I received a very nice invitation from the people in Irish Ferries

They wrote to me a couple of months ago and asked me to name their new ship. They said it was a competition, but they have to do that because of some ruling or other. A bit like the Late Late, where your name is drawn but you have to answer a very simple question just to keep everything legal.

I think they chose me because I wrote such a nice article about them [actually I think it was my first post on this Blog!]

I asked them if it meant I had to break a bottle of champagne on the ship, like the Queen does, but they said no, that the ship had already been launched, and they just wanted a name for it. I always thought that was a great waste of good champagne anyway. They said that I could have a holiday instead, which was nice.

So Herself and I sat down and spent a good half hour going through names. It had to be a French name, or a name associated with France, and it had to imply luxury and speed.

My first thought was “L’escargot” which I thought was good [l’escargot – “let’s car go”, “let’s cargo” – a double whammy pun. Geddit?] but a snail doesn’t exactly inspire the idea of speed.

“Brittany Ferry” sounded good, but some bugger of a company has already grabbed that.

I was going to send in “Flight of the Earls” because of the Irish – French link and the 400th anniversary and all that but it was a bit long. Actually I think I did send it. I hit the ‘send’ button instead of the ‘delete’ button by mistake. I’m always doing that. It gets me into a lot of trouble.

We thought up quite a lot in the end and sent them off so that they could have the final choice. They said they’d get back to us by the end of March.

Herself is fierce excited by all this. We went to France last year and had a fabulous holiday and she is looking forward to going back this year. We have cancelled all our other plans and have our bags packed.

We have been sitting in the car, waiting to go since the 1st of April. But they haven’t sent us our tickets yet, which is annoying.

We need to go to the loo.