Judging by all the teevee and radio shows it appears that no-one in Sydney is allowed to talk of anything else today.
Hundreds of pleasure-craft escorted the Cunard line’s massive bit of kit into the harbour where it docked at the naval base at Garden Island due to being to long for the International Passenger Terminal wharf at Circular Quay and too tall to go under the bridge to the other IPT over there.
Thousands of Sydney residents got up early to go into town to watch it arrive, clustering along the foreshore and frustrating the daily joggers.
My two favourite bits of QM2 trivia thus far:
* it’s as large as 132 Manly ferries
* while it’s berthed at Garden Island it’s going to be blocking Russell Crowe’s harbour views.
I saw the ship as I walked to the city this morning – it’s huge!
We’re planning to go down this evening after work to take a squiz (and do our bit to confound the evil joggers some more).
It is a pretty amazing sight. I doubt whether many people will be doing laps at the Boy Charlton pool today. They’ll be glued to the glass wall looking over to Garden Island.
Anyone else get woken up by it? Straight after it blew its horn at about 6am I heard a couple of kookaburras respond – it sounded like something off an old newsreel.
As a matter of historical interest, was the Queen Mary (both this one and the original) named after Bloody Mary or named after an innocuous Queen Consort of the same name?
(Digression: apparently one factor in the failure of Bloody Mary’s religious policies was the English weather, which made burning people at the stake a much more laborious and aesthetically displeasing affair than was the case in sunny Spain.)
The original was named after Queen Mary, the consort of George V. The new one is named after the old one.
The consort, Mary of Teck. I have heard so much about the bloody thing this morning …..
There is a possibly apocryphal story about the naming of the first Queen Mary after George V’s consort.
Cunard wanted to name their great new liner after the fondly remembered Queen Victoria, at least in part to evoke the glory days of Empire. They approached the King as to whether he would approve this plan.
After describing the ship’s glorious furbishings and appurtenances to him, they said something like:
“Your Majesty, we feel that the ship is so magnificent that the only possible name to do her justice would be to name her after England’s greatest Queen” meaning to add “your late grandmother”.
However, King George, beaming, interrupted with “How marvellous! My wife will be so pleased!”
And that was that.
It has such an obvious agenda about the House of Windsor’s famed obtuseness (the current monarch is a familial exception) that it’s most unlikely to be true (and Cunard have always denied it), but it’s a great tale.
Two giant queens come to Sydney.
How is this different from any other day?
“It has such an obvious agenda about the House of Windsor’s famed obtuseness (the current monarch is a familial exception) that it’s most unlikely to be true (and Cunard have always denied it), but it’s a great tale.”
It is, tig, but if were true, the King would almost certainly have assumed that Cunard were talking about his mother, (“motherdear”)Queen Alexandra, with whom (like all her children) he had a most unusual, permanently infantilising, relationship
I’m getting a weird sense of déjà vu.
Rebecca at the Dead Roo:
http://www.deadroo.com/index.php/its-a-ship-not-the-bloody-second-coming/
I prefer the QE11, it’s smaller and I could get to the lifeboat faster. Reminds me, Channel 7 are showing the original Poseidon Adventure, this coming Saturday afternoon so time to stock up on the Jaffas and relive my childhood.
We took one child down to see it (other one’s off at school camp). Heaps of people around the harbour, but I wonder whether they would have come down just to see the big boats if there weren’t also fireworks going to happen.
Still, it was a perfect summer evening and everyone looked to be enjoying themselves.
Even the nekkid water skiers were out and about.