Chasing Phileas Fogg:: 80 days on the Borealis

By Wiktor Moszczynski

This luxury cruise was to test us. Others would probably give their right arm to participate in such a journey. If we still go ahead with it, even if it is the last hurrah in our long life together, will we survive it physically, financially, medically, mentally? And would we, by any chance, actually enjoy it? Or was that too much to ask.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Oct 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9798823084147

Book preview

CHASING

PHILEAS FOGG:

80 days on the Borealis

WIKTOR MOSZCZYNSKI

© 2023 Wiktor Moszczynski. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

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ISBN: 979-8-8230-8413-0 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-8230-8414-7 (e)

Published by AuthorHouse 10/04/2023

We would like to thank the Polonia Aid Foundation Trust for their generous contribution to the publishing of this book.

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Many of the areas visited during our blissful 80-day spring cruise on the Borealis have since undergone a series of horrific natural disasters, emanating from the extremes of climatic change and rising temperatures in the oceans over which we sailed. In the summer we have witnessed massive floods in India and Hong Kong, earthquakes in Morocco, record breaking temperatures causing heat waves in southern Europe and California, the evaporation of water from the Panama Canal, and virulent forest fires in Portugal and Hawaii. My wife and I were particularly shocked by the destruction wrought by the fires on Maui Island and the massive loss of life and property in the small coastal town of Lahaina, which we had visited, but which has now been completely obliterated. We dedicate this book to the memory of those 115 known fatal victims of the Lahaina wildfire disaster.

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INTRODUCTION

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On 12th March 2021, at the height of the covid crisis, my wife Albina and I made a momentous decision.

As retired medically vulnerable Londoners in their mid 70s, we had been confined to our flat in Brentford and told to stay at home all day and all night. We were told to leave it to younger people to buy our food and cater to our needs. We had planned journeys to Poland, to Spain, and to Mauritius, which had to be cancelled. We could not go on walks, or buy a newspaper, or travel to work (I was then employed at a documentation centre and working two days a week), or use a bus, or talk to friends, except by phone. Our son Sandro was living in a different part of London and could not visit us. My busy social life and community work among London Poles were cut short and our theatre productions in the POSK Polish Centre were cancelled. Our hospitals were factories of death. Like thousands of elderly UK citizens, we were prisoners, bottled up like model ships, travelling nowhere except in time. Our viewing platform on this journey was our balcony where we could watch the world go by, with the changing weeks and seasons. The stations in our journey were not places, but weeks, and eventually months. We lived in fear; our daily fare were death statistics. There were still no remedies, no available vaccines. Admittedly, it meant I could spend more time in Albina’s company. But otherwise, it seemed that our civilization, built on optimism, prosperity, and the internet, had collapsed. Even later, when there was some let up on getting out of the house, the restrictions on travel, and especially on foreign travel, were immense. We saw stories of people stuck at airports, quarantined for weeks in hotels, punished for daring to dream of any movement, caged like birds. Airlines and travel agencies were threatened with bankruptcy. When would all this end?

All we could think of to escape this vicious circle of prolonged anxiety and boredom was to look further forward. Not weeks, not months forward, but years. There may have been no current travel, but holiday companies were still advertising several years forward. On the basis that the covid dragon would be largely contained in two years’ time, travel companies were daring to offer a dream. So, we picked a specific dream, namely, a tour around the world which was due to take place in the spring of 2023. It had the added attraction that it commemorated the 150th anniversary of one of my favourite books, Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. A cruise? We had never been on a cruise. It was not part of our experience, or that of people we knew, but it was an escape to something beyond our imagination. This was so far forward that it just seemed to be a surreal dream, a grasp at freedom from our current incarceration. So, one day in March 2021, we telephoned the agency advertising the cruise. We spoke to a young lady whose description of the cruise further fired our imagination. 80 days was a long time, but then Albina was retired, I was only working two days a week on temporary six-month contracts. Who would know if I would even have a job in two years’ time when all civilizations and certainties had collapsed? We listened to the options on prices, dreamed of the chance of living in a cabin with our own balcony, gave our debit card details, drew access to some former residual ISA accounts, paid our deposit, and with one bound we were free!

By the following year, the situation slowly improved. We could travel now with face masks, we could shop, we could use buses and trains with appropriate social distancing. I could again travel by car at last to work in an office at Spelthorne. Then came the vaccines, and the vaccine boosters. Theatres and social life slowly returned to normal. I was able to return to active work in the Polish community, twice chairing AGMs of the Polish Social and Cultural Association (POSK) on zoom and assisting in the Polish Theatre and the Union of Polish Writers. Albina tended to stay at home, and saw less of me again, but life seemed increasingly to return to normal. We could forget about our pact with the devil and our escape route. That cruise remained something unreal in the distant future.

And then in the summer of 2022 that reality began to bite. The cruise was now appearing more firmly on the distant horizon, ever nearer. The deposit was not returnable, costs needed to be paid, the insurance sorted, my employers informed, also our many hospitals and clinics prepared, our social activities to be again curtailed. Was there an alternative? Yes, possibly we could have gone on a shorter cruise, using the initial deposit as a main payment, to be topped up with a few remaining payments.

