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 the Windstar line of small ships the size of big yachts. 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 was mild, we avoided rain and had sunshine in Barcelona, Leghorn and Rome. The unexciting weather 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 most over 60. 

I know. It is what it is. 

One occasionally has a candid conversation of the type you have with your 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, which is not open to ticket holders and which required standing in a very long queue. On December 21.

By the end of 1990, after seeing all the Eastern European capitals which were then so very fascinating, Barcelona remained my favourite city in the world.

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

From our next port Nice I took the train for 22 minutes 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 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 with a Tridentine Mass. 

The city does have one mildly interesting thing: 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. The Barberry slavers enslaved white Christians.

A woman from dinner the night before attended church at my suggestion. Mass was the only thing happening. She wore black and reminded me of Whistler's Mother.

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

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

Many Americans think Trump is a Russian asset and this is the background to the war in Ukraine.

We were given crackers, which made it feel like Christmas.

Whistler’s mother declined to pull mine.

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

Mark pulled my cracker, without gusto, since I pointed out that if he didn't pull it I couldn’t really pull it alone.

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

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.

Roast turkey was on the menu but there was no stuffing and no sprouts.

‘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.

To be honest, 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. Pisa was a tourist trap, though thankfully out of season. Half the tourists, curiously, came from the Indian 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.