Now then….
At this early point in the trip, my blog post should be reading something like this: “arrived in Dover safely and boarded the ship as planned. Settled into the cabin on The Black Watch and watched as the lights of Dover Port disappear behind us. Coming up next…. The Bay of Biscay…”
Sadly, that didn’t happen.
As I write this, I’m still at home in Richmond, nursing a horrendous bout of vertigo that hit me about tea-time on Monday evening. I don’t know where it came from, and its something I’ve never experienced before; the world just wouldn’t stop spinning – the knock-on effect of which was nausea and the inevitable sickness – not very pleasant at all. Bearing in mind that the plan was to be up at 6am and to be away, heading south by 7am on Tuesday morning, I went to bed, convinced that it would all be fine by morning… except it wasn’t.
I stubbornly insisted that I would be okay, and went crashing about making last minute preparations, until my head and stomach finally made me see sense, and went back to bed, feeling quite poorly, and thoroughly disappointed.
Tracey, efficient as she is, managed to get me a 9 o’clock appointment at the doctors. I duly threw up for him, just to prove that I wasn’t faking it, and he jabbed me full of drugs to stop the spinning in return. He didn’t seem unduly worried; asked me a load of questions to try and ascertain the source of the problem, but basically told me to stay in bed, and keep taking the tablets he’s prescribed me. The most important thing he said was that he was sure I wasn’t in any way contagious.
The fact is; even if I had managed to get as far as Dover, there’s a very high probability that they wouldn’t have let me on the ship in that condition. We’ve also been experiencing some of the worse flooding in the area for about 30 years, with roads being closed in all directions, including the A1 Southbound, meaning that even if I had managed to get away from our driveway, I would have been faced with serious travel restrictions… someone up there really didn’t want me to get on the Black Watch, yesterday….
So there’s been a slight change of plan.
Both Tracey and I will be flying to Spain on Friday to join the Black Watch in Almeria on Saturday. I’ll have missed The Bay of Biscay and three workshops….
No worries; I’m going back to bed….