A long cruise would be a big challenge for us. I still had my Crohn’s Disease to control, as well as my regular nose bleeds, cataracts, and swelling feet. Albina suffers acutely from rheumatoid arthritis in her joints, and both her shoulders are damaged, so she cannot raise her hands higher than her head. She was still at the time awaiting a crucial operation to remove two useless kidneys which were pressing on her remaining organs. Also, she was concerned as a private person how far this cruise would impact on her normal preference to stay home and socialize with friends by phone. How would our different interests and contrasting lifestyles, which had survived fifty years of marriage, survive 80 days cooped up with each other in one cabin?

This luxury cruise was to test us. Others would probably give their right arm to participate in such a journey. If we still go ahead with it, even if it is the last hurrah in our long life together, will we survive it physically, financially, medically, mentally? And would we, by any chance, actually enjoy it? Or was that too much to ask.

To retain my sanity and sense of purpose on this cruise, I needed to keep a blog to record our journey and our preparations for it. That is where we pick up the story in July 2022, when there are still 210 days to go before the embarkation date, and when I am literally having nightmares about how to endure the journey. The text that follows is the selected version of the blog I have kept going throughout that whole period. It includes a considerable amount of detail before the cruise to show our mental and physical preparation for this adventure, as well as a regular day to day description of life on the ship and on the excursions at the 27 ports that we visited, either together or alone. I regret that the text during the cruise may occasionally sound repetitive, but then that is the nature of long sea voyages, and I hope this will not prevent the reader from enjoying the narrative, either selectively or in full.

I would like to take this occasion to thank my fellow passengers and members of the crew on the Fred Olsen vessel Borealis for their friendship and good will shown to me and my wife during the 80-day cruise, and for providing me with a rich array of characters to fill the pages of my original blog, on which the contents of this book are based. In particular, I want to thank Sharon and Ranald Shepherd, and Helen and Tony Barbour, for their company, for being my teammates in the daily General Knowledge Quiz evenings, and for their generous sharing with me of commemorative photos (especially Tony who is a professional photographer). Also, a big thank you to Shiwi Gurung and Mary MacPhail for their help in India and for sending me some photos. I would also like to thank my employers for making it possible to set aside nearly three months of absence from work for me to complete this cruise. Above all a very big thank you to my wife, Albina, for putting up with me for so long and who, despite her physical difficulties, has reluctantly agreed to figure as the heroine of this adventure on the high seas.

Wiktor Moszczynski London 20th July 2023

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CONTENTS

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Introduction

Before The Cruise

August 2022

September 2022

October 2022

November 2022

December 2022

January 2023

February 2023

The Cruise

Europe

Africa

South Asia

East Asia

North America

South America

Europe Again

Annexe

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Phileas Fogg’s route

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Route of the Borealis

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BEFORE THE CRUISE

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London, Friday, 29th July 2022.

There are 210 days to go.

At night I hallucinate and shudder in fear. I wake after a nightmare where I stumble at night across a long bridge. It seems endless. I am seeking an exit, but in vain. There is a bus which I run to catch, but it is not going my way. I am still overwhelmed by an all-encompassing dread over some unresolvable problem that I cannot even formulate. It is eating into my soul. Unless I can cross that bridge, I cannot resolve it.

It’s morning. In the light of day, I grapple with a similar frustrating reality, as grim as the nightmare, but which I also cannot resolve. I feel less and less competent to solve it.

So, what are the anxieties gnawing away at me?

First of all, in a week’s time, on August 7th Albina and I face our fiftieth anniversary. I have looked forward to this for many years, thinking of which venue, and with what mutual friends, we would like to enjoy this day. The nearer we got to the date, the further we got from a decision. I was prepared to spend a few thousand pounds, but Albina seems not to want to celebrate it at all, and certainly not with anyone else. Partly this is because she still feels too weak to celebrate anything following her fourth kidney operation. Although technically successful, it still involved her body being cut up twice, on June 23rd and again on July 5th. to correct a medical error. This had been followed by a debilitating bout of covid which laid us both low. It had been all the more devastating because it caught us both right in the middle of the 40-degree heat wave, which paralyzed the whole country. For three days we had been imprisoned inside an airless oven.

But most of all, my nightmare centres around this round the world trip from February next year, which we somewhat rashly signed up for last year at the height of pandemic, and towards which we have already paid a substantial unreturnable deposit. It is now only 210 days away, a little more than four months. I have little sense of the positive anticipation we both felt when we first booked it in early 2021. It followed repeated cancellations of planned trips to Poland, to Mauritius, wherever. We gambled that covid would no longer be a world epidemic by 2023 and that there would be a cure, or some sort of resolution, to the pandemic. In that world of despair, we had needed a belief that the covid-driven humiliation and seeming collapse of our comfortable civilization would eventually end and that the medical technology of the civilized world would eventually triumph over this adversity. And what better way of celebrating that triumph than in a recreation of the 80-day journey of Phileas Fogg, one of my most favourite literary creations.

