Seize the day!
Vera, 90, agrees to go on Med cruise with 91-year-old man she’d met 45 minutes earlier (and he pays the £3,700 bill)
AT the age of 90, Vera Burrell is still up for a bit of adventure – her motto is ‘seize the day’.
Family members were aghast, however, when she agreed to go on a Mediterranean cruise with a 91-year-old man she had met only 45 minutes earlier.
The widowed great-grandmother was on a coach trip with friends when they stopped for lunch and met the charmer, who wasn’t part of the group.
After talking about holidays over a glass of wine, the man – identified only as John – took her over the road to a travel agent where he paid £3,700 for an 11-day trip.
Everything was above board as they had twin beds in their room. And despite turning down his offer to go to the Caribbean next year, she said yesterday: ‘Life is for living. I am not dead yet. You have to get on with it, haven’t you? I am a bit tottery, but I’m a damn sight better off than a lot of others. I would say to people, “Seize the day”.’
Mrs Burrell, from Suffolk, was travelling to Bournemouth when her coach stopped at a pub in Winchester. ‘The gentleman sat down, ordered his lunch and we got to talking, as you do,’ she said.
‘I told him how I go on coach journeys around the country, how I used to go abroad but don’t any more. He said, “My late wife and I really enjoyed cruising”. He’d been around the world several times.’
Mrs Burrell, a retired singer, told him she had never been on a cruise. ‘We came out of the pub together. On the other side of the road was a travel agent and before I knew it we were in there,’ she added. ‘I’d only had the one glass of wine with lunch – I was not intoxicated. I knew he was booking a cruise but I had not assumed it was for the two of us – until he asked what my name was.
‘The travel agent asked how long we had known each other and John said, “About three-quarters of an hour”.’
After checking the booking was genuine, she decided to go ahead. But Mrs Burrell, whose policeman husband Jack died in
‘It was just a lovely, leisurely holiday’
2005, was warned by a cousin: ‘Haven’t you heard of stranger danger?’ And she told one of her daughters only the night before leaving because she ‘would worry’.
John’s daughter cancelled the payment, thinking he had been scammed, so he had to reassure her he knew what he was doing.
The pair set off on October 8 from South- ampton, John’s home town, on the P&O ship Azura, which has pools, spas and casinos. They took in Lisbon, Porto, Cadiz, Malaga and Gibraltar and breakfasted on the balcony of their top deck room every day.
‘We knew the same tunes, we remembered the same comedies from the radio, the same films,’ said Mrs Burrell. ‘He told me about when he was in the Army with the Royal Engineers. We were strangers but did have quite a lot in common. It was just a lovely, leisurely holiday.’
They also became the subject of gossip when Mrs Burrell made her companion a coffee in a restaurant and asked if it was the way he liked. ‘The people on the table next to us looked stunned,’ she said.
She confirmed they would stay in touch, but turned down his offer to go to the Caribbean. ‘I just haven’t got time to waste. I could pop off tomorrow – I’ve got things to do,’ she said.