplay between the characters (Aouda was played as a vamp) and constant references to our daily grind on the vessel, including spoof announcements from the captain's bridge. In fact, the ship used by Fogg was the Borealis, and later the crossing of the Pacific was by one of Olsen's sister ships. The amateur company made itself even more amateur by overstressing when they needed a prompt and by pretending to have French or American accents and then dropping back into their native tongue when being misunderstood by another character. They even had a joke in the prologue about the balloon not being part of the original story. I normally watch shows and lectures at the far back of the balcony on the left side, particularly to remain inconspicuous when I inevitably doze off. However, on this occasion, to show my support to my friends, I sat in the front row. I was so entranced and so amused by the show that I did not drop off to sleep once. Not only that, but I also forgot to take a single photograph. Incidentally, Albina watched the show on the cabin TV. 

Next we were invited to attend a farewell reception with Captain Stoica. A glass of champagne was offered to everyone on arrival at the theatre and the captain thanked us for our cooperation. He gave some gift vouchers to three members of the staff who had been proposed by their departments for being exemplary employees. He asked each of them how they would spend the money, which I thought, was none of his business, especially as he joked about the amount being £1000, and then made it clear that it was not a big amount. One replied contemptuously that they would use the prize voucher for hair gel, which got a laugh. 

It was a formal night and I finally convinced Albina to change into something a little more formal (i.e. not her pyjamas), if only to have a photograph together. It would be good to show to our friends as a climax to our 80 day cruise. In the end she did not put on anything too glamorous, because in every sparkly bit of clothing hanging in the wardrobe she found a last minute flaw, or because it did not match another portion of her wardrobe. Finally, she put on an elegant black dress, and I was grateful to her for that. Reluctantly we went to the Borealis Restaurant where the service was again reliably slow and the menu was still incomprehensible, especially to Albina, who again ordered something she could not eat. Also the dessert basically offered 5 choices, all including chocolate, which Albina did not like either. She ended up with the cheese board option again. However, the chicken we both ordered for our main course was quite good. Well, something had to go right. 

We went to have our photograph taken by the staff photographer. While we waited in a queue by the Ocean Lounge we watched the Dance Class couples rehearsing their many steps while dressed in their dinner jackets and evening dresses. The couples, as well as the ladies dancing with Olsen's professional dance partners, must have had a sense of achievement that they had now returned to everyday life with new dance steps to wow their friends and make them jealous. 

After the picture was taken we went to watch the Borealis Crew Show. It was wonderful to see members of the crew from all departments in the vessel, including the cabin maids and the engineers from the boiler room, showing off their talents and strutting their stuff as dancers. At one stage I thought the boys from the boiler room were going to do a carefully choreographed Chippendale strip show as they removed the tops of their overalls. Certainly the audience would have appreciated it. The Filipino crew members presented a number of stately dances from their country.  For a finale they sang movingly about being children of the world and that they wanted the world to live in friendship and harmony. It was something resembling one of those feel good Coca Cola adverts, and more a song for children than for young adults. However, in view of the relative age of most of the elderly audience and the youthful figures, mostly in their twenties, appearing on the stage, the message of the song was not out of place. The whole show was met with rapturous applause and even a standing ovation.

It was noticeable thar Sammee introduced each of their acts by naming them individually, at least with their first names.  Thankfully to her they were not a nameless collective, but individuals, no matter how humble or remote was their daily task. She congratulated them for finding the time and being willing to make the effort to rehearse, particularly for the group dances, amidst their daily routines in different parts of the ship. Although all of us as passengers may have got to know a little about those members of staff with whom they were most frequently in direct contact, to most of us they appeared as shadows, only there when we most needed them. That is partly because we only see them when they are directly serving us. Just as in Hogwarts, hidden beneath the areas frequented by the pupils, there was an underground of secret passages with various ghosts and spirits living in parallel with the teachers and the schoolchildren above. They only had access to the main building by secret portals. So too it was with the Borealis. Hidden from us passengers was a whole world of corridors and stairs leading from A Deck, below Deck 1, of which we would only have a glimpse when we needed access to the gangway to leave the ship on excursions. Yet this secret world stretches all the way up, as far even as Deck 9, and its only link to our world was behind a series of unmarked doors on each deck, where these staff members woud suddenly make an unheralded appearance to take up their scheduled task. We as passengers would pass these unmarked doors every day without giving them a second thought, unless by chance we witnessed the sudden emergence of one or more of crew members from their parallel world. It was pretty surreal, but it was also the reason why so many of them would remain like shadows without individual personalities and life histories. Yet when asked, while they prepared our food or served us a drink, they could reveal sufficient information about their lives to give us an inkling about their country and how they provided the funds to help their families, including children, from whom they would be seperated for many months at a time. At least their Crew Show gave us the opportunity of humanizing them in our eyes, before they returned to their mundane daily service. I salute them.