And so, with our naïve faith in the eventual victory of science we adopted what we now fear is a horrendous commitment to a journey lasting 80 days. I honestly wonder about the survival of our fifty-year relationship in such a journey, particularly as our expectations from this cruise are so different. For me, if we were to go, the cruise could be an opportunity to have an adventure and an active social activity on the vessel from which I can record my experiences for posterity. For Albina it is simply an opportunity for rest and for anonymity. I fear for our own sanity, living for 80 days with my wife in a cramped cabin. There will be no purpose to our day-to-day activities, other than our own survival and our sustaining the discipline of our daily medicine intake. One thing I will be without, namely my regular hospital infusions of vedolizumab for my Crohn’s Disease. Will I survive that? I will feel uprooted, not only geographically, but also because our sense of time will be in flux. We will be systemically crossing longitude after longitude and time zone after time zone, constantly adjusting the time on our phones, and losing hour after hour from our day. I fear it will be sheer madness to embark on this cruise.

What can keep me sane on such a journey? Contact with friends? Keeping up to date with the world’s news? Or perhaps keeping a journal? But will Albina tolerate my writing a journal every day? Will I have the strength of purpose to continue it, day in day out? Yet without that journal, I feel that the whole journey would be just an empty meaningless vacuum in a hitherto busy life, a journey without a compass, without an end destination. All that I could look forward to being to return again to the beginning and restart my life.

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AUGUST 2022

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London, Tuesday, 2nd August 2022

It is 206 days before embarkation.

My company has now been informed of the details of my holiday. I was concerned how they would react, but as I had not taken any holiday for a full year, they have made a generous offer to prolong my temporary contract till September 2023 and to extend my current holiday allowances to cover that period. That is remarkably good news. It ends my anxiety over at least one aspect of this cruise.

Also, Albina seems quite resolved to enjoy the voyage in its fullest term. For her the 80-day tour will be our real fiftieth anniversary celebration. She wants to delay any celebration of our fiftieth wedding anniversary from August 7th this year to when we will be on board. Specifically, till 28th February 2023. That is the date of her pretend 75th birthday. I say pretend because, according to her own definition, she has no birthday at all in 2023. It is not a leap year. She is actually a classic leap year baby, born 29th February 1948, and so has a birthday only every four years. But 75 is a milestone of an age and has to be celebrated all the same. However, I also still intend to celebrate the wedding anniversary this Sunday, come what may, despite her reticence.

There are other worries and anxieties over this trip. We still need to prepare visas from October this year. That will be expensive. Otherwise, I may have to run around the consulates myself. I note that we will need visas for Egypt, India, Vietnam, and China. Our last journey to the United States was in 2012, so we will probably need a new visa for the States as well. Furthermore, we both need to warn our doctors and our clinic to ensure we have the right supply of medicines for that period and the right inoculations for Covid-19 and for tropical diseases.

We will also have to consolidate our finances so that we can spend what we will need to enjoy the trip to the full. As a result, we will have to save money everywhere else. So, no holidays in the meantime. Just as well, in view of the current chaos at the airports.

London, Wednesday, 3rd August 2022

205 days to go.

Time to stop moping, get my act together and look forward to the round the world trip next February. If Albina, for all her poor health, is being positive, and if all my friends and people in the know are being envious of our cruise, then I had better start to be positive about it myself. Just as positive and reckless as we were when we first made the booking so far forward in March last year.

Albina and I had then decided to book an 80-day cruise around the world. Fred Olsen Cruises chose the timing and the route to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days. This had fired my imagination at the time. Verne’s novel was one of my favourite books when I was a kid, and Phileas Fogg was a model character for me to try to emulate, being self-confident, laconic, all knowing. Sure, the cruise was expensive, but we were prepared to have a once-in-a-lifetime experience, brought on by the fact that during the covid pandemic we had been prevented from traveling anywhere at all.

The journey will take place on the Fred Olsen liner, the Borealis, and I looked again at the details of the route.

23rd February - sail from Southampton.

26th February – Lisbon, Portugal

2nd March – Brindisi, Italy

5th March - Port Said, Egypt, with chance to visit Cairo.

6th March – Suez Canal, Egypt

7th March – Safaga, Egypt, with chance to visit Luxor.

14th March – Mumbai, India, with chance to visit Taj Mahal, Agra.

15th March – Goa, India

16th March - Kochi, Kerala, India

21st March - Singapore

23rd March - Nha Trang, Vietnam

25th March - Hong Kong

28th March – Shanghai, China

30th March - Hakata, Japan

1st April – Osaka, Japan

2nd April – Nagoya, Japan

3rd April – Yokohama for Tokyo, Japan

10th April – Honolulu, Hawaii, USA

11th April - Lahaina, Hawaii, USA

12th April - Hilo, Hawaii, USA

17th April - San Francisco, USA

19th April - San Diego, USA

23rd April – Acapulco, Mexico

26th April - Puerto Caldera, Costa Rica

28th April - Panama Canal, Panama

29th April – Cartagena de Indias, Colombia

30th April - Santa Marta, Colombia

2nd May – Tortola, British Virgin Isl.

3rd May - Basseterre, St Kitts and Nevis

9th May – Ponta Delgada, Azores, Portugal

13th May - Southampton again.

