Interview with MC Muir

 Many thanks to Margaret Muir, whose Age of Nelson novel The Unfortunate Isles has just been published, and who has agreed to be interviewed for this blog.

Congratulations on the publication of the fourth in your "Under Admiralty Orders" series!  And thank you for agreeing to be interviewed on World of the Written Word.

JD. Your hero, Oliver Quintrell, is a strong character, particularly as he is both taciturn in speech and silently decisive in action.  When he was first created in your mind, did you have any man, either real or fictional, as an admired model?  How has he developed over the writing of the books?

 MM: Although I have watched various screen actors portraying famous sea captains, and have read of others, both fictional and real, I never consciously moulded Oliver Quintrell on any of them. Nor did I base his personality on anyone I have ever known. He is merely a figment of my imagination who evolved on paper.

From page one of the first book, I had no preconceived ideas about Oliver Quintrell, apart from the fact I wanted him to be human – not some composite cardboard character.

As such, he was physically scarred following an injury to his hand. This led to rejection of intimacy from his wife. This, in turn, scarred him emotionally. He compensated for this lack of affection with fleeting amorous encounters with Susanna whenever he visited Madeira.

Feedback over the past three years, mainly in the form of private emails, has told me that readers relate to a flawed character, a man with faults who displays human emotions.  One reader, however, found the captain’s extramarital affair to be unacceptable. I take notice of what readers tell me, and because of this I decided to remove her from his life.

I believe that since he first walked the quarterdeck in Floating Gold, Oliver Quintrell has developed. He has accepted his flaws and moved on and despite a recent short period of withdrawal, he has grown in confidence. He accepts command without question, approaches challenges with determination and, as always, his ship and men are of primary importance to him.

JD. A distinctive feature of your writing is the very intricately evinced settings.  The reader can picture the scene easily, feel the heat or the cold, and sense the power of the sea and the wind. How much time do you spend researching your backgrounds, and do you make any personal journeys to the places you write about?  

MM. Reading primary source material written around 1800, describing exotic locations, opens the door on lyrical prose which is extremely evocative. I love it, though it strikes me that writers of 200 years ago saw things more clearly than we see them today. It is obvious they were overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of scenes witnessed for the first time. In my opinion, it appears that today the gloss has faded from these scenes. Is it because they have been presented to us so many times in the media that we have become blasé about nature’s beauty?

Whatever the reason, while we cannot see and experience everything the world has to offer, visiting the location of a story and experiencing its atmosphere, is essential if the writer hopes to convey a convincing picture to readers.

Having taken the helm of a sailing ship in the Southern Ocean, felt the power of the wind, and been overawed at the immensity of the sea, I regard myself as fortunate at having experienced such things so I can write about them with confidence.

While I love to travel, I do so with a view to finding new settings for my stories. Cruising into Deception Island in the Antarctic Peninsula inspired my first book Floating Gold. Sailing through the Strait of Magellan – The Tainted Prize, and visiting Gibraltar – Admiralty Orders. I savour the images I see and lock them into my memory bank.

JD. Writing a series has its challenges, as well as its pleasures.  How difficult do you find it to write sequels, when you know that there must be readers out there who have not read the previous book or books?  Do you feel compelled to reiterate a lot of what has gone before? 

MM. Patrick O’Brian has always had a huge following of dedicated aficionados, who possibly knew the canon better than he did. Because of this, there was no necessity for him to regurgitate the back-story when each new book was released.

Unfortunately, for emerging writers, the dilemma exists that readers are not familiar with their earlier books. So, what should the author do? To repeat events from a previous book is boring to those familiar with the series. Yet, for those reading the book as a stand-alone work, it is essential to include some prior information.

One ploy I have used in an attempt to combat this problem is, prior to publication of a sequel, to offer the previous books free to readers. This allows them access to past events and characters. Over the course of the series, several thousand of my readers have taken up these free offers. I don’t regard this as a loss of royalty income, but as a promotional exercise and investment in future followers.

Another challenge for writers of any series is to maintain interest and not run out of ideas and steam. This happens in long-running series particularly where stories are spatially confined, for example, within the wooden walls of a sailing ship.

