Memories of the good old days

The weather being as it is I have some time to write again.  I'm having a really lazy Sunday although in a way I have been busy doing some paperwork. I finally took action and contacted a lot of former colleagues from my ferry days for a big reunion.  I had set a date in September, the weekend before I'm off on holiday, but as many of them seem to be out of the country at that time of year I have changed the date to November.  That does give me some extra time to get things sorted.  Not a bad idea seen that I will be very busy at work in August and the first half of September.  Some of my friends were in doubt if this is a good idea but fortunately a lot were really full of enthousiasm to get back together again.  I knew before I set out on this task that this is how people react so I'm not too bothered. I'll just carry on and see how things turn out.  In the process of trying to contact as many NSF colleagus as possible, a lot of memories came back to me.  I suppose this has to do with my age.  Some names seemed to be burried very deep and I had to do a lot of digging and to my disappointment there are still faces I haven't been able to match with a name.  I am trying to get the ones I have been able to get in touch with to help me out.  You would think that it should be fairly easy to get in touch with people nowadays, but some people just can't be found.  Not everybody is on facebook or linked in or google and I guess most must have a mobile phone but with an unlisted number.  One of my colleagues was actually saying that there not are only happy memories and quoted (I don't know who) that 'the past is never where you think you left it'.   Ofcourse over a period of 25 years there have been many happy, but also many sad occasions.  That's just life.  The ship sailed out in the evening and arrived in the morning.  When I started working there, the small ships only carried a maximum of 249 passengers but when I left the company the ships from Zeebrugge could accommodate a 1000 passengers.  It was a night crossing and there were restaurants,shops and bars on board.  Everything that happens on land can occur on board.  There was a birth once on the ferry to Rotterdam.  That was a very happy occasion.  Unfortunately there were also fights, deaths and even suicide or passengers gone missing. In the early days, the ferry often arrived late when there were gale force winds and some passengers joked that NSF meant Not So Fast.  We had problems with strikes, but the Iron Lady put an end to that and one of our ships was requisitioned by the British government for troop transport during the Falkland war, leaving us with a chartered vessel for 6 months.  I saw new ships being launched and named.  Some people may believe we should let the past be the past, but the future is built on the past so even looking ahead means leaning on the past.