2nd April - food - speedy sailing - spills

Tuesday 2nd April

2XS is going gangbusters!  Pete rang as they sped past Port Macquarie.  I think they will be in the Whitsundsays in the blink of an eye…maybe I misjudged, booking my ticket to arrive on the 12^th…

And while I was writing this he rang again – they will be arriving at the Gold Coast tonight at 7; they have been going fast and steady, with no mishaps at all.  They didn’t even stop in Sydney, where Pete thought they would have had to spend a few days fixing this and that.  This and that usually goes wrong, on a boat.  But not this time!!

Ad break: He also said the food has been wonderful.  So go to Food2U in Moonah and buy some!  It is apparently very tasty and satisfying, and…easy!

At dinner last night with a cheery group of women the conversation turned to accidents…spills in particular.  My most annoying and recent spill story was on 2XS in high seas.  I had been longing for a cup of tea – the longing for a cup of tea is quite a primal urge, isn’t it?  I was at the helm and Pete struggled down into the galley to make me what my heart desired.  It had barely reached my hands when oooops over it went.  The next one I managed to sip a beautiful sip or two and then over it went.  I think I ended up spilling and NOT drinking about four cups of tea before we both, sadly, gave up.

Tanya’s most horrid spill was two large glasses of beer, which she managed to throw all over herself by tripping over the leg of a barstool while trying to impress a potential boyfriend at the tender age of seventeen.  Come to think of it…many years ago I went out to dinner with a large group of work friends, to a busy Battery Point restaurant.  The waiter arrived at the table with two large jugs of beer which he poured ALL over Tom and Pauline, who were just sitting there innocently minding their own business.  The waiter didn’t deal with this at all well. Hardly an apology; he just went off and got a few napkins and dabbed, fairly ineffectually, at their sodden clothes.  He did bring fresh jugs of beer, but that was it.  And at the end of the evening, adding insult to injury, we were overcharged by about $200

Ann-Marie had a fairly tragic spill-story… Many yeas ago she worked at a hotel on the Isle of Man.  This was in the days before there were TVs in every room as a matter of course.  There was a TV lounge, and all of the guests would gather in the evening to watch together.  They were mainly long-term guests, fairly elderly, and the high pint of the evening was cocoa and biscuits.  It was Ann-Marie’s duty to get this supper treat for them.  One evening she climbed on a stool to get the two large jugs of milk left on a high shelf.  As she climbed down, it went through her mind that the floor was wet, and possibly slippery, and that she would have to be very careful…Not careful enough… She skidded across the floor in a fairly spectacular manner, slopping milk everywhere.  And the poor oldcodgers, waiting eagerly for their hot cocoa, had to make do with seeing sodden milk-stained Ann-Marie making a chastened apology.