By the time we awoke at 08:30 we had already docked in Odessa. The temperature was already in the high 60s. It was going to be another scorcher.I don't know much about Odessa other than Michael Caine was involved with some files in the midst of the Cold War!!Odessa was founded in the late 1700s by Catherine the Great after 4 foreigners in Russian Service met by chance on a Russian Military vessel. One of these men, the Duc de Richelieu convinced the Russian E...

One final postscript to the excitement of the disturbance in Istanbul. We checked a few web sites to see if we could fathom out any more details. One website had the tagline: 'Istanbul becomes ‘war zone' on May Day.’  Even by my standards that’s a little bit sensationalistic and a stretch of the truth. Europe 1914-18 and again in 1939-45 were war zones. Even my bedroom when I was a child was a war zone as my mother used to say: ‘...