My Titanic Struggle For The Truth
My daughter suddenly remembered that she had a homework project to finish for school tomorrow. It involved answering questions about The Titanic and, to be fair, she had done most of the work. The final section involved some personal research on the disaster and writing a short essay. Thanks goodness for is all I can say, although I was able to supply a few nuggets of Titanic trivia myself.
I remembered a doom-laden song about the sinking that I'd been taught in school and started singing this around the house, much to the dismay of other family members.
"Oh they built the ship Titanic, to sail the ocean blue
and they thought they had a ship that the water would never go through
But the Lord's almighty hand
knew that ship would never land
It was sad when that great ship went down."
Then I retrieved from my memory the story about the grand staircase of the Station Hotel in Inverness. It had, so they say, been the inspiration for the design of the staircase on the Titanic. Mrs Z. simply refused to believe this so I went on the world wide web in search of proof but couldn't find any hard evidence. I mean there was enough to cut and paste a , but nothing that would get beyond my wife's threshold of gullibility. So I had no option but to bundle Zed-daughter into the car and drive down to the hotel itself.
It's now called the and a nice young man at the reception desk was very understanding when I explained my plight. He even let me manoeuvre around armchairs full of elderly residents while we took some photographs and then gave me a lovely colour brochure which contained the vital information about the staircase and its link with the Titanic.
We rushed home so I could confront Mrs Z with the evidence, but she simply smiled and nodded. No humbling apology was offered.
All of which left me with a strange sinking feeling.