Helen and Tony did not appear in the Morning Light Lounge for the daily quiz. Probably Helen was just too tired, just as she was after the Coronation Fayre. However Albina did join us, which was a pleasant surprise, especially for Ranald and Sharon. It was not one of our more  succesful nights with scoring only 10, and the winners were at 13, but then we were two of our members short. We chatted for a good half hour after the quiz and Sharon and Ranald were fascinated by Albina's life history and by the story of how we met. Sharon still had a ukelele concert and a singing concert next day, so we all retired before midnight. We also had to move our watches forward by one hour. For the last time. We will now have the same time as London. 

Ponta Delgada

 

Borealis Tuesday 9th May 2023

The Captain got it wrong. His fine weather prediction for the Azores was not to be. We slid into a rain soaked Ponta Delgada at 8am. That did not put us in too good a mood. The view from the breakfast room onto the main area of the city is actually quite pleasing because, while the day remained overcast, the dark menacing clouds were only over the hills. We had our hurried breakfast and turned up at the theatre to report for our morning excursion only to find that it had already left the ship. We hurried down to the gangplank and the port terminal  and passed on to the coach. There were no passport controls of any kind. 

The coach drove out of the town of Ponta Delgado, the maintown of the island of Sao Miguel, which in turn is the largest of the 9 islands of the Azores archipelago. On the map the island has a long sausage shape with our port being on the south western corner of the island. The town was not large with probably no more than 100,000 inhabitants. The town had only one high rise residence and its highest buildings were the church towers and the town hall bell tower. It was clean with limited traffic and good quality roads. Everything looked neat and in place, the road signs and road markings looked new, and there was not a drop of litter in sight.

Of course this was really Europe now. Azores had always been Portuguese. When the Portuguese first discovered the island in 1432 as a result of Prince Henry the Navigator's prodding of the possible routes to India, nobody was living here. It is possible that there had been Phoenician and Viking landings on these islands, because the explorer who discovered it, Cabral, had maps showing the outlines of some of the islands. It was first settled by landless Portuguese peasants seeking to eke out a living in a new virgin territory, but it was organized by a group of Flemish nobles imported here at the behest of Henry's sister, the Duchess of Burgundy, when their land was overrun in the Hundred Years War. The main product was initially wheat, but then it became a useful entrepot for Spanish galleons trading some of their treasures for Azorian supplies of provisions and fresh water. Its prosperity suffered under Spanish occupation but in the eighteenth and nineteenth century it became dependent on the production of oranges, especially for British and Amercan armed forces. Following a catastophic collapse of orange production caused by a disease the Azores needed to diversify and became reliant on producing and exporting whale fat, pineapple, tea, sugar beet, tobacco and dairy products. The last of these, the production of beef, milk, butter and cheese remains a primary export of these islands to this day. The countryside is scattered with meadows full of Friesian cows with their traditional black and white patches. 

As we left the town we began to drive in the direction of the higher hills we could see from the port.  Despite the altitude the hills were covered with the deepest lushiest green vegetation. But as we looked further up we could see the higher ground was still enveloped in a thick white cloud, which remained as dense when close at hand as it did from a distance. Our first stop was supposed to be the Lake of Fire but we were beginning to have our doubts about being able to see it, though we left the matter unsaid initially. Of course I did express my concern about this quietly to Albina. She was not pleased and started complaing about why we were travelling in that direction if we were not going to be able to see it.

In the end, Anna, our tour guide, voiced her concern about this in public. Apparantly these heavy mists normally appeared in June and were occasioned by the mistiming of the increase in summer warmth between the land and the sea. This is because the sea warms more quickly. In the past these mists were called the "St John's fog" and were the most common cause of fatal shipwrecks at this time of the year. However, with the increasing quirkiness of the climate here, as well as everywhere else, the mists have been coming earlier. Anna explained over the bus' sound system that we were now approaching the lake she wanted to show us, but there was a danger we might not see it. She was praying hard, she said, for the cloud to disperse, as this was supposed to be "the highlight of the tour". On hearing about this being the highlight, the British tourists in the bus burst out laughing. It was a welcome British recognition of the fact that in Britain the weather always has the last laugh. Albina angrily vented her frustration to me but I just shrugged. We actually stopped at the viewing point and Anna asked if anyone wanted to get out. But we all looked down on the milky obstruction below us and stayed in the coach. Anna consoled us by walking the length of the bus and showing us pictures of the lake in its pristine form. Of course it was nobody's fault, but it would have been wonderful to see the lake resting on the floor of the crater, both as a scientific wonder and as a picture of natural harmony of colours. It is also a warning. The particular crater had erupted in 1563, as recorded by the Portuguese, and hence the name Lake of Fire. What erupted once, can erupt again. The whole archipelago is potentially under threat as it sits on the dividing line between three tectonic plates, African, American and European. The mist prevented us from dwelling on the potential danger. Yet, withn two minutes of us leaving the site, we were looking down on a beautiful valley without even a smidgeon of mist in sight.

