ALL FOR SHOW - FRIDAY 11TH JULY - BRUGES

 

The reply from customer support that “Everything looks good in terms of installation and settings, perhaps you could try relocating the antenna”.  This was at once a confirmation that I had not made a mistake, but also that I had.   

The number of places an antenna can be located on this boat can be counted on the fingers of one thumb, and the solution we had, we thought was quite clever.  It had taken a couple of hours to route the cable invisibly, so  even if there was an alternative location which would not offend our aesthetic sensitivities, the prospect of moving it was not a happy one.

We did what most would do when faced with a problem of this magnitude.  

We ignored it and took a long walk through the backstreets of Bruges, pausing only for waffle and coffee, except instead of waffle we shared a rather large and delectable slice of apricot cake, while we considered our next move.   Perhaps sleeping on it would fix the problem?

By the time we’d done that, and with no solution in sight, Tony and Amber had arrived, berthed directly behind us.  Before we could say “that’s after our bedtime” we’d made arrangements to visit the light and sound show in the market square late in the evening.   Very late, of course, because it requires an absence of sunlight to be seen at its best, or perhaps to be seen at all, and the sun does not make itself absent until almost tomorrow.

Light shows are a curious thing, always spectacular but in differing degrees.   We’ve seen a few, or perhaps many, in all sorts of places, so we think we know about this stuff.  The one that started them all, projected onto three sides of Place Stanislas in Nancy has set a bar so high that thus far none have matched.   

It might have been the cobbles on which we were sitting that added to our discomfort, it might have been the nagging thought about relocating antenna or it might have been that we were looking through tired eyes, but we left what was undoubtedly a clever production feeling that bar had not been reached.  

The subtitles played live in one's choice of language on one's own phone were a nice touch, but impossible to follow and watch the screen contemporaneously.  The action on the tall narrow screen was remarkable, but it was so narrow that the scenes had gone before they arrived. It was worth the cost of admission of course, but we couldn’t help but feel that someone was just trying to be a bit too clever, just as perhaps they had with the antenna location on our boat.