Now that I look at this list of visits, it is, objectively speaking, beyond anything I could have dreamed of. A single visit to any one of these destinations by plane would have been a major event in its own right. 26 stops in 17 different countries. Taken altogether, it amounts to a total 24,000 cruise miles with 79 nights on board. We would have our own cabin with a private terrace for sunbathing, from which we would not need to move, except to eat. So, we would only have to unpack once. On top of that, a chauffeur collects us from home and delivers us back again after the tour. It will not be too crowded as the vessel has 1360 passengers and 336 crew. It is not one of these floating glass palaces with 4000 passengers, where we would also just be anonymous passengers imprisoned in a sea of captive humanity.

That is the bare bones of it, and it sounds embarrassingly sumptuous, but also quite arduous. Albina is determined to look forward to it. But will I survive this?

London, Friday, 5th August 2022

203 days to go.

Albina had impressed on me the concept that I had devoted the first fifty years of our marriage (as well as the years before that) to public service for the community. The only thing that interests you is politics, was her normal refrain. Nothing else is important to you. Exaggerated, of course. But now she wanted me to devote the next fifty years to her. She felt resentment at the fact that I had apparently neglected her, and also our son, for all that time, especially as my work was always voluntary and it did not bring in any meaningful income. Even the articles I had written had been mostly unpaid or written for a meagre amount. I don’t quite see it that way, but I can understand that she felt I had not given sufficient time to her. Basically, she wants me to give up, or at least significantly reduce, my community work and my writing, especially in the build up to the cruise, but also during the cruise itself. Perhaps even after the cruise too. That at least I can try and do, but it might not be easy.

Of course, she still wants me to carry on working, where, despite my earlier retirement, I am employed just two days a week. Initially this was at the company’s invitation. Today, I visited our company’s head office in the heart of the City, even though it wasn’t a Monday or Tuesday, the two days on which I still work at the Spelthorne branch. I was participating in making a video in which I explain what an EUR1 Movement Certificate is. It is a document that confirms the eligibility of an export shipment from the UK for duty relief at country of destination. I did what I was told was a trial run, saying it mostly in my own words. To my surprise they had filmed my trial run and said it was good enough as it was. They played back a bit of it for me. I felt very embarrassed about the occasional urgh and ehrr. However, my colleagues said these hesitant pauses gave my message authenticity. I would not be seen by our customers as some hired actor asked to play the part, but as a genuine employee. I’m not so sure. I think I should have been slicker, but it’s their baby not mine.

Then they suggested that I write the occasional articles for the company magazine. They were aware that I had written numerous articles, in Polish and in English, in the past. However, now, I’m a bit outside my comfort zone. Such articles require concentration and precision, but I feel my ability to do that is receding. Those seemingly non-existent 75 years of my life have suddenly crept up on me and are subverting everything, my concentration, my self-confidence, and even my capacity to enjoy anything, including the terrifying prospect of undergoing that world trip Albina and I have signed up to.

But in the immediate future I am due to write some articles in Polish. One of them concerns the burning issue of the future of a Polish centre in Kirkcaldy in Scotland, which the Polish owners are refusing to sell to their Polish lessees, who have been running the place successfully for decades. My intervention could make a difference here, or else it could renew the tension as I stir up my enemies from the past once again. Yet my compulsion to write remains, much to Albina’s annoyance.

London, Sunday, 7th August 2022

Our Fiftieth Wedding Anniversary

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50th Wedding Anniversary

Yesterday I was invited by a friend to an unofficial meeting of board members for the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust, which is seeking autonomy from the Sikorski Institute. Not yet sure whether I should get involved. There is so much at stake at present with other texts I am committed to, namely on the Polish Club in Kirkcaldy and on the mystery concerning the rising figures for Polish speaking children in Great Britain. Everyone assumed that after Brexit these figures would fall. Apparently, not so.

And there is Albina still unhappy that I am neglecting her. Well certainly not today. Today is our fiftieth wedding anniversary. Of course, I had wanted to celebrate this milestone publicly. Albina wanted our anniversary to be a quiet low-key affair, with no friends and no big expense. Just us. Albina had it as she wanted it, to spend time uninterrupted with me alone. Consequently, we began the evening by seeing a film at the Westfield Vue. It was Bullet Train, an extraordinary feast of mousse foam violence, as various assassins run into each other and interact with comic book extreme sanction. It takes place on a bullet train rushing from Tokyo to Kyoto, a route I am familiar with. In fact, the bullet train experience is one that we may still face when we get to Japan during our cruise. Brad Pitt is in his element in this film as a philosophical, somewhat absent-minded, assassin. We see about fifty or so brutal deaths, to which we become totally anaesthetized by repetitive action and by a sharp upbeat script mellowed by mood music and songs. It was a black comedy with not too many jokes in the script. Albina appeared to be happy that we went to see the film. Afterwards, we went back to Brentford by bus and had a meal at the Holiday Inn Hotel, just at the end of our road.

As we toasted each other with a glass of wine, I gave her a pretty ring with three amethysts interspersed with some mini diamonds. She was delighted. I know she likes jewellery with inset stones, not stones that jut out and get in the way and get caught on clothes. The amethyst is her birth stone. However, my intention had been to buy her a diamond ring for £2000 or so for this occasion. Over the years I have given her rings with sapphires, rubies, and emeralds, as well as pendants with other stones, such as tanzanite and peridot. A decent diamond would complete the quest. Unfortunately, I cannot do it just yet because of the need to save money for the coming cruise, but I am setting up a separate reserve fund in order to present her with this ring on the ship on her 75th birthday in February next year. I wanted to avoid using any credit card. For three years I have stopped using a credit card completely and even cut up my last platinum card. I prefer to do all my spending from my debit card alone.

