---

Friday, 22nd September 2023

Today was home day. On advice from J and J we decided to breakfast at 8am, despite being told our disembarkation time was 8:30. Theirs was “any time up to 09:50” so clearly no one was going to throw us off ahead of that sort of time. A leisurely breakfast would be just the thing and would get us through the day until we were home and unpacked. With that in mind, we went for the full English breakfast for the first and only time on this trip. It was good, tasty, and in fact confirmed that the kitchen knows what they’re doing, they just don’t want to scare the horses (at least not in the Britannia restaurant anyway).

After breakfast we went to the Photo Studio again (we’d dropped in before breakfast but the USB stick was apparently still being processed) and collected our three photos, which I have to say I really liked ($90 well spent in my opinion).

After that we collected our remaining (small) bags from our stateroom, said goodbye to J and J, and went to try and leave. The queue snaked all the way round Deck 2 and looked ridiculous. We figured we could either join the queue, or wait for the end of it to draw level with us. The latter seemed the more sensible choice, so we took at seat in the Red Lion, and waited. And waited. And waited. Eventually, the queue started to thin out, and we spotted J and J, who’d obviously decided that they would stand in line. We joined them as they were now very near the doors.

Once off and through the various necessary checks, the luggage hall was quiet sparsely filled with baggage and so it was easy to spot our cases. There was a brief moment of panic when my camera bag was not with them, but it was quickly located sitting all alone in the area for bags that had lost their labels! Panic over.

We were then very quickly reunited with the car and set off to drive home. We had a planned detour to make via Hungerford. Because our friend A had been house- and cat-sitting for us, we wanted to treat her to a good dinner. During the Covid lock downs, Laurent Lebeau, the chef who ran one of my favourite gastro pubs, the Red House, had started doing “takeaways” to be collected or delivered locally (within 45 minutes). As it was too far away, we could only drool at the weekly menus, and fantasise about living closer to The Funghi Club. Eventually they opened a shop in Hungerford, which they say is a deli but is far more like the sort of traiteurs you find in France and Belgium. In other words, it’s so much more than a deli with ready to reheat and finish at home meals of superb quality alongside the cheeses, meats and so on.

We got to Hungerford after a couple of annoying but unavoidable delays, and found parking behind the store, close to the local library. A coffee was in order while we collected our pre-ordered meal (two portions of dariole de St. Jacques, one of crevettes, three portions of guinea fowl fricassee with pommes puree, and a cheese board with chutney), as well as browsing the shop to see what else looked good. I proceeded to collect a large quantity of rabbit in a mustard sauce, some sourdough, a couple of glorious pastries, two dried Espelette peppers, and a large bag of fresh chanterelles! It was an expensive detour, but oh so worth it.

We arrived home a little after 1pm, and basically fell through the front door, completely exhausted. Suitcases were dragged into the spare rooms and emptied of all laundry, and then we simply collapsed for the afternoon, happy not to have to cook that evening.

We’d completed our first, albeit very short, cruise. Would we do it again? Yes, provided it’s on Cunard, partly because we like the sense of occasion, partly because their ships are not idiotically huge – I really wouldn’t want to deal with the huge ships that can take several thousand passengers and seem to be more like great big slabs of cities that have been plonked down on top of a floating pontoon of gargantuan proportions. Do I have reservations about the ecological impact? Yes, I do. But the same applies to flying, which I’m trying hard to avoid as much as possible. And we are going again, in 2025, in pursuit of the Northern Lights.

Dinner was excellent, by the way.