Cruise Control Day 1: Southampton. Setting Sail.

Day 1 of a week aboard Cunard’s Queen Anne, sailing from Southampton to Norway and back. This is not a cruise review so much as a diary of what actually happens when you put 3,000 passengers on a floating hotel, give them unlimited food and, in our case, a drinks package. The good, the bad, the ridiculous and why, despite everything, I’d probably do it all again.

We arrive in Southampton. Eloise immediately misidentified the correct ship, which was a promising start. The ship is the Cunard Queen Anne, 3,000 passengers, 1,500 staff. Just humongous. The first and last cruise we went on last year was on the Cunard Queen Victoria with Eloise’s family. We travelled down by train, and as lovely as staying the night in Paris and two in Rome was, driving for an hour and a half to Southampton was a lot simpler.

We queued to get the car parked. Although, of course, they actually park it for you. Welcome to cruise life, where you don’t have to lift a finger. A holiday for slobs. Going through all the various stages of embarkation wasn’t exactly a pleasure, although I don’t think I’ve ever gone through such a process with so many incredibly friendly people administering it. Eloise thought it was probably because we were some of the last people getting on, so they could see the end of their working day approaching. Whatever the reason, everybody seemed extraordinarily pleased to see us, despite presumably having spent the entire day dealing with thousands of people who had all turned up with too much luggage and expected someone else to deal with it. Some cruisers take not lifting a finger as also not having your wits about you.

Straight on and straight up to our room for a quick look, and then up to the Trough. The Trough is the main food hall, nicknamed that by Eloise’s mother. They call it the Artisan Food Hall, but it isn’t. When we went on a cruise last year, you could immediately see why. Everyone just helps themselves to vast quantities of food. It’s actually quite revolting to watch. Plates are piled up with combinations of food that nobody would dream of putting together at home, presumably because it is all there, and it has already been paid for.

That’s one of the things about cruise life; there is quite a lot of greed. You very quickly become aware that thousands of otherwise perfectly respectable people have been placed inside a floating hotel where almost everything is available in unlimited quantities, and this does something slightly strange to them. We were no different, obviously, because we were at the Trough with everyone else.

But this time the Trough was different, and not in a good way. At first glance, the free-for-all had simply been removed and replaced by a dozen or so man-operated workstations. Much better organisation, but the portions were small, and a school-dinner-type serving system meant you would ask for what you wanted and it was nicely served as per the elected portion size, precluding one from a personal choice of variety and size; a mainstay of cruise culture gone!

Anyway, we moved on to somewhere called the Pavilion, which is basically a swimming pool with bars around it, all enclosed, with a huge mezzanine and retractable roof. Now, if you’ve never been on a cruise, one of the first things you realise is that this isn’t like being on a ferry. The ship is beautifully accomplished. The quality is outstanding. There is a member of staff for every two customers. The staff are predominantly Black or Filipino, incredibly well trained and incredibly friendly. Everything is spotless, everything works and somebody always seems to appear the moment you want something. There is something faintly ridiculous about how quickly you become accustomed to this. Within an hour of arriving, having previously been perfectly capable of getting our own drinks and carrying our own belongings, we were already accepting this level of attention as completely normal.

Sitting there, having a few Peronis, you suddenly think; this is actually pretty amazing as you switch from life’s struggles to a near-luxury existence. We went back down to change for dinner, which is a very tedious ritual, and found our cases had been left outside the room. Of course they had. Somebody had taken them from us in Southampton and somehow, amongst several thousand other cases, delivered them to exactly the right door while we had been sitting upstairs drinking lager. Cruise life was already beginning to make normal life seem unnecessarily complicated.

Dinner wasn’t initially promising and didn’t ever improve on that. We were shoved into a corner next to a couple of people who were very quiet, and it was horribly claustrophobic. I was left simply facing a wall. It’s almost like sitting at a dining table with people you don’t know, because that is essentially what you are doing. Anyway, they were fine. Like us, they basically spoke to each other under their breath. There seemed to be an unspoken understanding that although we had been positioned within a few feet of each other, none of us was going to pretend that this meant we had suddenly become friends.

Then, of course, a loudmouth came and sat on the other side to us, loved the sound of his own voice and was clearly travelling with his estranged daughter. There was such coldness and unfamiliarity, this was a make up for being a crap dad cruise. He didn’t drink alcohol. Maybe that was the cause, a history of addiction? With very little to do on a cruise, you soon get curious about other people. On land you might move tables. On a ship you have to sit there and put up with it, gulping down lots of wine in front of him to show him we still could, a pathetic revenge!

Crab for starters and then some fish. As with the previous cruise I went on, the fish was very good but warm, the service tediously slow, before manically accelerating as they kicked into gear. On the Queen Victoria, the restaurant service and food were exemplary. Because we were on the drinks package, you could quaff the wine at a fair old rate with dinner. The drinks package is another important part of cruise psychology. Once you have paid for something in advance, there seems to be a strange obligation to make absolutely certain that the cruise company doesn’t somehow get the better of you. Consequently, drinking becomes less of a leisure activity and more of a financial calculation. Every glass feels as though you are gradually recovering your initial investment.

From there, we went on a bar crawl around the various cocktail bars. We did the Golden Lion, which is the slightly naff fake English pub, before eventually ending up at the Commodore, right at the top of the ship. I don’t think that many people know about it. They always have a pianist; it’s incredibly laid back, in a gloomy but almost classy environment. We sat there sipping gin and tonics and whiskies. By this point, quite drunk. The whole ship seemed designed to ensure that wherever you wandered, another comfortable chair and somebody willing to bring you alcohol would appear.

We somehow hung on until eleven o’clock, which is when they get some more food out for the pigs. Naturally, we dutifully scoffed a hot dog before crashing out. There was absolutely no reason why either of us needed a hot dog or even liked them. We had spent much of the afternoon eating, had eaten a full dinner and had been drinking for most of the evening, but the hot dogs were there. And on a cruise ship, the mere existence of food appears to constitute a perfectly reasonable justification for eating it.

Day one completed. Cruise life. You don’t have to lift a finger, you’re never more than a few yards from alcohol, and just when you’ve eaten far too much, they bring out hot dogs. Within a few hours you have stopped questioning any of it and simply joined in with everybody else.