A similar problem, arising from a series set at sea, is having the limited cast of characters. This is something I am learning to deal with. At the end of Book 4, I purposely introduced a few new characters to add spice and vigour to the next book. I also added a few teasers, hopefully to entice readers back.

Will the presence of two women on board lead to any romantic entanglements? What is in Captain Quintrell’s new orders? Will he sail to Van Diemen’s Land or not?

Until he opens them, even I don’t know.

JD.  Could you tell us something about your writing routine?  Early or late?  In long spells of creativity, or short bursts of inspiration? Do you do a great deal of research before commencing the novel, or do you find yourself pausing to check facts all the time?

MM. When I am in serious writing mode, I get up about 5 am. Turn on the computer. Make two cups of tea. And write. Often for seven or eight hours straight – seven days a week. But the serious writing phase does not always commence until half way through a book. Only then do I glimpse where the story is heading. As a result the writing flows more easily.

Research, however, comes first. For me, this includes everything from journals and logs written around 1800 to the latest travelogues describing exotic destinations. The internet is a Pandora’s Box of information and inspiration – the place where my ideas are born.

As I never write to a predetermined plan, it is often while researching something unrelated that the germ of a story is born. Twelve months ago, when drafting a blog post on Crime and Punishment in the navy, I came across an article on the physics of hanging. The noose and gallows slowly evolved as integral features in The Unfortunate Isles.

While seafaring terminology and naval actions are referred to all the time, I endeavour to get the facts correct. Readers of nautical fiction are sticklers for accuracy.

JD. Finally, if any (or all!) of your books were filmed, which actor would you like to see playing Quintrell?

MM. This is something I have never considered. From the time of writing the first book up to the present, I have never formed a visual image of Oliver Quintrell in my mind, perhaps because I tend not to dwell on descriptions of individuals’ physical features. I firmly believe, no matter how much information you supply to readers, they will create their own picture of a character in their imagination.   

I do, however, carry Quintrell’s personality in my head and when I write, it is the character’s nature I aim to convey – his spirit, his temperament, his dedication to duty, courage, compassion, frustrations and fragility.

While actors are cast in roles where these qualities are portrayed, and certain actors manifest these traits in their off-stage lives, I will leave it in the hands of the film director to decide who should play Quintrell, if, in the unlikely event, a film offer should ever arise.

IN conclusion, the adventures of Oliver Quintrell will be continuing, but before I embark on another mission, I have to write the tale of a 19^th century Australian convict. He has been nagging me to write his story for several years.

My thanks to Joan Druett for inviting me to be interviewed on World of the Written Word.

The Unfortunate Isles is available as an e-book from Amazon US (http://goo.gl/HjSglt) and UK (http://goo.gl/8jTLz2). It is due for release as a paperback in February 2015.

Authors unhappy with Kindle Unlimited

From Galleycat @ mediabistro.com

Self-published—and to an extent, traditional—writers who owe much of their reading audience to Amazon’s publishing platform are upset with the retailer’s new Kindle Unlimited program, notes the New York Times’ David Streitfeld.

The KU subscription service offers 700,000 self- and traditionally published books for $9.99 per month. While this new model may continue to draw readers, writers are earning less. Successful romance author Holly Ward, writing as H.M. Ward, saw her income drop 75% after two months in the program. She wrote on the site kboards under the topic “KU Crushed My Sales,” “I couldn’t wait and watch things plummet further,” and left the program.

Streitfeld writes, “Amazon, though, may be willing to forgo some income in the short term to create a service that draws readers in and encourages them to buy other items. The books, in that sense, are loss leaders, although the writers take the loss, not Amazon.”

Authors’ responses have included calls to unionize. As the Times points out, “since the payment is the same whether the book is long or short, other writers are taking the hint,” and adapting by writing in shorter forms, with serial novels and short stories, and publishing more frequently.

E-Book consultant and publisher Bob Mayer split his book on failures of technology and leadership into seven different Kindle Unlimited volumes. Ward’s first novel was 500 pages; some of her recent works average 100 pages. Volume 17 in her “The Arrangement” series pubbed in early November; she brought out “Life Before Damaged Vol. 1” at November’s end, following it with “Life Before Damaged Vol. 2” two week later.

