("We caught a ship last week").
At the Iron Gates I caught a ship for about 50 miles, then stayed with a very nice consul in Sofia …" And he rattled off the names of places and people that must have vanished long before I was born, in a lost world of feudal Europe, as though it were all just yesterday.
At the age of 17, with only the shirt on his back, Fauja Singh left his parents in a small Punjabi village and made the long and dusty journey on foot and by train to Kolkata (Calcutta), where he caught a ship to his new home.
After waiting two months in Buenos Aires he caught a ship home.
"It is the sound of driving a futuristic, glistening sportscar (top down), through a twinkling neon cityscape, to a space port, to catch a light ship heading to an off-world resort, with your children and the woman you love," says one neo-Nazi site.
When the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, in August of 1945, I was in the wardroom of a fleet tanker, waiting to catch a ride with a ship that was heading home.
We fitted a Citroën 2CV with outsized tyres and arranged the interior so that we could sleep in it, then caught a cargo ship from Marseille to Djibouti.
By September they were in Prague, and later called at Dresden, Dessau and Hamburg, from where they caught a packet ship to Great Yarmouth, arriving on 6 November.
He first began providing information to American counterterrorism officials after being caught on a ship in April 2011.
The French captain surrendering without a fight before the overwhelming British force that he faced, shocked that his frigate had been caught by a ship of the line in open waters.
