Clipper ‘07-’08
This weekend I drove up North first to Manchester to hang out with Vlad, Samia, and Huseyin. We had a nice meal out at Pizza Express in Prestwich, before heading to AMC in the centre to catch ‘Run Fat Boy, Run’. Thandie Newton is damn gorgeous, which helps.
Saturday evening I drove the remaining 50 miles or so to Liverpool to join a few well-wishers see of my Uncle Quentin. A very average meal was followed by a thirty minute drink in an impressive hall at our hotel. Unfortunately everybody else had been up into the wee hours of the morning, which meant I was left stranded in my hotel room at 10PM with nothing to do. For once I managed to remember my book; in this case Haruki Murakami’s ‘new’ novel, ‘After Dark’.
I’ve covered sixty or so pages of After Dark already, and it’s as good as ever. What’s slightly odd is that this book is written entirely in the third person, which is very uncharacteristic for Murakami. I’m not sure if this is a good thing, or a bad thing. While previously I’ve been a middle-aged man (probably just divorced (or soon to be)) who enjoys cats, pasta and jazz… this time I’m a fly-on-the-wall. A very big change.
The hotel, the Adelphi Britannia, which is opposite Lime St station, reminds me terribly of the Dolphin Hotel from an earlier Murakami novel. I half-expected a high-class prostitute to turn up… that or for a professional young receptionist with a tight blazer to take a fancy to me. No such luck.
Up this morning for breakfast at 8AM, Quentin and Angie would have been at the clipper preparing for half an hour or more… hopefully sorting out the 30Kg of porridge that appears to have been loaded onto the boat! What’s more impressive is that 30Kg isn’t for the full ten month trip, it’s just for the first leg; a mere four weeks!
Quentin is one of the relatively few people who is planning to do the full ten month stint… other people sign up for one or more legs, depending on how much time they can set aside from work, or indeed if they think that they can’t put up with four hour on-deck/in-bunk shifts and weekly showers for that long.
This afternoon the boats peeled off, did a quick turn around Albert dock and eventually headed out into the Mersey for more parading before the official race start at 3PM… Quentin’s clipper, ‘Hull and Humberside’, headed out into the sea in second place, just behind ‘Durban 2010 and Beyond’, which is surely a good start, but is by no means indicative of the final result. According to Quentin, in one of the previous races three boats sailed across the leg finish line within 23 seconds of each other!
Not too much more to say about it for now… plenty more info to be found at www.clipperroundtheworld.com and I’ll upload some photos when I got my slides/negatives back from processing.
Tags: Photography, Travel