UKCruiseJeff

Thanks Terry. 1. Botanical Gardens and the Orchid Garden. 2. Satay street at Lau Pa Sat EVERY evening for 40 mixed sticks and a jug of Tiger from a Tiger “Aunty”. 3. Gardens By the Bat at niight for the two light shows. 4. Tiong Bahru hosing estate and the hawker center. Don’t over think. It’s all cheap simply try everything and in particular stuff you thin you should never eat. You will be suprised. 5. Chinatown food complex. Hundreds of stalls missed by almost all tourists. Try anything but if in doubt join a queue. Enjoy Jeff

The thing is, that breakfast is always in the mornings and dinner is always in the evenings but lunch can start whenever you decide and end at any time and can end whenever you decide. And what is the point of the rest of the day that isn’t lunch. If your circumstances permit then lunch everyday can be almost all day. And for the sake of forum continuity lunch on a ship is when everyone else has got off to explore a boring place with thousands of other ants. So far as boozy or unboozy is concerned then lunch at home or on land anywhere with it’s timely elasticity allows you to siesta and wake up and fill the rest of what is left of the day with something worthwhile like thinking of tomorrows lunch.

GD, I loved your post. It has always seemed to me that A. A. Gill understood life at the very least because he was a confident contrarian and drank almost always whilst he thought and when he could remember to write. It’s possible to feel a degree of affinity with him if you are unencumbered by continuous sobriety and are happy to live oddly and think a little differently. I don’t like breakfast or dinner much largely because of it’s timing as to me lunch seems such a perfect time anywhere in the world or whatever the circumstance. You can prepare a bit earlier and stop a bit (or a considerable time later) and the rest or the day can stretch around lunch. breakfast and dinner seem so much more stiffy to me. I have so many memoeries of lunch with people but can’t recall any breakfasts and very few dinners. Lunch is king. The art is to take the very best from breakfast or the very best form dinner but have it at all at lunch time and linger at it forever. And drink more because you can doze afterwards. The thing that can be improved on the great British Breakfast is to stop thinking of it as a morning meal - who on earth wants to get up early if you went to bed at 3am? ) and wouldn’t want to substitute the mug of tea with a well frozen bottle of decent champagne and after a late rise make your way to the kitchen and have an early morning Electric Tomato (OK …. a Bloody Mary …) whilst you fry up a great British Lunch Brekky. This to me seems civilised. A big shout for each and every and all Coolers …. great to see it aging gracefully. jeff

Absolut spot on. The only distance between us is that whilst we both hotel extremely well, you eat upscale and I eat with poorer and more local. I suspect you also shave whereas I don’t. And I bet I drink more Absolut than you. 😝

Entirely your own fault. 🙂 When you booked the cruise when presented with the choice of “Would you prefer to be butled or debutled” you should have chosen “debutled”. And in the future when offered a choice when booking “Would you like a human to manage your booking or our AI Bot” choose the “AI Bot” option. Much better. As all us oldies know, that increasingly less and less stuff involving humans works anymore. It turns out that artificial intelligence for most stuff may be better than no (or limited) intelligence. I always pack our own bags and cases splitting our negligables between all bags so all of us have Y fronts and knickers. I do this because I don’t even trust ‘er. 😄 Jeff x (From the Original Old Hampshire)

Thanks Terry. I meant I was becoming weird because of my increasing adoration of my wonderful wifey after 50+odd years of being locked together. A good marriage is an unusual achievement these days when she is married to me! 🙂

We need to tread a little Caerphilly here ….. Out of touch with you … how did you and yours cope with Covid era? Is the manor keeping everything going? I saw you and yours on a cruise earlier .. any other travels planned? Jeff

I know this is off-piste but would a thin spread of brie do it?

Thanks Terry. The Welsh do very good cakes. In thanks for your request and kindness … this is todays cake corner …..

