Wednesday 21^st November

Yesterday I got a joyous email from Pete – Holy Smokes boat toilet fixed at last!

Calloo callay o frabjous day!!  This will make him (and me!) very happy.  I don’t know how many horrid hours he has spent wrestling with the pump, the pipes, the innards of the pesky toilet system.  I hope it now works for many MANY years to come, pumping, macerating, NOT leaking, not jamming up, not suddenly (inexplicably) stopping to function as a toilet should.

Well done Pete!  Not only can he make pompoms; he can fix complicated and tricky toilets!

India #23

On the way from Margao, in Goa, to Hampi we had a big carriage very much to ourselves.  This was just lovely.  We could lie along the window seats and doze and stare out of the windows, reading and being very calm and happy.  I assumed, wrongly, that we were all looking at much the same things, so when we passed a large field with a beautiful herd of darling little bambi-like deer, I just admired them peacefully, then went back to say to my friends, “Weren’t those deer just gorgeous?”  Well, what deer?  No-one else had seen them, and they were all very sceptical.  In fact we never did see a single other one, not until we were – um I forget where, but it had a deer-park, which was closed to the public that day – well in the vicinity of this deer park SOMEWHERE in India we saw a delicate little deer being fed in the back of a van.  Fortunately for me, Pete and Vish were befriended for many hours on this leg of the trip by a retired engineer, Mr Rao, who was very knowledgeable about all sorts of things.  I asked him if it was possible I could have seen a herd of deer, frolicking on farmland, and he said yes, they are very common, and are completely protected, so they can go and eat everyone’s crops and make the farmers all very angry.