A bit of a strange day…

Friday started off fairly normally, except for having had a communication from our daughter the night before saying that the BBC was doing a live report from her ship at 6:20 in the morning.

Not being that organized at that time of the morning, we managed to miss the first couple of minutes and the DVD recorder spent all of the rest of the report formatting a new disc so I failed in capturing it for posterity.

It’s really weird sat at home in the comfort of your living room watching a live report from the deck of a ship several thousand miles away on which your offspring is spending her life.  So near and yet so far away from the ship we waved good-bye to a couple of months back.

Never mind I thought, they endlessly repeat these things on breakfast TV, I’ll catch it later and record it then.  They are not going to fly a reporter his crew and a live satellite link on to a Royal Navy Frigate in the waters off Iraq for a single 5 minute slot on the breakfast programme at 6:20am, are they.

With recorder remote control to hand I monitored the rest of the programme out of the corner of my eye, but no sign.  OK then plan ‘B’, which was possible as I was working from home that day.  The BBC feed these kind of reports in to their News 24 service, so a silent TV accompanied me through the morning.  Not that I was taking much notice, as the fact that the Talis Developer Network had been hit by some obscene spam overnight, was capturing my attention. 

Whilst on the phone to a colleague I suddenly spotted the BBC reporter stood on the frigate’s deck.  Winding the sound up I heard him say “it has been reported that fifteen Sailors and Marines from this ship, HMS Cornwall, have been captured by Iranians“.

The day then got a little surreal from that point onwards.  First step was to text various family members to ensure that they were up on what was happening and assure them that our Kerry ’shouldn’t’ be out on small boats. News channels on all over the place, phone ringing as friends contact to find out if she is OK.  It didn’t really calm down until I rang the Ministry of Defense, some hours later, to be assured that she was OK and still on the ship.

I know in those few hours we went through all sorts of emotions until we knew she was safe.  I can only imagine what the families of the fifteen are going through.  They must feel so helpless as our government goes through their diplomatic maneuvering.  Lets just hope they are very successfully very soon.

The BBC reporter no doubt though all his Christmases had come at once, being on HMS Cornwall on this day – I’m not so sure how much his presence helped the rest of the crew and the families. Welcome or not the reporter Ian Pannell, has since published his view of his day on the Cornwall which makes me at the same time both concerned and proud of my daughter and her ship mates.