“I’ve started working with four co-authors,” Ward told the New York Times. “If you’re not constantly putting out new material, people forget you’re there.”

TUPAIA TO BE PUBLISHED IN CHINESE

TUPAIA, THE REMARKABLE STORY OF CAPTAIN COOK'S POLYNESIAN NAVIGATOR will be published early this coming year by LOCUS PUBLISHING, Taiwan.

It will be a featured book at the Taipei International Book Exhibition (TIBE) in February, where New Zealand is the honored guest and theme country.

Back in July, a new era of collaboration between Taiwan and New Zealand was ushered in, one that will lead to not just more trade between the two countries, but also to a lively collaboration in the arts -- book publishing and film production in particular.

As the press release announced, "The Ministry Of Culture, supervisor of the TIBE, will join hands with the Publishers Association of New Zealand (PANZ), Creative New Zealand, and the New Zealand Commerce and Industry Office (NZCIO) in Taipei on this special event, introducing New Zealand's core value of diversity to a wider audience. This event will highlight the distinct features of Maori culture and oral literature and seek to effect intercultural exchange with Taiwan's aboriginal community while showcasing New Zealand's unique attributes."

What fun that Tupaia will be a part of it!

Enticing your guests to go

There are two weekly issues of The Dominion Post that I love the most.

One is Monday, when I turn to the Science page and read the latest by Bob Brockie.

The other is Saturday, when I turn to the "Weekender" and read the agony column featuring foodie Peta Mathias, "traveller, writer, cook, bon vivant"  (surely that should be "bonne vivant"?

This week she devoted her wisdom to a correspondent who wanted to know how to urge one's visitors on their way.

"This is the season for entertaining," he said, "but what are your tips to get rid of guests who all want to be the last to leave?"

I don't actually have that problem, my guests being sensitive and busy people with a big social calendar, but I read Peta's answer with interest.

"Whether it is breakfast, morning tea, lunch or an afternoon swim party," she said (swim party?  Good lord!) "there is a time and a purpose to everything under heaven.  Tips for Encouraging Guests to Go Home:

"The end of a party is like the end of a yoga session where everything slows down.

"Quietly stop serving things like tea and coffee.

"Quietly stop serving wine ...

"Slowly turn the music down.

"Lose consciousness at the table.  Put your head on it and slip into snoring if you can [without laughing]."

LOL.  On East Indiamen, where the most affluent passengers ate in the cuddy, hosted by the captain, the decanter went round two or more times after the ladies had retired ... and then, with a polite good afternoon, the captain replaced the stopper, and stood.

And everyone took the hint.

SAILORS OF THE MARY ROSE

Mary Rose, by David Meagher

Another great story from The Economist

PITY the poor sailors of the Mary Rose. In 1545, the lives of more than 400 men (and one dog) were lost when Henry VIII's flagship took on water and sank between the Isle of Wight and the English mainland. There it, and the remains of at least 179 sailors, rested for more than four centuries. What was left of the ship was raised in 1982, and the remains became the spoils of the Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth. As if that were not ignominy enough, now people are shooting lasers at the sailors' bones.

It is all in the name of science, of course. The heavily silted conditions of the seabed protected a significant portion of the ship and its contents from the ravages of the sea. An astonishing array of objects was beautifully preserved; visitors to the museum can even sniff 16th-century rope. But the human remains amounted to scattered piles of bones (and the canine remnants, too; it took until November 2014 to discover that the ship's dog Hatch was a he, not a she). Archaeologists of the Mary Rose Trust cannot even match the bones to come up with a solid figure of just how many people were left on the wreck.

That looks set to change. Alex Hildred, a researcher at the Mary Rose Trust who was part of the 1982 recovery mission, recently ran into Allen Goodship, of University College London's (UCL) Institute of Orthopaedics and Musculoskeletal Science, at a conference. Dr Goodship's team had been testing a technique called Raman spectroscopy as a means to diagnose bone conditions.

