A little bit of Louly

After I had dragged myself out of bed this morning (boooo to Mondays) I was watching the BBC 1 News and discovered that there had been a fire this morning on the Cutty Sark, the famous 19th Century Tea Clipper. It’s been out of action for a while as there were restoration and conservation works going on because sea salt had accelerated the corrosion of the iron framework. It was expected that it would re-open to public in 2009 but now due to the damage caused by the fire it will be much longer. They did say on the news that because of the conservation work that was happening they had removed a lot of the ship which was safe. Good things. The fire is being treated as suspicious. I love that phrase, you almost have to pronounce it in a special tone including inverted commas: The fire is being treated as “suspicious”. Funny if you take it out of context, well of course it’s suspicious it’s not every day that the ship is alight! Buuuut anyway, I feel slightly attached to the ship in a way as when I was in primary school, age 9 or 10.. as a class we went onto the Cutty Sark and worked on it as the merchant navy workers would have when it was in action. It was great fun! Scrubbing the deck, learning how to tie knots (can’t remember for the life of me how to tie any of them now of course) eating pieces of lemon to avoid scurvy (tee hee), bringing in the cargo - I remember the crates being rather heavy and there wasn’t even anything in them… though suppose I was little louly back then lol. But it’s definitely a shame, hopefully they will be able to restore it all back somewhat.