It Started With The …

On a Facebook group our talented leader often posts a “Sunday Prompt”, it might be a word, usually a picture, something to get our poetic juices flowing. This week she posted this

Go for a walk around your flat, or wherever you are. Pick things up and look in nooks and crannies. Find something that sparks a memory. Write about that memory. Have the first sentence be:

“It started with the…’

Hmm… interesting, intriguing and inviting. It started the musing and cogitating – I glanced around me and wondered what item would spark an interesting anecdote. So much of my trinketry and souvenirs of my life adventures had to be let go, donated, sold or ditched. Then I remembered by box of bits and wondered what curios of my past it was hiding.

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It started with the day trip, for the fun of it we’d go to Felixstowe, walk onboard the ‘roll on roll off’ ferry and sail the seas to Zeebrugge., then catch the next one back (6 hour sail, each way). At the time I was learning navigation at the Maritime College, so I would set myself up at the table with the sea chart (the size of a small table cloth), compass, dividers, parallel ruler, pencil, paper, and calculator, and would plot our progress.

After seeing me doing this my Dad got a bit of balsa wood about inch long, shaped it, glued a couple of cocktail sticks, painted it (complete with green and red navigation lights) and found a little Perspex box to put it in. Then he found a tiny piece of blue paper for the ship to sit on, and created a background complete with lighthouse and birds in flight. He presented it to me when we were getting ready for the next trip.

I set myself up once more and every few minutes I would recalculate our position and move the ship along. Often we would see the same person walk past and take a glance, maybe make a comment. Sometimes a gent would stop and ask a question or start a chat. Then one day, after the Purser had been back and forth, he returned with a piece of paper and passed it to me. Word of my plotting had reached the Bridge and the Navigation Officer sent down an exact position Latitude and Longitude. Guess what folks, lil old amateur learner was less the a few millimetres out!

I have a vague visual remembrance of a line of bums peering out the windows into the darkness, counting the flashes of buoys, so I could find them on the chart.

It made the journey more interesting than just reading or doing homework.