Raman spectroscopy, named after the Indian physicist who won the 1930 Nobel prize for inventing it, is an incredible tool for chemical sleuthing. When a laser beam is shone on a sample, much of its light is simply scattered and reflected unchanged. But a tiny fraction of the light's energy is absorbed by the sample's constituent molecules, making them vibrate at characteristic frequencies. As a result, the tiny colour shift in a fraction of the beam is a fantastically precise measure of the molecules it has encountered. 

Along with colleagues at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, Dr Goodship and his team had shown successes diagnosing genetic bone disease with the technique in living patients (using a colour of light that passes through flesh but bounces off of bone). That gave Dr Hildred an idea. She had been looking for a means of examining the sailors' bony remains nondestructively; precise tests such as studies of DNA require drilling into or chipping off bits of bone, and they do not always succeed. But Raman spectroscopy does its work without so much as touching its subject.

Dr Hildred provided two sets of five tibias—shin-bones—to the team: one set that appeared normal and healthy (at least at the time of the ship's sinking), and one that showed curvature characteristic of rickets, a once-prevalent disease attributed to malnutrition. Jemma Kerns, of UCL, led a project comparing them to fresh bone from cadavers. Raman tests showed that the evidently healthy bones from the Mary Rose are, from a chemical standpoint, just like those of a healthy person today. Moreover, as the team reports in the Jounal of Archaeological Science, the bones showing evidence of rickets looked chemically different from healthy ones, providing the researchers with a kind of fingerprint for the disease.

That opens up an enormous line of enquiry. The idea that these chemical clues are preserved in archaeological bone suggests that all manner of conditions might be diagnosed, perhaps even some that do not affect the bones' appearance and manifest only chemically. Dr Kerns has already shown, for example, that chemical differences in bone are indicators of degenerative joint disease as well. The collaboration is in discussions about just which conditions it will try to diagnose next.

The technique will also pay dividends for the living, as some conditions might give themselves away in bone chemistry before they can be diagnosed by more conventional means. And it could finally provide a means definitively to match the Mary Rose bones to their rightful owners and come up with a conclusive number of sailors who went down with the ship.

At sea on a container ship

From the Economist

Floating bazaars

Like the other giants in its class, the Marie Maersk was built for the profitable Asia-Europe route: from Busan and Kwangyang in South Korea, then along the eastern and southern Chinese coasts, down to Malaysia, across the Indian Ocean, through the Suez Canal to Tangier and southern Spain, then up to Scandinavia by way of the Netherlands and Germany. Then back again; the round trip takes around six months. The kaleidoscopic cargo might include iPads, smartphones, cars, bulldozers, baseball caps and T-shirts from Chinese factories; then, on the return journey, fruits, chocolates, wine, watches and whisky.

The longest leg is from Malaysia to Port Said in Egypt. That takes ten increasingly stifling days—by the end, say the sailors, the containers that are refrigerated sweat almost as much as the crew. A power failure on this particular run would affect diners at sushi restaurants across Europe: among many other things, the containers hold 33,350 kilograms of frozen fish roe, loaded in Ningbo, China, plus roughly the same amount ofsurimi (the traffic-cone-orange fake crab that turns up in California rolls) and blast-frozen yellowfin tuna, both loaded in Kwangyang, South Korea, all bound for Gdansk or Algeciras. The scariest container is unrefrigerated. It contains 50 tonnes of fireworks, destined for Europe’s new year’s celebrations. The officers joke, mordantly and often, about what would happen if it caught fire.

The officers’ life has changed utterly. Legal documents from the 19th century refer to merchant-marine captains as “Masters under God” for the absolute authority they wielded. These days captains on European-flagged ships are bound by labour and safety regulations just like any other manager. That, in fact, is what they have become: neither snarling tyrants keelhauling miscreants, nor heroic helmsmen, but managers. Globalisation has made container ships the indispensable conveyances of the modern world. Automation has turned the men who sail them into administrators, overseers and technicians.

