The bed on the cruise ship Seabourn Encore seems more comfortable than my bed at home. This bed is higher, wider, has more pillows and a slightly softer mattress than mine, but I don’t think it’s that. It has soft lights that come on to show me the way to my en-suite bathroom when I get up in the night, and its not that either.

Possibly the comfort is not to do with the bed at all. I neither have to make this bed nor tidy and clean this room, which is neither room nor cabin but is a suite. When I get up in the morning and go for my swim the steward says a cheerful, “Good morning, Mr Acland,” and adds, “Enjoy your swim,” which I do despite the water in the pool being unheated and certainly cold.

At breakfast I am again greeted by name and am reminded by the waiter who is from Albania that we have met before on another cruise on a different ship. He seems genuinely pleased to see me.

That happens again at Seabourn Square, ‘Guest Services’, and I recognise, from another cruise, the young woman from Kenya who helps me sort out my iPad connection to the internet. I am really pleased with myself as remembering people is not my strength. She is pleased as well.

The same thing has happened with an English couple I met on a cruise two years ago – enjoyable recognition. We are having dinner together one evening.

In due course I retire to my very comfortable bed thankful for the day and wondering whether it is not the mattress or the pillows so much as the personal encounters with others that make for my comfort.

I am going through boxes of papers, photographs, paintings, exercise books and notebooks sorting, throwing away and, inevitably, putting some things back into boxes. I usually travel with a notebook so that if I hear, see, or come across something that strikes a chord or moves me, I write it down.

In one such notebook, with only a few pages remaining, I had written part of the eulogy given by a father at the funeral of his son who had died in a car accident. The father was William Sloane Coffin, some time Chaplain at Yale University. I did not know him or his son, Alex. I cannot remember where I came across this. Alex died in 1983 at the age of twenty four.

’Nothing so infuriates me as the incapacity of seemingly intelligent people to get it through their heads that God doesn’t go around this world with his fingers on triggers, his fists around knives, his hands on steering wheels……Never do we know enough to say that a death was the will of God. My own consolation lies in knowing that when the waves closed over the sinking car, God’s heart was the first of all our hearts to break.’

I now put this alongside Bishop John Taylor’s saying to me, concerning walking the tightrope of faith and life, in response to my heartfelt questioning about the presence of God should I fall off the tightrope:

”Simon, God falls off with you.”

And, during the Good Friday Three Hours meditation at St Mary Abbots in the 1980’s, when the Venerable Timothy Raphael was giving the addresses, he finished each address with the words:

‘There is a cross buried deep in the heart of God.’

Not so much composed on Westminster Bridge as displayed on Lambeth Bridge. A friend sent me a photo of a placard leaning against the side of Lambeth Bridge:

’THE BOX PEOPLE TRY TO PUT YOU IN, IS FOR THEM, NOT FOR YOU’ and underneath in smaller capitals ‘notes to strangers’.

It struck a chord with this stranger. The ability to categorise, discern and discriminate is amongst the highest of human abilities and enables science, law, education, social order, art, music and much else besides. It is also, like all great gifts and abilities, open to abuse.

London traffic is chaotic this week because of a strike by members of the Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) union which has crippled London Underground services. I have simply no idea as to the rights and wrongs of the issues about pay which have caused the strike. It is the reaction of Londoners to the strike which has struck me.

On Monday I was at St Thomas’s Hospital keeping my 3.40 pm appointment there. At 4.00pm I discovered the doctor was running an hour late and I would not have been able to get home with the buses over full from 5.00pm. I went to the reception desk and the staff could not have been more helpful or understanding. I cancelled the appointment. While on the homeward bus I had a call on my mobile phone to tell me of a new appointment for next Monday.

On Tuesday I took my usual bus, the 360, from Elephant and Castle to the Royal Albert Hall for a concert. The bus is direct, almost door to door and usually takes about an hour. The first bus ‘terminated’ at Sloane Square and the next 360 ‘terminated’ at South Kensington. Both bus drivers had negotiated heavy traffic and traffic jams with skill and good humour. When I thanked one of them he said, “We do our best mate.”  And they had. For the last leg I took a taxi. The journey took two and a quarter hours but that was fine as I had allowed three.

On Wednesday I took a crowded bus to the swimming pool. A young man, seeing me with my walking stick, gave up his seat for me. It was a ‘priority’ seat. At the next stop more people got on including an older woman who was standing alongside me. When she caught my eye I said, “I’m not going to get up to give you my seat but you can sit on my knee if you like.” She laughed aloud and said, with a great smile, “Thank you, but no thankyou!”

Today, Thursday, I will walk to church, visit some friends and walk home.

The strike has inconvenienced people mildly, as I have been, and greatly. What I have realised is that how we deal with inconvenience is our choice. Most of those I have met have chosen to make the best they can of the strike and to deal with it calmly, patiently and often with humour.

Thank goodness for medical science.

I readily admit that science was not my strong suit at school but I know enough to recognise that it is discriminating; science discriminates. 

I have been diagnosed with Grover’s Disease which, according to the British Association of Dermatologists, ‘is an itchy rash…..this commonly affects white men over 50 years of age.’

So it is racist, sexist, and ageist. 

Religion doesn’t play a part and, fortunately, it is neither hereditary nor contagious. The origin is unknown, it is comparatively rare, and it is treatable. 

The cap fits. I am white, male, over fifty and, thanks to the diagnosis by an excellent dermatologist, I no longer itch nor, more importantly to me, scratch.