Cruise Control Day 2: A Day at Sea.

by Chris Harris

Day 2 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.

Because the drinking had been carried out over an eight-hour time frame, we didn’t really have too much of a hangover, although it was still quite a blast to the system. We were up and about by half past seven and went up to the Trough, where we had a revolting cooked breakfast. It’s baffling why an expensive cruise liner would knock out small, crappy sausages, but apparently it does. It filled a gap and was the last one.

Back to the room, and after the last five weeks, since we returned from Lake Coniston, I’d been through a punishing schedule of work and was due a couple of hours of catch-up sleep. Well, probably more like a couple of days would have been appropriate. The boat was at sea all day, so after a nap we went downstairs for a nice cup of coffee and walked around the deck.

This is an integral part of cruising for some people, especially me, as it helps offset some of the greed, and I dictate my blogs and short stories. It’s 0.4 of a mile all the way around the ship, so in the morning we did two miles, and in the afternoon I did a further two while Eloise made a trip to the huge theatre they have on the boat to watch a talk about cryptocurrency. She gave it 7/10, which, as Eloise always looks at the bright side of life, is probably 5/10 really.

There are so many activities on a cruise liner, but mine seem to consist almost entirely of eating, drinking, walking and writing.

At the Pavilion, on the mezzanine floor, is something called the Wellness Café. Now, a Wellness Café isn’t necessarily something you’d expect on a cruise liner, but it’s probably going to become one of our go-to places. We had a delightful grilled salmon with various salad accoutrements and a great big fat smoothie.

Sitting up there looking down over the swimming pool, however, you get to see some of the worst excesses of cruise life. This is where you see fat, middle-aged and old men and women with their guts hanging out, stuffing themselves with burgers and onion rings. It’s amusing to watch, but actually quite disgusting.

Cocking a snoot as we walked past them with our healthy lunch inside us, one does have to consider that they may well have seen us necking all the alcohol and thought we were quite disgusting too.

We went up to one of the decks for beers. This was beside an outside pool and didn’t have quite so many horrible things to look at. Unfortunately, Eloise’s watch had inadvertently moved back another hour, so we suddenly discovered we didn’t have time to go to dinner because we had to be there by 5.45.

As it happened, that night was a black-tie event, which is a very weird thing where basically everyone has to dress up in suits and smart clothes and then go and sit in the same restaurant they sat in the night before, go through exactly the same routine, except the food on the menu is probably 5% better. It’s just one of those cranky, silly things that I think appeals to people of a slightly snobby variety. There are always two black-tie nights on the cruise, so I was delighted to miss one because of this faux pas.

Eloise had already been to see the restaurant manager to complain about the table we’d had the night before, because your table is effectively set in stone and you’re allocated it for the entire cruise. The guy couldn’t have been more amenable, virtually admitting it was a shit table, which was something of a relief because the thought of sitting next to that bloke talking about himself for a week would have been too much for me.

So instead we went to the Golden Lion for more beer and a scotch egg with haddock, which was delicious. On the way out to another bar, we stopped off at the Trough for a great big bowl of shrimps and a roll. After further alcohol back up on deck, we eventually found ourselves down at the Golden Lion again.

Downstairs, all the diners looked slightly at sea, which obviously they were, as somebody had apparently had a heart attack. The rather sad thing was that the general conversation you could hear around the place seemed mainly concerned with whether or not he was dead. Back upstairs, at the Trough, we had a fairly poor fish dish with potatoes and salad, followed by a bolognaise sauce with pasta, from which I fished the meat out. The overriding theme of the Wellness Café, eating healthy food in normal measures, had now been very much blown out of the water. It is not as greedy as it looks; the portions are small, and I won’t eat unless I am hungry, which the alcohol helps to exacerbate.

We went down to watch the karaoke at the Golden Lion, now rammed. Too full, we had to move on to Peroni and double whisky chasers. We sat with an extremely nice group of people who were having a fantastic time, two of whom were taking part in the event. One of them, a lovely gay guy, was an absolute show-off, but he was so sweet. ‘Karaoke should be fun,’ he said to me, and his friend then went up and did her best Damon Albarn Blur impression doing Parklife. She managed the whole of the first verse, or about half of it, before giving up and going into the chorus. She was jumping and gyrating around the stage, completely pissed and having a great time. They were a lovely bunch of people.

Karaoke on a cruise is a bit like wrestling; it seems to be slightly fixed. There are real oddball normal people genuinely doing it, which is very funny because they’re all still wearing their suits and bow ties in a sort of trashy mock pub, and then there was one creepy guy who looked like either a stalker or a Scandinavian murderer. He was in his mid-forties and just sat there looking creepy with a can of Coke, which stood out because virtually everyone else in the place was getting absolutely shitfaced. Then he went up on stage. He had this beautiful, almost operatic voice, finished his song, sat down for another hour and then went up and did it again. It became increasingly evident that he clearly went on cruises specifically to do karaoke. I’m not just assuming that. It was pretty obvious that this was his thing that floated his boat.

Then, of course, you have people who are part of one of the entertainment acts on the ship and are clearly there to boost their egos and, more importantly, promote whatever performance they’re putting on. But anyone who was there who genuinely wanted to sing did, and those who didn’t just watched everyone else make complete tits of themselves. I remember on the cruise we went on last year, my stepson doing the karaoke and his brother holding me with one arm over his eyes, saying, ‘Chris, please make it stop.’

Anyway, we somehow managed to accomplish another eight hours of drinking and eventually returned to the cabin, where I gorged on the chocolate brownie I’d half-finished from somewhere else. So much for the Wellness Café.