Albina has been worn out over the years by long night shifts at the airport and by illnesses, as well as by the effects of her difficult childhood as an orphan. But sitting opposite her at dinner in the hotel, I still remember the soft-spoken shy golden-haired beauty whom I married in a secret ceremony in Wandsworth Civic Centre in 1972. There were only three witnesses, and I only informed my bewildered parents a week later. It was all both foolish and romantic. We had met in 1969 when she lived for five weeks in my parents’ house in Ealing and worked in the kitchen at my mother’s club in Gloucester Road. She was a bookworm, pretty, and quiet as a church mouse, wishing to avoid everyone’s attention. She hid her shyness behind a beaming bright smile that lights up her face and her surroundings. Though not perhaps as often as I would like. I showed her around London. We got very intimate, to my father’s horror, as he thought her some kind of a Communist plant. After a month she went back to Poland. Initially we corresponded, then she fell for another guy, and for the next three years we lost touch.

We reminded ourselves how in the summer of 1972, she rang me out of the blue from Poland and said her aunt was going to invite her to England. If she came, could she please see me, she asked. I said yes straight away. I was excited to hear from her again. Then she rang very disconsolate some weeks later, saying her aunt had other priorities and could not invite her. Without hesitation I said not to worry, as I will invite her myself. Only then did the trouble begin. I was pestered by police visits. They asked me why I was inviting a young lady from Poland. To shake off the Home Office, I resolved to marry her as soon as she arrived and afterwards, as my wife, she would be able to travel back and forth between Poland and the UK without hindrance. So there. That was my logic. Very naïve. I had not given any thought how we would live together, and where. I only knew that I loved her and could not let her slip away again. I revealed my plan to her the evening she arrived. I pressed her for an answer, and she quickly agreed, but she asked why I had not warned her of my intention. I said that I didn’t tell her because if I had warned her, she probably would not have come. Well, you’re right, she said.

She had only come for just five weeks again, and I just had the time to sort out the licence with Wandsworth Civic Centre (at the time I lived in a commune in Battersea, as we were all employees of Davies Turner and Co.). For witnesses we had my former university flat mate John and his wife Anne, as well as a photographer friend. Anne had earlier taken her to the junior section at Harrods and bought her a pretty dress, all patterned in white and yellow. I was wearing the green suit I had bought earlier that year in Carnaby Street. It was all very sweet. Albina repeated the marriage vows word for word in English based on the script she was presented with, stumbling only over the word matrimony, and not understanding one word of it. Then she read the pre-prepared text again, but this time in Polish. Next day she swore loyalty to the Queen as a prospective British subject in front of a Commissioner of Oaths. Three days later we both went abroad, me to Italy as a guide, and Albina back to Poland. It was only after she had left that I told my parents and friends. They all thought we were mad. A madcap decision made impulsively and romantically with no chance of lasting, they thought. Six months later Albina returned to London and has lived here ever since. Well, that was fifty years ago, and we’re still an item.

London, Monday, 8th August 2022

200 days to go.

China has had a temper tantrum. The Chinese military have been intimidating Taiwan with live fire manoeuvres on a massive scale in the Taiwan Strait, which we are supposed to be crossing next year on our cruise from Hong Kong to Shanghai. Jules Verne described how Phileas Fogg sailed up the Formosa Strait, as it was called at the time, on a tiny ship that nearly sank in a typhoon as they crossed this area. I believe that at the time Taiwan was part of the Chinese Empire, but some twenty years later it was captured by the Japanese, and for the next 50 years became Formosa.

The present Chinese Communist Government is determined to cow and recover Taiwan, whether by diplomacy or by force, as it considers the island to be an integral part of China. The current Chinese leader Xi is no longer paralysed by fear of the American dominance through its traditional Seventh Fleet. China’s local firepower now surpasses that of the Americans in the area. The experts say that the Seventh Fleet is still the largest of the U.S. Navy’s forward deployed fleets and consists of 50 to 70 ships and submarines, as well as 150 aircraft. But China can top that now. It has eleven new amphibious ships, three aircraft carriers and 500 other vessels, plus 600 aircraft. with 300,000 active personnel. All of that kept in a state of readiness, but so far without battle experience.

Yet if the People’s Republic really intends to invade Taiwan by force, experts say it will need to amass at least two million troops and land them under fire over the full length of the Taiwan coastline. The Chinese Liberation Army fleet would have to commandeer many hundreds of commercial vessels in order to supplement its invasion fleet. Can they do that? Someday, at a moment of U.S. weakness, under Biden or under Trump, or some other weak successor, China could well try and pounce. It still nurses the grievances of how the Chinese Empire was plundered and humiliated by foreigners in the Nineteenth and early Twentieth Century with the Opium Wars, the suppression of the Boxer rebellion, and of course the Japanese invasion.

China hates the Western style values of democracy and freedom of expression practised in the last thirty years in Taiwan. The Taiwanese are proud to be Chinese but do not want to be part of People’s China. They do not want to become enslaved by social credit scores on their i-phones, or to describe how loyal they are to the Chinese state. They want free elections of their leaders. Currently, the two systems of rule are incompatible, and I do not see any alternative but to maintain the status quo with a military stand-off, until China relents, or is bought off.

