RIP Sandra – Brits On A Ship

We were absolutely heartbroken to learn of the death of Sandra, one half of Brits On A Ship with Chris, this week. This is not a throwaway comment or one of those things you’re just expected to say. There were tears. There are still tears. Sandra was one of the best of people.

Sandra and Chris were younger than us but keen users and abusers of Twitter before the great fucking racist business-moron twat that is Musk ruined it all, turning it into something that those of us with a conscience had to get away from. We connected on this opinion. We also connected through similar humour and the geography that tied Sandra’s early years in Gosport with our own in Portsmouth. When we dispersed to other social media places we lost immediate contact with this couple we had much in common with but we still kept in touch, more sporadically.

We first cruised with Sandra and Chris aboard Regal Princess in the post-pandemic period, getting back to cruising season. I remember we all had to sit apart when entering the cruise terminal and we’d spotted the pair of them in seats so sat in front of them but still masked and separated for sensible reasons. We’d tried to catch their attention on the way in but failed, yet Chris had apparently determined who we were afterwards based on some mystical intuition and told Sandra that we were those people from Twitter. We met up aboard and realised that the online chats barely touched the surface. We were all kindred spirits. Left-wing, tech-savvy, intolerant of those who’d put their images over everything else, loved the same things, hated the same things. Good people.

We cruised together – unplanned – on Scarlet Lady out of Portsmouth that same year and that was eye-opening. There were other cruise bloggers aboard and they all knew Chris and Sandra. And they all treated them like second-class people. We were horrified and angered by what we witnessed. We spent almost every spare moment with this amazing pair and we saw others that we knew online act like our friends didn’t exist. Sandra absolutely loved cruising to her very core and there were people she knew online who knew this but didn’t want to post photos of themselves with her because she didn’t look right for Instagram. She shrugged this off but we were sitting there and we could see how much this hurt her inside. We had to carry the fury for her. Those people who were there know who they are. Sandra was so nice she could try to forgive and forget, but we absolutely fucking couldn’t and don’t. We will never forgive how those people she considered online friends treated her because it didn’t suit their own image.

Sandra was better than us.

Sandra took her love of cruising to the Cruise Critics website after Twitter to make a fresh start while we headed off to the Fediverse but I’m so pleased we all stayed in touch. Online connections are tricky and maintaining them after migrations trickier still. Many of those who knew her wouldn’t have known of her coma, her inability to walk, her home renovations to make life easier for her on the road to recovery, her plans for this year to come, her expectation and hope to see an eclipse at sea.

Those plans came to nothing all of a sudden, but we know those plans were things that brought her so much joy. We are utterly devastated to lose Sandra. This pales to nothing compared to what Chris and their families have gone through. We will miss Sandra so much.