11th May - social life at Ocean View Marina (Samal Island) - Game of Thrones on 2XS

Monday 11^th May 2015

Marina life is very social.  So far we have had a (regular Friday night) BBQ with about thirty people, a birthday party with even more and quite a few five o’clock drinks in the clubrooms.

Sue (SV Sidewinder, USA) celebrating her 68th birthday (and looking pretty fabulous…)

The people here are nice.  We have had invitations for dinner, coffee, drinks.  I can see how some sailors come here for a day or two and end up staying for years…

Last night after the birthday party we invited Trish

 and Will

(SV Shanghaied) to join us on the very messy boat

Bare floors…carpet ripped up!

for dinner.  I had managed to get together enough ingredients to make an interesting variation on the theme of stirfry, with marlin marinated in this and that, and whatever vegetables were left after my Babak market shopping spree.  They were very appreciative because they were leaving the following morning at 6.30am to fly to Canada and they were down to their last little scarps of food – a cold cooked pork chop, a tiny cabbage, and half a white radish.  (I know exactly what they had leftover because these items are now in our fridge…)

We enjoyed their company very much and with a bit of luck we will see them in a year or so in Tasmania, because they are very keen conservationists and own shares in a block of land on the slopes of Mt Wellington – very close to home, for me!

So…most of our evening was great.  Birthday party 5-7; dinner guests 7-9…and then…oh no… I must say I used to enjoy our 2XS evenings.  We have watched quite a few boxed sets of TV programs and have enjoyed them all to varying degrees.  Boston Legal was interesting and fun; Grand Designs ditto; Breaking Bad was fascinating; Happy Valley was gripping…and so on.  But for Christmas Pete very kindly bought me the boxed set of…Game of Thrones.  And now our evenings are ghastly, full of torture, beheadings, slashing, misery.

The worst thing is that Pete is loathing every minute and he complains bitterly for the whole 50 minutes of “compulsory” viewing.  (Compulsory is in inverted commas because I don’t now WHY it is compulsory for us to watch every single damned episode…) I don’t hate every single minute.  I quite like the dragons, and I very much enjoyed John Snow’s epic climb with his Wildling girl, up an immense vertical ice cliff.  But mostly I have to watch it with my eye closed or my head averted.  Watching people being tortured is probably my least favourite theme, in movies or TV programs.  And there is a LOT of torture and general violent mayhem, accompanied by loudly voiced complaints from the other side of the table – Captain Pete, on his couch, groans loudly every few minutes – CRAP!  he shouts.  Or, Oh how nice! as someone gets dragged off to have his hand chopped of or her eyes gouged out.

I am very much aware that Game of Thrones is widely admired, and adored, by most of the viewing audience.  I can see it is very clever – brilliant costumes, landscapes, cinematography.   But…oh how I hate it… I hated the book(s) too.  In only read the first one, and felt much the same about it as I do the TV program.  I would drag myself to my Kindle very sadly, whimpering faintly, and I only just managed to get to the slaughter of the loyal, gentle direwolf, Lady, who HADN’T DONE ANYTHING WRONG before I cast the whole thing aside, shuddering faintly, and plunged, with a sigh of relief, into my Nancy Mitford omnibus, always a source of joy..  So…Pete and I are absolutely in a minority…and there are still many episodes to go…

On a more cheery note…this boat, anchored near us in Borot Cove (Monserat) was called - Alaska!