I just hope that a further outbreak in tensions will not prevent our passage down this route in March or April next year. We would then have to sail by way of the Philippines, and probably miss out Hong Kong as well.

London, Tuesday, 9th August 2022

I am happy to see today that my article in Polish on the woeful Tory candidates for Prime Minister has been published, both in the London-based Tydzien Polski (Polish Weekly) and in the Londynek.net website. I called it the Brexit Acolytes fight for power. Both candidates are pandering to the worst possible instincts of their 140,000 strong Tory electorate and Liz Truss is way ahead. She is trying to gain a total monopoly on having her cake and eating it. She claims that tax and national insurance cuts totalling £32bn will not hurt the economy and not spur inflation further. Also, she is relishing a fight with the EU over the NI protocol and looking forward to sending more hapless asylum seekers to Rwanda and elsewhere. The Daily Express headline stressed that she is offering Britain a golden future. More like molten gold poured over our heads as in The Game of Thrones, I would have thought.

London, Wednesday, 17th August 2022

191 days to go.

The Fred Olsen cruise that I booked through ROLCruise draws ever closer. Today our NHS clinic confirmed that it can give us three months’ supply of all the repeat prescriptions for Albina and me, provided we give them at least a week’s notice. However, they would not be able to give us the necessary inoculations for the journey, but recommended four local pharmacies that could do it.

I have learned that a company can arrange our visas for Egypt, India, Vietnam, China, and USA, but they suggested we approach them with our passports no earlier than October. Their agency costs are high. Hope this will not clash with a possible visit by Albina to a health spa in Poland.

ROL have just reminded us that we need to pay another £2124 towards our initial deposit by the end of this month. I have just arranged the additional payment. The full payment balance will have to be made in late September. We cannot recover the deposit but perhaps it may still be possible to switch to a shorter less ambitious cruise if we still feel uncomfortable about disappearing from the world and from our social obligations for a full 80 days. At least Phileas Fogg did not have any such obligations to abandon, except for his daily game of whist.

And yet life here goes on.

On Saturday morning I attended another Council meeting of POSK in Hammersmith. POSK is the acronym for the large Polish Social and Cultural Association building in Hammersmith. Ever since the 1970s it has been known to UK Poles as the Miracle on the Thames as it was created by funds exclusively raised from the Polish community and from many legacies of the post-war emigres, to house the largest Polish library outside Poland, a working theatre with 300 seats, a gallery, a concert hall, a restaurant, and the headquarters of many Polish social organizations, including the Polish Weekly. The miracle still stands, a shining example of Polish self-sacrifice and entrepreneurship, though some of its sheen may have lost its lustre.

We spent the first three hours correcting the minutes of the last three Council meetings from January, March, and July. The new Chairman, an honest man but currently floundering because of bad advisers, is faced with pent up hostility from his predecessors, who want to challenge him with a new candidate in the September AGM. I left before that stage of the meeting was finished as I had agreed to meet Albina and prepare for my friend Stefan’s birthday. I honestly don’t know what happened afterwards but suffice it to say the meeting was highly distasteful and frustrating. This is one aspect of my community activities I will be happy to ditch once I go on that cruise.

Then off to Ognisko Club in Kensington with Albina to enjoy our friend Stefan’s 75th birthday. A wonderful meal on the terrace under a marquee with airflow towers protecting us from the heat outside. We each had two starters and a main course as well as a sweet (a Pavlova, of course), and we had plenty to drink as well. By the time we got home by taxi I was only able to lie flat on my bed like a beached whale and fall asleep.

Sunday was another sweltering day. I was supposed to drive to Cambridge to visit Sandro and seek his help to clear up anomalies on my laptop so that I can have it working properly for my voyage next year. But the combination of heat and a considerable alcohol intake left over from the previous day made me feel uncomfortable about driving such a distance. I had no hangover, but all the same I called off the visit.

Instead, I took a long three mile walk along the canal path in the hot sun. I was dressed just in shorts and took my shirt off for most of the walk. I must have looked a sight. However, I tripped at one point, skinned my knees, and left arm, and stubbed my toe. I bought the Sunday papers in a shop in Hanwell, hobbled into Lidl to get a large crate of strawberries, a fruit juice and some bread and then took the bus home. Albina was pleased with the strawberries, but she gave me an earful over getting the wrong kind of bread and for getting her a Mail on Sunday without the colour supplement. Woe betides if something besmirches her sense of perfection. A Sunday newspaper without a colour supplement is not a Sunday newspaper. So much for my heroic efforts to keep her happy.

Then on Wednesday I went to Ealing Hospital for a decision on whether I should have my left eye operated on. It was supposed to be a matter of removing a cataract, but now they plan to give me an artificial lens so that my eyesight should improve considerably for distance. They did the same earlier this year for my right eye, but they made it near sighted, so I can now read a computer screen or a book with the naked eye. That is the first time I could do that since childhood. If I have one eye near sighted and one long sighted, will my poor old brain be ready to cope? I was also aware that this will be under local anaesthetic again. Can you imagine the horror of having a surgeon poking around in your eye for half an hour, while you are still wide awake? I went through it once, and now will go through it again. It scares the hell out of me, but what else can you do now, once you have committed yourself and have a medical team hovering over you, geared up to carry it out? I listened to all the things that could go wrong (blindness, pain, scarring), shrugged my shoulders, and signed the consent form. The idea is that at least I will be able to see better when I am on our cruise on board the Borealis.