On this voyage, the Marie Maersk’s captain is John Moeller Jensen, a slight, shaggy Dane who wears his uniform in port but at sea prefers T-shirts and daringly short shorts. He has a wry, watchful manner and is a practised storyteller, given to punctuating his yarns with cartoon gestures, such as a riffling of hands to mime a corrupt port official pocketing money. “I’m not God sitting in an office,” Mr Jensen says of his daily rounds. “But you also have to keep a distance. You can’t play cards and go ashore with people and then fire them the next day.” It is easy to imagine him sacking someone: like many successful managers he can quickly turn serious, even lightly menacing. Recalling a confrontation with a phalanx of Chinese port inspectors, something behind his light-blue eyes switches off, his jaw clenches and he seems to grow taller.

When Mr Jensen started sailing in the mid-1970s, more than 30 people were needed to operate a container ship. The Marie Maersk crossed the South China Sea with 22, and can manage with 13. Jakob Skau, the chief officer, says that modern container ships can mostly sail themselves. People are there mainly to react to the (often irrational) behaviour of other people. Ship engines, like car engines, now self-diagnose: when something goes wrong they display the equivalent of a car’s “check engine” light. That means fewer engineers. Paint has become more weather-resistant, which means ABs (Able Bodied Seamen, the ship’s dogsbodies) spend less time painting—which means fewer ABs. E-mail has done away with radio officers. At night the only light on the bridge comes from the glow of screens showing the ship’s pre-plotted course, engine performance, ballast-tank levels and speed, while radar displays depict nearby vessels and their courses as blobs and contrails of lurid green.

Port calls that used to take a week now last eight hours. Cargo used to come in barrels, boxes, cartons, bundles and drums, all of which had to be loaded and unloaded by hand. Now cranes stack containers in an order predetermined thousands of miles away. At Tanjung Pelepas some containers await lorries to carry them up the Malay Peninsula, others the ships that will convey them to smaller ports: Sihanoukville, Brisbane, Auckland, Tanjung Priok. This efficiency has put paid to extended shore leave. “Sail around the world and see nothing,” jokes David Staven, the ship’s bearish third officer.

And if automation has made ships easier to sail, it has also made sailors easier to watch. Maersk’s are constantly monitored from a control centre in Mumbai, where a giant screen displays the position and course of every Maersk Line vessel in the world. The captain of a ship that deviates from its planned course or travels too quickly (thus using more fuel) can expect a prompt query. On this leg, for instance, Mr Jensen decides to sail east rather than west of the Paracel Islands, lengthening the journey but taking advantage of the current, which in October runs southward along the Vietnamese coast. “I send [the control centre] a long e-mail explaining our decision,” says Aditya Mohan, the ship’s swaggering, Marlboro-smoking second officer, “and when I don’t hear anything back, it’s because they know I’m right.”

Weighing anchor on a container ship

From the Economist

IMAGINE the beginning of a sea voyage, and you probably picture something like the frenetic preparations that Herman Melville describes in “Moby Dick”: “There was great activity aboard the Pequod. Not only were the old sails being mended, but new sails were coming aboard, and bolts of canvas, and coils of rigging…the men…were working till long after nightfall.” Boarding a ship in that state was a perilous obstacle course.

Boarding a modern container ship, by contrast, is a simple and subdued process. You walk up a steep, narrow ladder, hand your passport to the officer on duty and follow him to the ship’s office—which, on Maersk’s giant, Danish-flagged vessels, is as clean and screen-stuffed as any on land. At most you pass one or two crewmen: modern ships are huge but their crews small. A short walk down a broad, fluorescent-lit hall and a brief ride in a lift—festooned, as on shore, with safety regulations—brings you to the bridge, a long, glassed-in eyrie ten storeys above the deck.

The bridge could easily accommodate 50 people, but at its busiest rarely holds more than ten. The high, surrounding windows and purposeful hush instil a vaguely ecclesiastical feel. At its centre is a large, sleek, wood-veneered steering wheel, used mainly when arriving and departing from ports. 

Otherwise the steering is automatic: if a human needs to intervene, he does so using a joystick the size of a child’s finger. Like the rest of the ship, the bridge smells of new-laid rubber and disinfectant—not an unpleasant smell, but a sterile one, with none of the undertones (tobacco, salt spray, fish, sweat) associated with sea journeys. Even in the ship’s bowels, the strongest odour is not the fuel oil used to power the engine but the coffee used to power the engineers.

