Day thirtyfour, Friday 4th March, the last formal night.

Tonight is our last formal night and us ladies like to dress up. We love posh frock do’s where we can go all out and get a new dress, visit the hairdressers, spend hours in the salon getting nails n legs n eyebrows done, and finally spend 2 hours getting showered, make up and dressed ready for the night. The reason we love it is it is a rare opportunity to make ourselves look and feel real good. Us run of the mill, normal women look forward to those special occasions when we can do this.

On the cruise ships, we get the chance. There is a dress code for every evening, and not one of them allows a pair of jeans or a Black Sabbath t-shirt, except mebbe on the first and last days of the cruise:

Formal means black tie for him and evening dress for her.

Informal means a suit for him, “informally smart” for her, (a small step down from formal).

Elegant Casual - trousers and shirt for him, “casual separates or summer dress” for her.

Casual is “comfortable attire for ladies and gentlemen, yet with a casual elegance”??

On this cruise we’ve had 6 formal nights, 9 informal nights, fifteen “elegant casual” nights, and 3 theme nights (western, tropical and british). That’s an awful lot of dressing up and while it was nice at first, it eventually got to be tiresome, having to get changed for our evening meal every night. You begin to wish for a “slob night”, and the dressing up has lost it’s attraction. It was as much as I can do to get the frock out of the wardrobe.

Peter only brought 2 suits, his dinner suit and a beige one - no other trousers as such, just his combat trousers, jeans and shorts. He’s just about worn out the trousers on that beige suit, because he has had to wear them most nights. (I insisted “Elegant Casual” does not mean combats or jeans). Tonight he got his dinner suit out again, which at least gives the beige one a rest. Tomorrow we are allowed to dress casual, since all our cases will be packed and everyone will be down to the clothes they are travelling home in. Jeans at last........Phew!

Overall today has been relatively uneventful. We listened to Moss again, (on the tele), watched the dolphin racing and Peter’s last class had 42 people, who all brought their pictures to be included in the Grand Exhibition tomorrow. It was nice to see how appreciative they were of Peter’s teaching, the compliments and thankyou’s were overflowing. Really lovely. The show tonight was the crew show, made up from the staff of the ship, such as engineering, deck, reception and housekeeping. They sang, danced Philippine and Indonesian dances and included a couple of modern routines. Good fun.

We have one more sea day, and we wake up Sunday morning back in England. I am looking forward to solid ground, our bed and loads of space to walk in. The ship doesn’t seem very big when you are on it for this long.

Enjoy the pics, the first lot are from Antigua. The one of Peter was taken as he walked off the ship as an escort for the “Spectacular Antigua” tour. You can see now how he earned this responsibility. It was taken by the onboard photographers, who charged us £7 to get it off them. I’ve had to photograph the photograph to get it onto this blog. Worth it though.