MV Balmoral

A rat's-eye view along a hawser tethering the Balmoral, basking in the morning sun on her regular mooring in Bristol Docks, outside the M-Shed museum.

Back in July 2001 this ship was a prop in a musical called Up the Feeder, Down the Mouth, and Back Again, about Bristol docks and the dockers, that ran in the M-Shed building. We went to see it when Alison was heavily pregnant -- a few days away from giving birth to Zak. It was sweltering hot in the shed. and the staging seemed to be very cramped in front of the audience seats. Then, after about 15 or 20 minutes of it getting more hot and sweaty for everyone, all of a sudden the stagehands threw open the big sliding doors onto the docks, revealing the whole dockside to be the actual set with a steam train pulling freight wagons, the big cranes loading, tug-boats running, and the Balmoral turning in to moor. There was a review by Lyn Gardner in The Guardian that described it as "surely one of the most spectacular sights we'll see in British theatre this decade." and I think she was dead right. It was a real goose-bump moment, the sort of thing you can't easily get watching a movie.