London, Thursday, 18th August 2022

I see the Federation of Poles in Great Britain have asked me to travel to Vilnius in late September to represent them at a world conference of Polish communities (World Polonia Council) and speak about our record on promoting Poland and defending the interests of Poles in our country of residence.

Actually, I would love to go, even as a last Hurrah, as promoting Poland abroad is a subject, I have held dear since the 1980s when I chaired the Polish Solidarity Campaign and was later the Vice-Chairman of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain. Also, I have never been to Vilnius, a former Polish city and, even though it is now the capital of Lithuania, and still with a large ethnic Polish population.

However, the days in question are a Monday and Tuesday and I would have to take time off from work. After having reached a deal with my company over working without a holiday until the big cruise in February, taking time off would be a bad idea. But most important of all, I know that my going would only upset Albina. She is so sensitive now to my taking time off away from her. Maybe she is right that I have invested less into our marriage, than she has. The big tour around the world is my way to make up for it, now that we can afford it. So, sorry. No Vilnius.

London, Sunday, 21st August 2022

Got the news this morning from Bob. My darling friend Binia has passed away. Funny, brilliant, artistic, unconventional, a little crazy, often too honest for her own good. Earlier this year, after she collapsed into a temporary coma in Spain, she was diagnosed with cancer in nearly every organ of her body. Bob watched over her, first in the hospital, then at home, finally in a hospice, as she slowly sank into a form of semi-oblivion, but free of pain. She, who was such a key observer of life, who enjoyed good company and the fruits of a bohemian lifestyle, and yet also a talented film maker (films on Yoko Ono, Phil Spector), painter, kite flyer and writer of screenplays. Ever a smoker, and a lover of good whisky. She was a friend of mine from childhood after she left Poland as a child and settled with her aristocratic family in London. One son with Bob, Sandro, died tragically early when catching meningitis at Bedales School. Also, one daughter, Romana, from an earlier marriage, who survives her. Binia moved with Bob to Spain and with her chow chow, Boyo, before Brexit (which she hated), to spend her last years in the sun in Murcia. I had visited her there once. Covid stopped any further visits. She had been looking forward to hearing from me about my round the world tour following my return. Alas, no longer.

London, Friday, 26th August 2022

The announcement came this morning and the whole country winced with pain. Cap on average annual energy bill from 1st October will be £3549. That is an 80% increase on the summer annual cap of £1971. And that in turn was an upward leap from the January cap of £1277. It could even increase to more than £6000 in January. How can thousands on benefits and low incomes or state pension afford that? Although the figure was expected, yet millions are in agony, sick to the pit of their stomachs, as they consider their options. What cannot they afford? What to drop? Ibiza? Take away food? Netflix account? School uniform? Christmas presents? Visiting gran in the country? New shoes? A dilemma for all, but the well off.

Albina is already saying we won’t use any heating this winter as a result. At least until February when we leave on our world trip. This latest price rise just smashes the current welfare fabric in the UK into smithereens. People are anxious, are hurting. There will be mental health disasters and suicides, people staying at work to keep warm, small businesses, and especially pubs and restaurants, going bankrupt. There will be rent strikes and gas bill boycotts, and one young lady who advocated a bill payment strike on Sky TV was promptly blacked out as she spoke. It is as critical and momentous as the covid scare. So where are the parade of ministers and wealth experts (as opposed to health experts) to calm people down, to reassure and to promise that a proper relief package is on the way, as happened during the covid crisis? Nowhere. Still fighting over the succession for a hollow thorny crown. And that remorselessly stupid and non-empathic Thatcher clone, Liz Truss, mouthing inanities, cutting green taxes, feeding the inflation cycle with tax cuts, humiliating the Scots and insulting Macron, and glorying in being able to push the nuclear button, all to Tory cheers.

At least, a normally timorous Labour Party could say it found a temporary imperfect solution with a six-month cap freeze at the current annual cap of £1971, and a windfall tax to fund it. Nothing so concrete though from the Tory government. Nothing from the normally garrulous Tiggerish clown pretending to be our Prime Minister. He’s in Greece, or acting the hero in gullible Kyiv, with his bare arse stuck firmly out towards the British people. What a shambles! The infrastructure is crumbling. Raw sewage in streams and rivers and then flushed out to sea; cutbacks on climate change despite the heat wave; roads flooding during downpours; trains, legal aid, and post offices on strike; millions on hospital waiting lists; massive shortages of care workers; parts of the country with no NHS dentists, while 18% inflation lurks around the corner early next year. We still have five months to go before we can get away from it all, but having to pay all those massive spring bills will have to come first.

In the evening there was supposed to be a meeting of the Federation of Poles in Great Britain on Zoom. But only the President and the Secretary showed up, both just out from hospital with mobility problems. There we were. Just three 70-year-olds plus, discussing the conference in Vilnius, the situation in Poland and the UK. The Federation was once a powerhouse of initiative and activity. Now it seems to be a spent force, with younger trustees not even bothering to attend. If they don’t get their new website up and running by this autumn, they are finished. What a sad end to an organization that has spoken for Poles in this country since 1947.

