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Monday 25 April 2011

Easter in Amsterdam

Strapped wrapped and ready to roll Saturday lunch

 

Down the A14 to Harwich ready to catch the Stena line ferry, 10:30 Sunday morning. Drove down to Parkeston Quay to look for somewhere to drop the legs for the night, nowhere friendly, so decided to try the postcode of the caravan site in the Caravan Club hand book. Found it ok the Dovercourt caravan site £12 for the night.

Quite poignant - feller around my age at the booking hut, had sailed on the Arnhem, the British Railways night ferry that I had worked on back in the sixties. One of the reasons I wanted to take the Harwich Hoek route was, I wanted to see how much I remembered of the time I lived and worked in that 'neck of the woods'.

The caravan site even had electricity, known in the caravanning fraternity as a 'hook up', so all 'mod cons'.

Woke up bright and early 6:00 next morning, cup of tea and down to Parkeston for 8:30, boarded no problem



Ferry was nearly empty only about 200 people aboard, nice breakfast, then found ways to waste the next 6 hours. Had the Internet but very restrictive in terms of which websites you could visit, anything that had high bandwidth like Youtube was a definite 'no no' as the link was satellite based, but managed to download my emails.

The ship had a cinema, so decided to watch the Oscar winning film 'The King's Speech' one review I read, said it was "historically inaccurate" in terms of the way Churchill was portrayed, apparently Churchill did not want King Edward to abdicate, ok a little detail but a very important in terms of understanding what kind of man Churchill was. He was obviously not a moral absolutist, bit more of a pragmatist. I do wish people who make films about British history, did not tell lies about British history, the British state should be able to sue them for misrepresentation.

It only cost £8 million to make and made around £238 million so they could afford a few million paid into the widows an orphans fund for telling lies about my nations history. A particularly annoying example was 'Brave Heart' there were many inaccuracies, a historical film that is accurate is double benefit, entertaining and a lesson in history.
 
I thought the interplay between Logue and the Duke of York was very convincing and when the Duke became King very moving, but one wonders how historically accurate this bit of the film was?

The problem with our species is, the people in charge of things, care more about money than truth.

          

1 comment:

  1. Hey Dad,
    Hope your trip is going well and that the weather holds up for you. I just noticed your nodding 'german'?? highway patrolman on the dashboard...that took me back to the good old days! Good to see he's still got some miles left in him :)

    ReplyDelete