Escape from Bucharest

A week ahead of its departure and to my complete surprise I suddenly bought a ticket on the Windstar Pride sailing from Barcelona on the 20th arriving at Fiumicino, the port of Rome, on the 27th. 

I recommend Windstar – there were 220 passengers and 195 members of staff, the food and wine were great and by leaving it late to book I got a fairly good price with free alcohol, Wifi and 'gratuities' (a big thing for Americans) thrown in. 

The weather in December isn’t hot, though we avoided rain and had sunshine in Barcelona, Leghorn and Rome. This is offset by escaping the madding crowd.

It's probably the best time to see the Mediterranean.

It was my fourth Windstar cruise. I feel old saying this. 

One meets nice, very, very normal people, almost all from North America and this time most were over 60. 

I know. It is what it is. 

Good people, but not the cool gang.

One occasionally has candid conversations you have with your barber or taxi driver knowing you won’t meet again. 

In Barcelona I got to the Sagrada Familia which I didn’t make when Mrs Thatcher was Prime Minister, but I did not go in, except to Mass in the crypt. In 1990 after seeing all the Eastern European capitals Barcelona remained my favourite city in the world. 

The Barrio Gótico is still enchanting but hugely more touristy and sealed in plastic.

From our next port Nice I took the train the 22 minute journey to Antibes and found with difficulty the block of flats where Graham Greene lived for so many years. 

Nobody on the ship or with one exception on his street had heard of him. 

Café Felix, where he lunched each day, has gone but apparently it wasn’t much of a restaurant anyway. 

He loved Antibes in winter when it reverted from being a fashionable, chic Bardotesque place to being a small country town. I perfectly saw why.

Picasso spent time here too and the town has two Picasso museums.

I spent Christmas moored at Leghorn or Livorno, which was sunny, empty, uninteresting and cold but made up for it by a Tridentine Mass. 

It does have the Monument of the Four Moors,  commemorating the victories of King Ferdinand I of Tuscany over the Sultan and the Barbary slavers. 

The four Moors are not slaves, despite appearances, but slavers.

A woman from dinner the night before came along to church my suggestion. She looked like a painting and I realised after some thought it was Whistler's Mother.

i spent Christmas dinner with her and Mark who was 71 and a grandfather.

He thinks Trump is the biggest espionage success in world history.

We were given Christmas crackers, which made me feel it was truly Christmas.

Whistler’s mother declined to pull mine.

She said that  crackers should be pulled at the end of the meal and added: "And only on New Year's Eve".

But Mark pulled it since I pointed out that if no one else would pull it, I couldn’t really pull it alone.

Whistler’s mother then said that she would need a new plate as glitter had fallen on her plate.

I had had more jovial Christmas dinners but some very much worse.

And I had the paper crown and 3 terrible jokes, misspelt touchingly by someone whose first language was not English but perfectly understood how bad Christmas cracker jokes had to be.

A nice American woman later asked me if I was wearing the paper crown because it was my birthday.

We English have so little in common with Americans.

‘Again’, said Mark softly to Whistler’s mother.

I asked what the problem was and the problem was the snails have been taken out of their shells.

This was something that made me happy since I didn't know how to take snails out of their shells, but it's not the correct thing to do.

And nor was it correct later on that the trifle was served in a dish because the correct way to serve trifle is in cylindrical tubes. “Aren’t I right?” he asked me. I said my mother used any old bowl.

I thought what wasn't correct was trifle instead of Christmas pudding.

I also didn't think Americans should be arbiters of elegance.

Disraeli after all said that countries did not cease to be colonies because they became independent.

I thought Americans should have a Jamesian sense of deference in Europe, moored at an Italian port, but they didn't - they seemed to think that they rule the world.

Mark said he had gone into Pisa spent fifteen minutes there, took a picture and returned.

I said to him condescendingly “You do not have the soul of a traveller” but the next day I did much the same in order to get back for lunch. 

I walked across Leghorn, which is a dull place, was a dull place even before the British bombed it to pieces and spent only an hour or so in Pisa – it was a tourist trap, though one thankfully out of season. Half the tourists, curiously, came from the Subcontinent.

The short train ride through Tuscan countryside from Leghorn to Pisa and back was the most beautiful part of the day. And suddenly seeing the tower lurch out above the back streets.

Three armed soldiers, one I think had a machine gun but put it away, were on guard close to the station. They didn't speak much English but one said it was a sensitive area. I am sure he was not there because of Russians.

An Israeli journalist called Jonathan Spyer has said Europe is enduring a low level insurrection. He got banned by Facebook for saying it but has been admitted back.