London, Saturday, 27th August 2022

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Giles Hart Solidarity Memorial, Hammersmith

On Saturday I got together with my old friends from the Polish Solidarity Campaign for a regular annual picnic in Ravenscourt Park. In the 1980s we were organizing demonstrations on the streets of London and elsewhere, holding press conferences in the House of Commons, picketing trade union and party conferences, writing articles for the British media and making life difficult for Communist sympathisers in the UK, especially in the period after General Jaruzelski introduced martial law. In all, I attended nearly 200 meetings in the space of three years and others worked just as hard. There was even a book published about us and we had a strong media presence in that period.

One of our best achievements was to convince the Labour Party in 1983 to disinvite Polish and other Communist organizations from their annual conference. We were a mixture of amateur Anglo-Poles born in the UK to Polish emigre parents, genuine Solidarity sympathisers from Poland and British sympathizers of freedom and trade union rights. Our tilt was initially largely left of centre, and in fact our organization was initiated by Trotskyist Marxists anxious to condemn Stalinist regimes. We invited prominent trade union and Labour MP speakers to attack the Communist regime from the Left. During the legal period of Solidarity, we acted as liaison links between Solidarity leaders and individual branches of British trade unions. After martial law we became a mass organization with over a thousand members and with more than £22,000 operating budget, and very much a broad church. We made sure however that any Tory MPs on our platform, such as Bernard Braine or Lord Bethell, were not sympathizers of apartheid, Pinochet, and other military regimes, so as not to lose our street cred with our left-wing supporters.

It was an exciting time to be Polish while the entire world watched Solidarity unfold and struggle for freedom and eventually independence. When the Soviet bloc finally disintegrated, Poland entered a period of initial dramatic transition to democracy and a market economy which became a model for other countries. When the big recession hit Europe in 2008 Poland was the only European country to escape it. When Poland joined the EU in 2004 up to a million adventurous young Poles settled in the UK, encouraged by the Blair government. Despite the constant carping from the Daily Mail and other right-wing redtops, young Poles in the UK proved hard working and enterprising and contributed massively to the prosperity of both Poland and the UK. Those were good times and as a spokesman for the Polish community in the British media I felt that I had contributed to the positive image of Poland at that time.

Why was the picnic held in Ravenscourt Park? Well, it was near POSK, where we had our headquarters. Our most active supporter and long-term Chairman was Giles Hart who, sadly, was killed in the London bombing outrage in 2004 while riding a bus near Tavistock Square. We raised sufficient funds and obtained permission from Hammersmith Council to erect a monument in his honour and that of the Solidarity movement in Ravenscourt Park. The Polish Ambassador, the Mayor of Hammersmith and the Secretary General of the Solidarity Trade Union from Poland assisted at the opening ceremony. Now every year, as we meet at the picnic, we lay flowers in memory of Giles at the monument, normally accompanied by Giles’ widow, Danusia.

I always attend with a pleasant sense of achievement for the past. Mission accomplished. Poland is free now. It is just that the picture is spoilt by the current nationalist mean-spirited idiots ruling Poland today.

London, Tuesday, 30th August 2022

I took advantage of the beautiful bank holiday Sunday weather to drive up to Cambridge to see my son and watch him perform his filial duties of setting right various problems on my laptop. That is why us old folk have children these days. What to them is simple logic, for us is a mysterious and hostile wilderness full of traps and obstacles to ensure we cannot write what we want or provide the pictures we need in the right place, especially when internet wormholes appear that can swallow up a text on which we may have been working on for half a day.

Sandro is a python programmer (for those who know what that means), working for a cutting edge of technology outfit in Cambridge which somehow links computer images with photography. For all I know, he could be taking civilization forward in the science of morphing images or be in the forefront of providing fake news. He has just had his 33rd birthday which he celebrated with his old university chums from Sussex. He graduated from there with an MSc in physics, but more recently took a course at UCL which earned him a second MSc in (wait for it!) quantum technology. He is a number cruncher, in contrast to an airy-fairy weaver of words like myself. He gets his skills more from his mother, than me.

He is renting a three-bedroom house in a Cambridge suburb along with his long-standing Finnish girlfriend, Liisa. He seems to have little sense of attachment to his Polish heritage, though he can hold a conversation in Polish, and did eventually apply for a Polish passport once it was clear that the UK would leave the EU. He seems to identify more with Finland than Poland. Neither of them seems to have any plans for progeny yet, much to Albina’s disappointment. Probably by the time they decide to have children, we will be too old to enjoy them or to influence them.

Sandro sorted out my internet blips and we drove out for a proper roast lunch at a pub in Grantchester. We had an enjoyable walk along the Cam and passed the extensive land around a picturesque property called the Old Vicarage, with a statue of Rupert Brooke in the front garden. There were images of farm animals, including a magnificent horse, visible in the gardens and the neighbouring riverbank. It must be a rich guy that owns this, commented Sandro. Checking on Google, I found that this was in fact an address that Brooke stayed in on a number of occasions before he went to the front. And yes, the current