Today is the 324th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar. It is also exactly one year ago that the Virgin Holidays Cruises blogs first hit the Net.

Which as a result is now looking a little dented.

Don’t blame me. I just responded to a polite email from Sean Hardaker. He offered me an opportunity to write for Virgin, a certain amount of creative freedom and something that got my immediate attention: money.

Sean’s timing was perfect. For months, the only thing I had accepted by a magazine was a subscription to Readers’ Digest. Actually that’s not true. I also subscribed to The Beano.

And here I am, 52 blogs later. Blimey.

Presumably someone out there is reading this, apart from my cat and accountant, otherwise I wouldn’t be here. But you’d probably still be out there, reading something else about cruise ships…and perhaps getting so b-o-r-e-d you’d decided to spend a week in a Siberian holiday camp instead.

Excuse my wandering comments…I blame the Virgin Holidays Cruises blogs’ first birthday celebrations…None of which have happened yet, Sean.

Anyway, it seems appropriate that on this day several historical events occurred, including:

In 1820 an 80-ton sperm whale attacked the Essex, a whaling ship from Nantucket, Massachusetts, 2,000 miles from the western coast of South America.

An account of this attack partly inspired Herman Melville’s great American novel, Moby Dick, which was published in 1851. If you’ve never read Melville’s book I recommend taking it on a cruise. Or you could wait until your cruise ship hits a whale (an unlikely event, I’m glad to say) and write your own great novel – about the rights of whales to enjoy the freedom of the sea without being hunted down.

In 1947, the year I was born, Princess Elizabeth married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten at Westminster Abbey in London. Cunard named a cruise ship after her. Quite right too. I always thought they should name a battleship after Philip. I like Phil. He’d make a great cruise ship captain although he might be tempted to throw some of the more obstreperous and foolish passengers overboard.

I’m pretty sure he’s shown a keen interest in the SETI (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) Institute which was founded on this day in 1984. If an E.T. looked down on our planet, it (thingy?) would see over 350 cruise ships; 70 of which concentrate on coastal cruises. You couldn’t miss these ships for there are over 30,000 cruises every year to around 2,000 destinations – on this planet. None, elsewhere, that we know of. But watch this space…or the space above us.

Especially through the Hubble telescope named after Edwin Hubble, the American astronomer who was born this day in 1889.

If you need help detecting the right cruise ship for your holiday afloat I’d recommend (yes, really) talking to my friends at Virgin.

Or enlisting the services of that world famous cartoon peeper, Dick Tracy, who was created by Chester Gould, the American comic strip artist born this day in 1900. Tracy was the first fictional detective to use a two-way Wrist Radio (upgraded to a two-way Wrist TV in 1964), way back in 1931.

It was around this time that the British/American journalist, radio presenter, and personality, Alistair Cooke, who was born this day in 1908 in north west England, studied for a couple of years at Yale and Harvard.

In 1934 he saw a newspaper headline which stated that the British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s son had been fired from his job as the BBC’s film critic. Cooke sent a telegram to the BBC’s director of talks who invited him to an interview in London. Cook then sailed back to England on a Cunard liner, arrived 24 hours late for the interview but was immediately offered the job. He went on to global fame as author and presenter of his weekly Letters from America, and played a vital role in cementing American/Anglo relations.

If anyone knew about the Golden Age of liners and the famous people who sailed on them, it was Cooke.

His job and mine was made a lot easier on this day in 1985 when Windows 1.0 was launched by Microsoft.

Unfortunately this historic event in computing was 12 years after the American comedian, Allan Sherman (who was born this day in 1924) died. Sherman was a great song parodist and first hit the UK and USA charts, in 1962, with Hello Muddah, Hello Fuddah sung to the the tune of Ponchielli’s Dance of the Hours.

To celebrate today’s first birthday, I have written a song based on Sherman’s parody:

‘Allo Muvver, ‘Allo Favver
To book a sea cruise
Was a right palaver
Then I rang up
The Virgin cruise crew
Now I’m off to the sunny Med
With you know-who-who.

‘Allo Mudder, ‘Allo Fahder
Here I am on
Ship Granada
I’ve been eating
Lots of dinner
But I didn’t join this cruise
To get much thinner.

I’ve been playing
Quoits and poker
Bought my girlfriend a
Ruby choker
But my wife she
Isn’t happy
When my girlfriend sits next to this chubby chappy.

Chorus:
Don’t go home
Oh Muvver, Favver,
Next stop’s Rome
And Pompeii’s lava
Stay with me
And sunbathe on the deck
While we eat cream tea…

I must go now
Toast young Virgin
Get their crew drunk
They need no urging
So may I thank them
For this birthday
Which I’ll celebrate with a Happy Happy herfday.

If you think this was bad, wait till you see what I write AFTER I’ve had a celebratory drink…

Thanks for reading.

James Leavey

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Posted in Humour