Boats. Sizes. Consequences.

Holiday cruise boats, like clothes, come in a range of sizes: small, medium, large, extra-large. Mostly medium and large. I have never actually seen a small one but I have seen adverts for select cruises with a maximum of about 30 or 40 passengers. And I suppose a large yacht could be considered an extra-small.

I am pretty sure I read last year that there were going to be fewer cruise boats calling in Vigo. Well, this week we have had four: an extra-large on Wednesday, a large and a medium yesterday and a large today.

The city centre shopping streets yesterday were full of English, and Scots, surprisingly (maybe they came on the medium boat) all frantically shopping, enjoying the delights of C&A, that no longer exists in the UK, and buying stuff from H&M that they could get at home. Do they do this at every stop. Do they bring half empty suitcases to accommodate their purchases? A mystery!

I was in town looking for shorts for Phil, finding the sizes of them confusing as well. The same apparent size can mean different things from one shop to another. Another of life’s mysteries! 

Mysterious and strange stories abound concerning what life will be like in Britain after Brexit. Even the Rees-Mogg seem to say that it will take fifty years for the economy to right itself. Maybe some forward planning, and I mean prior to the referendum, might have been useful.

One of the latest horror stories is that there will be food shortages, not just of luxury items but of basic foodstuffs that it simply isn’t possible to grow enough of on our small island. Or maybe we have just stopped growing too many items.

Be that as it may, someone posted a tweet, supposedly from Angela Merkel: “

Dear British friends. Having grown up with food rationing and medicine shortages in the GDR, I can reassure you there is a solution. We fixed it by joining the European Union.”

In the meantime, maybe we should all start stockpiling baked beans, dried pasta and so on. Have a few chickens in the back garden. Possibly a pig, as during World War II.

Maybe this is the solution to childhood obesity, or indeed obesity in general: a return to food rationing and a restricted diet!

A Swedish student, Elin Ersson, refused to sit down on a plane on Monday and managed to stop the deportation of an asylum seeker. This being the age of social media, she live-streamed her protest. And, this being the age of mass-selfishness, other passengers tried to snatch her phone from her and make her sit down.

Her video has been viwed more than two million times and she has received prasie from around the world. And yet she still faces a possible prison semtence for her action.

The young man who protested against Donald Trump by smashing his star on the Walk of Fame was charged with felony vandalism and held on $20,000 bail. That seems an awful lot of money to me. I know he smashed some fancy, and expensive, paving stones but he didn’t damage people.

Now it turns out that his bail has been paid by a certain James Otis. Two years ago James Otis also attacked Trump’s star with a pick-axe and a hammer. So he probably felt some solidarity with the new offender and apparently plans to meet him. Plotting future action perhaps.

And finally, tonight there is going to be a total eclipse of the moon. Here is a bit if explanation from a news item:

“A total lunar eclipse happens when the sun, Earth and the moon perfectly line up. The most spectacular part about a total lunar eclipse is that when the moon is fully in Earth’s shadow it turns red. This has earned the phenomenon the nickname of blood moon. The red colour happens because sunlight is deflected through Earth’s atmosphere. The process is called refraction and it bends red light from the sun like a lens into the space behind Earth – and so on to the surface of the eclipsed moon.”

We have had some fine and clear nights around here but also some dull and cloudy ones. It would be fairly typical, I suppose, for tonight to be dull and cloudy just to prevent us seeing the sight!