Being a cruiser is like belonging to a tribe, but there are many sub-tribes. My least favourite sub-tribe is the “CV cruisers”. People who in mid-career take off with a boat for a year or so, get as far as they can and then head back to home waters to resume their old lives. Many in this group bring with them the deadline orientation of their working lives and simply seem to race from one place to another. Their objective is to complete an “adventurous episode” to add to their CV – their focus more on the next thing than the now. My favourite sub-tribe might be called the “so what?” brigade. People who when faced with all or any of the following objections from well meaning friends and family say “so what? – I don’t see why that should stop us going cruising”: • You haven’t got any money. • You can’t sail. • You’ve got a secure job. • She’s half your age. • You’ve only got one leg. Allied to this tribe are what might be called the pure eccentrics – like David and Eli. ...

Now we’ve been in the Med for well over a year I think I can say I’m getting truly acclimatised. This has a downside. I can’t cope with cold weather any more. Italy is at this moment in the grip of a cold spell. There is snow from the Alps to Sicily and the TV news has pictures of frozen tailbacks full of juggernauts from one end of the country to the other. I’m writing this in the early morning in my berth watching my breath condense all over the laptop screen. Our fan heater is going full belt, I’m wrapped in a duvet and I’m wearing track suit bottoms, a sweater and thick socks. Here on the coast the temperature is actually at this moment a couple of degrees above freezing, a normal English winter morning which a couple of years ago I would have thought nothing about. The trouble is ... I’m bloody freezing! When I wrote in October there were thirty odd cruising yachts here already and they continued to roll in steadily through October and November, so that there is now a ...

Having been resistant to living in an English-speaking cultural bubble, that is exactly what we have been doing for the past three months. However, our Italian is progressing thanks to our lessons twice a week and to the three Italians in the port who also live on boats. However, Sue is progressing faster than me, especially with the dreaded Italian verbs. We don’t get into Rome as often as we hoped to, but we still manage it about once per week. We still haven’t made it to the Vatican Museum (which includes the Sistine Chapel), preferring just to wander around and soak up the atmosphere. In doing so the sheer scale of the ancient Roman city slowly begins to dawn on one. During the four centuries after the birth of Christ Rome had a population of one to one and half million inhabitants, making it by a multiple the largest city of the ancient world – no other city even came near this size until the industrial revolution. We’ve also been doing more reading about Italian culture...

A couple of weeks ago we hired a car and drove down to Puglia (the heel of the Italian boot) with Claude and Jane, a couple that we have become goods friends with. Jane has worked in Taranto helping to project manage the development of a big new Container Port there and so has good contacts and is interested in buying a house in the area. Puglia is the market garden of Italy, being its largest producer of wine and olive oil, as well as having a big fishing industry. It is also the home of the Trullo – little round stone houses with pointed roofs which are built in clusters and are becoming very fashionable with holidaymakers and foreign investors. They are cute little buildings which often verge on the impossibly quaint – the town of Alberobello has thousands of them and frankly looks like nothing more nor less than Hobbiton. Our time was spent in an exhausting blur of house viewing and sightseeing, followed by leisurely debriefings over dinner in local restaurants. Parts of...