Is it passover already?! That passed me over. Oy gevalt. Thanks Lois … in my complete innocence I have just mixed and baked a manor house fruit cake the ingredients of which I have been dggedly composing and finessing for a few weeks or so because you cannot buy a good fruit cake and I need one but sadly it doesn’t include any matzo. I’m waiting for it to bake and smells wonderful and whilst waiting for it I have made wifey and me a ham and egg and cress and mayo in crunchy home made ciabatta So I’m now down on several on the yiddish front on several infringements. In my own defence I genuinely believe that our leader has a sense of humour and probably dislikes matzos except with butter and chopped liver. 🙂

Concierge?

Hi, I read your thread with interest because I might have parciated in those exchanges some years back, I really agree with your views and for what it's worth I'd add my two cents to what I see as the context of the Butler thing both then and in the light of what I see as future converging trends. The butler thing from recall wasn't SS being pioneering but followed another line somewhere removing stewards and dressing up stewards and calling them butlers. From flakey memory this coincided with Downton also hitting the US psyche and I think it caught a zeitgeist with people thinking that they were going to experience something that was obviously never going to happen. Butlers on cruise lines and in hotels – except the very very few where there is a single butler allocated to a single eye-waveringly expensive suite. I didn't like it also because I thought it simply a marketing deception which I fel was disrespectful to intelligence but I recognised it locked into an opportunity that was never really what was genuinely deliverable on the pack. At it's simplest a butler in the UK historical context version was always a male in a sole household that would orchestrate the male head of families life. He'd do all the stuff like lay out clothes make arrangements and manage the staff that did al the doings. The lady of the house would have a maid. A butler would never have several dozen bosses. Everything that would be asked of him would always be within his control. He'd not be in competition with dozens of other butlers to try and simply get their master in 801 on to the table of his choice in the overbooked restaurant of their choice. So butlers on cruises are not butlers. They are simply dressing up and pretending to be butlers. At the same time I also felt a potential loss of something my wife and I had previously really enjoyed. I think it was the lower level of barrier and informality. I felt that people dressing up as pretend butlers would take away some of the great experiences we'd have with some of the great stewards and even more stewardesses we'd had. It might be simply that they didn't dress up but we had several really individual stewardesses who were on a life travel experience and we'd lead them astray with time with us with them telling us their stories and drinking with us when they were on quieter moments of their duty. Calling us by our first names and bantering with us and teasing us. We really appreciated them and them us. I think we felt that Butlers would remove that whilst adding not much. I also see a societal change and it's been there for a while. Highly successful people are increasingly less stiff and formal and those that are tend to be more formal seem to me to be more more aspirational. Over generalised but it is what I see. So perhaps the deception of someone called a butler but who never was or is will start to fade and they might be replaced by younger informal highly intelligent and fun-loving but resourceful and engaging people who befriend rather than serve. I think that if there is a possible welcome trend it isn't to do with what they are called ... they should continue to do all the stuff you ask but there should be less suites for each of them and I think it would be nice if they morphed into more individualistic personalities that people read and engage more informally. Once again I know I make not much sense to others but I hope you get the gist.

Seasonal Greetings to all Coolers ... and to say it is wonderful to see the resilience of Coolers to find nuggets of existential gold for travels and experiences in a bewildering world. It's reassuring and lovely.

But the poster didn’t suggest or imply that anyone enjoying the wine was wrong to do so, did they.

One never tires of Seneca “Wherever there is a human being, there is an opportunity for a kindness.””

It was a quote from one of her fictional books. It wasn’t an expression of her personal philosophy. My sin here is that I broke my embargo to defend someone who had been attacked. If it appears that I’m disappointed having seen your growth and path and finding your voice and blossoming here subsequently to be a poster leading that attack then I am sorry you feel that I’m wrong. I simply wished to defend someone from being harassed for expressing their opinion.

Agatha Christie is a much admired and loved fiction writer. Every single Agatha book wrote about several murders. I don’t think that even she would ever believe in her wildest dreams that a rational thoughtful person would think that she was a philosophical supporter of murder. Anyway … let Agatha’s writings be your guiding light …….

I’ll admit that I’ve been dozing all afternoon and just glanced back. I can cope within being sanctioned by the thoughts of Aristotle or Seneca or Socrates or Marcus Aurelia or Confucius …. but wait for it ….. Mysty has just sanctioned me with the thoughts of Agatha Christie in “The Murder at The Vicarage” and received “likes” There is no hope for me. I have been Agathered. Thank god it wasn’t Enid Blyton and The Famous Five. Best wishes all.