We drove lower into the valley, now lush with Japanese cedars and a forest of ginger and heavy fern. The humidity increased as we got out of the coach at a place called Caldera de Velha, which translates as Old Hot Springs. We walked down a path through the lush forest until, certainly to my surprise, we passd a series of cubicles for chamging clothes, from which emerged a young lady in a bikini. She skipped past us a few yards further down and to our left we came onto a natural hot spring with some ten people bathing in it. A few steps further and there was a second pool full of more locals, which included a couple of young children. Anna led us past the pools up into another larger pool. "This one is not just warm, it is hot," said Anna. These pools were sitting on top of hot geysers caused by the hot water heated from the magma bubbling not so far beneath. We walked to a further pool, where the sides were yellow from contact with the iron. Then things went a little awry. Our group seemed to have got split up. Anna disappeared somewhere, as did the Fred Olsen rep, Anya, one of the Borealis Theatre Company dancers. We wandered around looking where other members of the group were going, wondering where to go and who to follow. Albina and I reached the spot where the coach had left us. Some of our group were there too, looking lost. I remembered our guide had said something about the bus picking us up lower down. I found a steep staircase leading further down some 100 or so deep steps. At the bottom of the stairs was our coach and our driver waiting for us. I began climbing the steps again to retrieve Albina and the others. When I got to the top, exhausted, I found that Anna had just turned up and seemed unaware that she had lost some of us on the way. We all went down the stairs again and then waited in the coach for the remaining stragglers that Anya had rounded up. And then we were off. Cheekily, I asked Anya in the coach, "Which was more difficult? Herding passengers or learning the choreography?" She gave a grin and pretended to give the matter some thought. "Depends on what kind of passengers I get," she finally answered.

We moved on to another beauty spot on the northern coast of the island. Suddenly, the mist was back. This time we got out of the bus and walked to the look out point. We went through a natural archway formed by two Japanese cedars. These trees are everywhere. We got to the platform edge. Again, just milk. Yet there was also historical interest in the site. It was the spot where liberal troops backing King Pedro landed to begin the reconquest of the island in 1832 in their struggle with the absolutists. I made some intelligent comment about that struggle with Anna, and one of the other passengers, whom I did not know, personally commented on the fact that she remembered my talk. Then one of the other passengers said "Oh yes, I remember. You said the balloon was not  part of the novel." "That's true," I agreed. "I'm amazed you people still remember. My talk was a month ago." "Shows we were listening," the second lady laughed. I was impressed. These people were still talking about my lecture, when they have, on average, listened to some 120 lectures since the start of the cruise. I obviously supplied a need at the time.

Last stop was the tea factory. Although the economy was now moving further into fields like tourism and the dairy industry, tea, which had been adopted as one of the prime industries of the Azores in the XIXth century, still has several factory farms in the country. Tea can be grown in this country in the months between April and December. We came to one such farm called Cha Gorreana, which is still operating with machinery from the last two centuries and still housed in the same old building. Pitched against the deafening noise of the machinery, Anna tried to overcome that obstacle as she struggled to give us a lecture on how the orange pekoe from inside the tea plant was placed into rollers, then oxidized, then dried and finally separated and packed into sacks. The factory produced both green tea and three varieties of black tea. The main difference between the two is the initial steaming process of the green tea.  

We were invited to the tasting area which combined as a shop for visitors. We were able to drink both the green and the black variety along with a complementary pineapple cake. The surrounding slopes were covered with neat measured green bushes of tea through which you could walk in very narrow paths that brushed against your clothes on either side. There were also other plants around the factory, such as the pretty blue flower of the Agapanthus plant which flowers at the time of the year in the Azores, along with pink azaleas. Albina was also drawn to the factory cat lazing outside. It had the traditional black and white colours associated with the country's cows.  As we drew away from the farm Anna suddenly announced. "Oh, I forgot one detail. Because of its enzymes, tea can also be a good substitute to viagra. If you have not bought any tea, shall I stop the coach so you can go back and buy more tea?" Of course that raised a laugh in the coach. It's probably her standard joke at this section of the tour, especially when she has a group of older passengers. 

