Who's The Daddy: The happy wanderer returns, but it’s not for long

The biggest shock Daughter #2 experienced after months of afternoons off in Miami, Mexico and the Bahamas was the icy wind that cut her in two 1/10th of a second after she stepped out of Terminal 3 at Manchester Airport, on what those of us who have recently lived through a North West winter would call a pretty nice afternoon, for January.

Me and the boss went to pick her up after following the last leg of her flight from Heathrow on a flight tracker website (took off late but got there in 40 minutes) and with incredible synchronicity her plane flew over the road to the airport we were driving along 20 seconds before she landed.

Her flight from Miami was a little bit more eventful, as due to high winds around London the pilot needed three separate goes to land the plane. The Boss, a nervous flier who makes Dennis Bergkamp look like Chelsey Sullenberger at the best of times, visibly blanched when Daughter #2 let that little nugget slip.

Back home, there was only one thing for it - chippy tea, which there isn’t a lot of call for on a cruise ship primarily frequented by Americans, so every last mouthful was savoured. We even had the pleasure of Daughter #1’s company who was working from home (ours) because she had a dental appointment here that day.

Jet lag is a weird thing. Daughter #2 did well to keep her eyes open long enough to finish her dinner, but after opening her Christmas presents (spoiler alert, mainly travel bags and accessories for her next six-month tour of duty around the Caribbean due to start at the end of March) it was lights out, literally, until 4am - which she misread as 4pm, thinking that’s when it goes dark in the frozen North, she got up to let her childhood cat out, who then did his best impression of a fire engine in the street in protest at being turfed out in the middle of the night.

After that, Daughter #2 didn’t stir until The Boss wandered into her room with a coffee at 2.15pm. And then she sat around in her dressing gown watching all the BBC Christmas specials we’d recorded for her that she missed while dressed as a 5ft 11in elf on board on Christmas Day.

Daughter #2 regaled me and The Boss with tales of what passes for legal and above board in international waters, absolutely none of which is fit for print. After 32 years in journalism, I didn’t think I’d led a sheltered life. Turns out after just under six months of Daughter #2’s working life on a cruise ship, I have. We all have.

Anyway, it’s great to have her back. Until she flits off to Liverpool to see her old uni friends, flies to South Africa to visit her crew mate and spends a week sunning herself in the Canaries with The Boss.

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