A voyage through fine wine off Sardinia

One could get used to this. I come from seafaring stock, albeit distant. ‘Anderson’ suggests Viking antecedents, especially as my forebears came from the Shetland Islands. Yet there must have been something wrong with the first Anderson. Other Vikings reached Normandy, Sicily, even Byzantium. At the very least, they found the odd monastery to plunder. Later, their Norman descendants compensated for cultural destruction with cultural creation. But to endure the rigours of crossing from Norway and then disembark on Shetland? Was my remote ancestor seasick, or mutinous, or did he rape the cabin boy? We will never know.

A millennium or so later, life at sea was rather different. We were on a yacht, cruising between Sardinia and Corsica. A golden sun presided over a sapphire sea as we sailed among islands, beneath limestone cliffs topped by fishing villages – some fortified. In the background were granite mountains of infinite antiquity.