Which artefact is the best emblem of modern life? The personal computer, perhaps, or the mobile phone, or the car. Or maybe, instead, the container ship, which transports all of those things and much besides: “90 Percent of Everything”, as the title of Rose George’s first-rate book on the shipping industry puts it. These ships are the workhorses of globalisation; they are also exemplars of another contemporary megatrend, automation. Their sterility would make them almost unrecognisable to Melville, the novelist-whaler, or to Joseph Conrad (who spent nearly two decades as a merchant marine).

Yet, as a crossing of the South China Sea on the Marie Maersk shows, not everything has changed. A voyage on these gigantic craft is a dizzying, paradoxical jumble of modernity and timelessness, gizmos and primitive wonderment.

Guest post from an Old Salt Press author

Tuesday, 23 December 2014

The Old Salt Press: A growing presence in nautical publishing

Sharp-sighted followers of the Dawlish Chronicleswill have noticed that the third novel in the series,Britannia’s Shark, has been published under the aegis of the Old SaltPress. This is an independent press, set up by an association of writers working together to produce the very best of nautical and maritime fiction and non-fiction. I was honoured by the invitation to be a member, joining four other authors who love ships and the sea, but who, individually, are focussed on different areas of interest.  Though we are very widely separately geographically we are united by a shared passion which results in work that spans a very wide range .

Below is an introduction to each of the authors and their work.

Rick Spilman is the founder and host of the superb  Old Salt Blog (see link in column to right) and has worked as a naval architect for several major shipping lines. Living alongside the Hudson River, he had extensive sailing experience as volunteer crew on the replica square-riggers HMS Rose and HMS Bounty. He has also sailed on both modern and period vessels along the New England coast, the west coast of Florida, the Caribbean, the Great Lakes and the southwest coast of Ireland. Rick’s fiction – such as Hell Around the Horn – is focussed on the great age of mercantile sail when large wind-powered vessels were in long retreat before the advances of steam power.

V.E. Ulett is based in California and her Captain Blackwellseries novels are set in the classic period of naval fiction, that of the Napoleonic Wars. Her work is however fresh, and unusual , in that it reflects, but is not dominated by, a strong feminine viewpoint. It is indeed unflinching in dealing with just how uncomfortable it was to be a woman in this era. Her plotlines and settings are also out of the ordinary, making for very absorbing reads. Her series starts with Captain Blackwell’s Prize and the second, Blackwell’s Paradise, is already available while the third, Blackwell’s Homecominghas just been published.

Alaric Bond, British based, also writes novels set in the era of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, but his “Fighting Sail” series differs from most written in the genre in that they do not follow a single individual exclusively, but rather a wide range of characters. Alaric’s work reflects deep knowledge of the events, personalities of the period, as well as of the complexities of ship handling, as demonstrated in the sixth book in the series, The Torrid Zone, was published in 2014. Though not part of the series, Alaric’s Turn a Blind Eye, unusually featuring the Revenue Service than the Royal Navy, is similarly enthralling.

Joan Druett, who lives in New Zealand, covers the widest range of any of the Old Salt Press authors. She is also the most prolific, and is widely honoured and respected for her non-fiction work based on detailed historical research. By reference to hitherto untapped resources she has brought to life not only the extraordinarily active roles – now largely forgotten –  played by women at sea in the Age of Sail, but also other neglected aspects of 19^th Century nautical activity such as sealing. Joan’s most notable fictional work is theWiki Coffin series of period detective stories , built around the adventures  of a  half-Maori , half-American interpreter who accompanies the United States Exploring Expedition which was launched in 1838. I was particularly enthralled by the factual The Elephant Voyage – an amazing story of privation, of survival and of the legal imbroglio that followed, and by the Wiki Coffin mystery The Beckoning Ice. Joan’s latest book, the non-fiction Eleanor's Odyssey, is built around the journal of the wife of an East Indiaman’s captain from 1799 to 1801. Like Joan’s excellent World of the Written Wordblog (see bar on right), this offers fresh insights to life at sea in the period.

And the fifth Old Salt Press author? That’s Antoine Vanner and you’re already familiar with him if you’re reading this blog!

