Gulls, Diesel and a Peach Cobbler: 22 to 26 July

Five days, one continuous horizon, and more incident than I expected from a week in which nothing whatsoever was scheduled.

Wednesday: a man fishing from a ship

I came round the stern on my afternoon lap and found Tiny fishing. Not with a rod. With a hand line, a lure of uncertain origin, and the calm of a man who has done this in more oceans than I have visited countries. We are moving at what I am told is a commercial speed. I asked him whether that presented a problem. He said, "no." I asked what he expected to catch. He said, "something."

I stayed for forty minutes. He caught nothing. He did not appear to consider this a failure, and after a while, neither did I.

Thursday: the engine room

Kev kept his promise.

Ear defenders, boiler suit, a briefing about handrails delivered twice, and then down, and down again, through a series of doors that get heavier as you go. Nothing prepared me. The engine is not a machine in a room. The engine is the room, and the room is several storeys tall, and you walk on grating around it while the whole thing turns over below you with a sound you feel in your sternum rather than hear.

And then the turbocharger. He did not say anything. He simply stopped, put a hand on a rail, and let me look at it. Cathedral was not a joke. It is the size of a small car, mounted where you would expect a component to be, and it is quite obviously moving air in quantities that make my Miata look like a hobby project undertaken by a child.

I said something like, "yes." Kev said, "mm hm," and he said it the way a man says it about his own kitchen. He was proud. Openly, uncomplicatedly proud, of a machine he did not build and does not own, and I liked him enormously for it.

He then showed me the spares store, which is alphabetised. I have not seen a garage that tidy in my life, and I have been in a great many garages.

Friday: clear blue

Nothing happened on Friday and it was the best day of the crossing. Clear blue skies from horizon to horizon, no cloud at all, the sea a flat hard blue with a small chop on it, and a sun that made the containers tick as they warmed. I did three laps, read on the aft deck, and had a long unproductive conversation with myself about how many days like this a person is realistically given.

Priya came past with a coffee, looked at me in a deck chair with a book on my chest and my eyes shut, and said, "hard morning." I did not open my eyes. "Punishing," I said. I heard the mm from about ten feet away.

Saturday: the cobbler

I need to be clear about Elena. Every dinner on this ship has been cooked properly. Not adequately. Not efficiently, for twenty six people, in a moving building. Properly. Fish that is not dry. Rice that is not glue. Sauces that were made rather than opened.

On Saturday she produced a peach cobbler and my week reorganised itself around it. Warm, slightly too sweet, with a crust that had been given actual attention, and served in a dish clearly intended for four people rather than one. I asked whether it was a special occasion. She said, "it is Saturday."

I had two helpings. Someone at the far end of the table mentioned the key lime pie again. I ignored them, which is the only sound policy available to me now.

Sunday: the gulls

We must be within some meaningful distance of Europe, because this morning the top deck had been taken. Seagulls, dozens of them, lined along the container tops and the railings like a committee that had been waiting for me. They have no fear at all. One of them watched me eat a piece of toast on the walkway with an expression I can only describe as legally threatening.

Marco says they follow us in for the last stretch. Container is beside herself and has spent the day flattened on a hatch cover, tail going, doing arithmetic she cannot possibly complete.

Where we are

Northeast, and getting on with it. The water has changed colour, the traffic on the radar is no longer notable when it appears, and the air smells faintly of something other than ship.

Land soon. I have mixed feelings about that, which I did not expect to be writing down.