On our way back to Ponte Delgada we passed one of the island's geothermal power plants which generates a quarter of the island's electricity needs. The country is also more and more dependent on tourism and is looking for further investment in that field while wishing to preserve the island's culture and traditions. Apart from the attractiveness of the climate and the rolling green fields and forested mountains of the country, there is also the attraction of sperm whales and other riches of marine life in the surrounding seas. Whaling as an industry was dropped in the last century.

On returning to the town the coach stopped at the square beside the old XVIIth century fortress.  Anna  asked if anybody wanted to get out here to visit the town individually. Some 10 of us got out. The rest, including Albina, were driven back to the ship which was nearby. I visited the fortress, built to withstand pirates and the French navy attacks. It was an imposing sight, although the ramparts were not very high, they still dominated the western part of the town and also the harbour area. Inside the rooms and internal passages looked dark and dank, like something from the middle ages. Yet there were fine exhibits in neat glass cages of uniforms and firearms throughout the centuries, from the sixteenth upto and including the twentieth century, with well documented exhibits of the history of the fortress. 

Emerging from there I crossed over to the Convent of Hope chapel and church. The full name was Santuario de Nosso Senhor Santo Cristo das Milagres attached to the Convento de Las Esperanza. The interior of the church was beautiful with a barrel vaulted ceiling beautifully adorned with blue and gold panels, while the walls were lined with large blue and white ceramic panels depicting the life of a local saint. There was also a richly adorned balcony protruding from one of the walls, which may or may not have been a pulpit. The other end of the nave ended in a heavy duty grating behind which was a further chapel dominated by a bright gold portrait of the Christ surrounded with a silver framed altarpiece with numerous candles arranged beaneath it. A small number of parishioners were praying on our side of the grating and it was obviously a place of veneration. There were candles ("cirios") on sale at the entrance, but these were not the sort of mini candles supplied in a British church. Each of these was was a think wax tube at least 3 metres long. These people take their veneration seriously, especially as they associated the church with miracles. The front of the church was covered with some scaffolding and a large banner proclaiming a coming church festival to be celebrated next weekend.

I walked further into town along a narrow pedestrianized street roughly parallel to the harbour. The overwhelming colour of the largely two storey buildings was white. Some had balconies jutting out onto the street, but most just had shuttered windows on the first floor. The streets were largely quiet and clean, and pictureque enough to be a tourist attraction in their own right. I reached the historic town hall with a double staircase emerging in the middle. At the back of it was a bell tower which I foolishly chose to climb to the top. There must have been more than a hundred steep steps inside the tower, which was dark and without any hand rail for support. Large gaps would appear between the vertical and horizontal stones of each step, through which you could see the ground way beneath. There was a wonderful view of the town from the top, but coming down you felt as if each step had to be leaped, rather than just stepped down, to avoid the yawning gaps. The Bell tower must have been in the same state of decaying repair that it was when it was first constructed some 350 years ago. I needed to recover and eat a burger at one of the nearby cafes adjoing the civic centre. A group of Azorian school children had just been rehearsing for a concert while standing on a platform facing the town hall. Behind the platform was a long fountain and a statue of the patron saint of the island, St Michael the Archangel.  To the left of the civic centre were the 18th century city gates, consisting of three ornate arches, which stood between the town and harbour. In front of them was the statue of the seafarer Cabral who first discovered Sao Miguel Island in 1432. Behind the gates was another prominent baroque church called St Sebastian with a white square tower attached, which was from a later period, and which had been visible above the rooftops of the town from the ship when we came in. 

While walking the streets of Ponta Delgada I kept running into passengers and crew from the vessel. All of them said the same thing, They agreed that Ponta Delgada was a pretty town, with little traffic and noise, nice shops and cafes, and free of litter and dirt. Most would happily revisit the place.

We sailed at 6pm. We seemed to be departing from the island for a long time as it was still close and vsible for the next hour and a half. I assume that we were simply circumnavigating the island, so as to be able to proceed through the Atlantic ftom the island's northern coast. Yet the island looked magical as we sailed on because it as enveloped by clouds at two levels forming distinct strata of cloud at the top and the middle of the mountains. It was quite eerie, even romantic. What added to the magic and the romance was a pod of dolphins playing around the ship as we slipped further and further away from the island.

I spent most of the evening watching films on out TV and also a show from the Neptune Theatre with a rather earthy ventriloquist called Jimmy Tanley. I cam dwnstairs to the Morning Light Lounge for another quiz, which was particularly tricky. We were disappointed with our 8 points until we realized that the winner only received 9. I took back to the cabin my Pere Ventura bottle of champagne which we had won on our third victory a couple of days back. Albina was very please until she realized tht Fred Olsen's prize bottles given away as every day prizes were dated no later than 20th December 2022.