Thursday April 13, 2023
We crossed the Greenwich meidian line so officially as of 10:15 AM we passed from the east to the west. We have spent the last three months in the east so we are now back on UK time. Three good lectures today and an outstanding Israeli singer were the key parts to the day.
First was Gloria Barnett who covered the behavior of sea creatures with videos she has taken while SCUBA diving around the world. Some really fascinating behaviors and how she was able to get the videos even though some of the animals were difficult to capture. She also talked about the pollution that humans are dumping into the oceans and the damage, particularly plastics are having on ocean life. Over 80% of the oxygen we breath as well as other land animals comes from plant life photosynthesis in the ocean. Without this, no land animals could exist. She also spoke of these mega trawlers that bring in 400+ tons of fish each time they set out their nets and as they bring in the nets the fish are processed and end up in tins, with the waste being thrown back overboard. The issue is that all the fist that they don’t need for their process, get entangled, killed and sent back into the ocean, polluting it even more as well as overfishing.
The second talk was part 2 of John McCarthy’s 5 1/4 years in captivity in Lebanon as a hostage leading eventually to his release. He told many stories about how he, Brian Keenan, Tom Sutherland, Freddy and the two Terry’s Whaite and Anderson managed to survive, sometimes together, sometimes separated, on occasion with decent guards and on other occasions with brutal guards. They kept asking to get books, magazines etc and at one point they had a radio so were able to get some information about what was going on in the world. They would sometimes give them whatever books were around, one which the men got was on Breast Feeding!!! The only book they always had was the Bible as the captors were devout Muslims and always had the Quran, they figured that the hostages had to have a bible. We are looking forward to his interview by Neil Kelly in a couple of days.
The third lecture was by Dave Wright, the European Historian and the subject was Lawrence of Arabia. He made a point of getting to know and become friends with the local tribes throughout Arabia and would have them help him to disrupt the supply chain for the troops of the Ottoman Empire fighting the British and allies. He promised, based on UK and French leaders promise, that if they were successful, the Arabs would have one combined country to rule. He was disgusted and felt betrayed when the British and French had secretly agreed to divide the area between the two and not give Arabs self rule. This decision is still causing a lot of the issues of mistrust we see today in that part of the world. The evening show was Shimi Goodman, born in Israel, but now living in the UK as a UK citizen, a spectacular singer, doing opera and musicals – as he has performed in many musicals. He had full command of the stage, the audience and received a standing ovation at the end of his performance, which is very rare with the crowd on the ship. I think it’s only been two or three times in the 100+ shows of this voyage that this has happened.
Roger & Anne Travels 