Good Grief JP .... All of us can express things better but it is how we deal with others on the internet that is the issue. You are saying that if I were to simply say that "Calamari in my view is disgusting" then that is OK and you will not attack me but if I say that "Calamari is disgusting" because I didn't add the words "in my opinion" that renders it as unacceptable and worthy of attacks? What your view leaves us with if that someone says "Silversea is wonderful" that will receive no attacks but loads of "likes" but if they were to say that "Silversea is NOT wonderful" they would be attacked unless they added "in my opinion". How helpful is that for people to learn from? Let us just leave it that I think more good and decent people are lost to this childishness than are welcomed in and that is a loss to all.

It is ironic that some only find their voice as a result of finding tolerance and kindness from others as a result of others being kind and welcoming to them. But a person makes a post with a personal opinion. How can an opinion be anything other than "personal"? And so another person feels attacked. Needlessly. And in the end they will not post. And their experience and opinions will be lost. It is a shame.

Just a shorty to say a bit of a belated adieu to Coolers. Seems like several life-times ago when on a rather rainy day nearly ten years ago I thought I’d ask for a place for people who meant well, but nothing much better to do to hang out …….. and I never really thought it would last much longer than a day or so. But now with around 35,000 posts and 1.4m views I’ve decided to duck out and wish all well. Jeff x

A wonderful picture of doughy loveliness. Those bottom two of perfectly innocent unadorned bagels are ones I can both smell and taste. I mean equal adoration to the others and supremely Ta muchly. For what it's worth I award you the Grand Medal of Bagel Chewiness. Please go forth and multiply. For what it's worth ignoring likes and lack of likes you are henceforth entitled to the nom du plume of FlyingScotSailors GMoBC. 🙂 Jeff

Thanks D, Don’t really do recipes because once you understand the principles you can make any bread variation simply viscerally if you get my drift. If you always use my very highly hydrated approach then this approach enables you to use any mix of flour you fancy at any given moment. I make my nutty, fruity, honey baguettes in exactly the same way as my standard ones. It is incredibly liberating not following recipes. It just needs that initial confidence, Bagels are very simple and are only different from a standard highly hydrated dough by the following. It is a dryer mix say 60% hydration with added malt or honey to the mix. Allowed a normal rise but not allowed the second rise or prove. That’s the first difference. That quick second rise from dough is done with the one or two minute boiling in malted water before baking. So you are not boiling bread that has just had the second rise. So the boil kills the yeast and stops further rising. If it has had the second rise you simply say “Naughty boy” - and knock it back for it’s boil. The boiling both gives the chewy crust and retards the proving giving the denser chewy characteristics of the bagel. The simple adjustments to that approach the second time you do it will decide things like ‘would i like it sweeter. Would I like it more chewy. What toppings do I want ie nigella, poppy, sesame etc’ Hope you give it a try. You will make better bagels than you can every buy because they will be exactly as you like them. I really mean this. Anyone and everyone can make better baguettes than they have ever tasted, even in the “baguette of the year” winners in Paris. The same with bagels etc. I like a darker bake as you can see. I also love onion bialys which you can no longer buy in most UK bagel places so you have to make them if you want to eat them. In fact I haven’t seen them sold for over 40 years. I’m going on again about bleedin’ bread. I can bore for England on bread. I just feel that everyone can make their days happier by making bread.

Thanks Ducky, I hope you are going to get baking! I’m more than a one trick pony! I also got so fed up with driving all the way from Jeff Towers on the Hampshire/Wiltshire border to Brick Lane in London for bagels or bialys at 2am I decided I had to make them at home. The last lot I bought. I bought a dozen and I asked for the well done dark ones and by the time I got home there were only two left for the wife! “Where’s the rest of the bagels! You’ve been gone for five hours and come back with two bagels. How many have you eaten …….” So I had to learn bagels. And they had to pass the Brick Lane test ……

Thanks. You will find me every morning taking Breakfast On The Morning Tram with the extraordinary Stacey Kent ……. 😋