Best Wishes to all my readers for Christmas 2014 and for a Happy and Successful 2015!

                                                                                     Antoine Vanner

World's most beautiful yacht

I looked out the window, and to my surprise I saw a really pretty little ship.  Usually the cruise ships that call into Wellington really dominate the harbor, being such enormous chicken coops, but as you can see this one is smaller than our local ferry.

So I looked it up.  It is called MV Europa, and is billed as the prettiest yacht in the world.  And indeed it is gorgeous.  But could you and I afford a cruise on this lovely little ship?  Speaking for myself, unfortunately, no.

Here is the hype:

MS EUROPA - Your Most Beautiful Yacht In The World

Travelling to the world’s most beautiful destinations on board the EUROPA will be an experience in itself: whether you’re shaking the captain’s hand or going to a dazzling gala evening, enjoy the traditional luxury of a classic cruise in the company of a small group of no more than 400 guests. You can look forward to the highest service and catering standards, which have already been awarded the rating of 5-stars-plus for the fifteenth time in a row by the Berlitz Cruise Guide. You can always rely on our crew who, with their discreet attentiveness and eye for detail, will be happy to fulfil your individual wishes.

Allow yourself time and space for your dream holiday: the well-designed ship and selected extras will make you feel at home anywhere in the world. Relax in luxurious suites and allow us to spoil you in every way while you enjoy ocean views. Our chefs create new, truly delightful gourmet treats every day in four restaurants. You can especially look forward to “Restaurant Dieter Müller”, where the legendary Michelin-starred chef will personally cook for you 70 days a year.

Your destinations will be just as diverse as your discoveries: every year the EUROPA sets sail on its journey around the world. Thanks to its size, you will also have the chance to visit ports that are unreachable by other ships. Wherever possible, the ship’s own Zodiacs will take you where you can experience the highlights along the coasts up close. Get to know the unbeatable comfort of the EUROPA: we offer routes of different lengths every year – from four-day introductory cruises in nearby regions to three-week cruises to fascinating ends of the world. Enjoy all on-board amenities no matter how long your cruise is and experience both exciting and unforgettable moments. Or are you looking for a more exclusive experience? Then come on one of our special-event or special-format cruises and rub shoulders with VIP guests from the world of films, TV and music. These will surely be some of your most memorable cultural moments.

Accompany the EUROPA across the world’s oceans and let us make every minute an extraordinary experience for you: welcome on board the World’s Most Beautiful Yacht!

The impossibility of contacting Facebook

Two days ago, I received a facebook message from a friend that ran:

Hi Joan - someone is pretending to be you and sending our friend requests - just thought I'd better warn you. You probably should alert Facebook and get them removed.

Good lord.  How the devil did it happen?  Worse still, it triggered a small tidal wave of comments from other friends who had had the same experience.  They hadn't hit the link, so no one knows who the imposter is.  I can't find any other Joan Druett on Facebook, and the strange friend requests are not on my activity log.

So the problem, in my honest opinion, is Facebook's, not mine.  But contacting them to alert them to the problem is absolutely, positively impossible.  All I get a a flood of menus.  I did my best by changing passwords, and stopping any activity from foreign browser, so what else can I do?

Cancel my Facebook account?  That, from past experience when I had a strange shadow account, is not nearly as easy as it sounds.  If only Facebook was like other sites and other engines, and had a "contact us by email" function, it would help.  But no, the geeks behind the Facebook computers don't like real contact with the outside world.

Hobbit film a blockbuster

Sir Peter and our very own Middle-Earth have done it again.

From GalleyCat @ mediabistro.com

Peter Jackson’s latest chapter in his adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit brought in $90.6 million in its first five days in theaters.

Variety has the scoop: “The franchise finale debuted Wednesday at 3,875 locations and easily trumped tracking that predicted a debut of about $70 million. For its inaugural three-day weekend, the fantasy adventure earned $56.2 million.”

In celebration of The Hobbit: The Battle of The Five Armies movie, comedian Stephen Colbert recently dressed up as Bilbo Baggins, Legolas Greenleaf and Gandalf the Grey for the cover of Entertainment Weekly.