A Life on the Ocean Wave

The ferry operating from Portsmouth to Le Havre is called LD Lines, and our ship, Norman Spirit, was very clean and pleasant and not too big.

Last year we had reclining seats, which nobody in the world has ever managed to sleep in, but this year I think we booked earlier and managed to get “sleeper seats” which are much better as they go completely flat and rather like a narrow single bed. Particularly good if, like me, you are prone to seasickness.

The sea was beautifully flat and I thought well, I’m going to lie down, and the sea’s calm, so I won’t bother with an anti-seasickness tablet.

Only slight drawback was a baby which had made its way out of the womb and almost immediately onto the ferry, and wasn’t much enjoying it so yelled rather a lot. But after a while everything quietened down and I went to sleep.

I woke a few hours later, rather confused as to what time it was and whether that, whatever it was, was in French time or British time. But since I was awake, I thought I’d have a shower before everyone else woke up.

Now it wasn’t what you might call rough, but I had forgotten that I don’t need rough to feel seasick. In fact I only need Not Completely Motionless. We were now in the middle of the Channel and the sea was slightly less flat than it had been in Portsmouth harbour. And there were, of course, no windows in the shower, so I couldn’t keep an eye on the horizon which is the only thing that generally stops me feeling sick and within about two minutes I realised that this whole shower idea had not been a good one. I finished my shower but by now I felt so ill I couldn’t get dressed.

After a melodramatic bout of groaning, and convinced that death was imminent, I managed to put on a T-shirt and trousers and ran into the toilets just in time.

I spent the rest of the night alternately lying down, moaning quietly and bravely in a suitably Victorian-heroine manner, and getting dressed, one garment at a time, underneath my blanket, while passers-by stared at me, as at a lunatic. Of course nobody else was seasick.

Why I never remember this fact I don’t know. I love ships: they don’t love me.

But hey, just a few hours later, when we had driven through lovely French scenery and stopped in French service-stations and eaten steak haché and frites and peed in those squat-down French toilets and arrived at a beautiful French mediaeval village in the French sunshine, I had forgotten it all.

“It’s just like being in France” said Emily. And it is.