Dec 19, 2007, Noon in the Azores

Heavy Weather

While I was in Southampton I read an article in the Sunday New York Times about a passenger mutiny on the Sapphire Princess in Asia. The passengers rebelled because the officers cancelled three ports due to weather. A typhoon was bearing down on them, making three ports dangerous. 

Mobile phones have changed everything in the cruise ship business. As soon as there’s any hint of something gone wrong on a ship within range of a cell tower, the passengers are dialing up CNN and reporting the crisis, whether real or imagined. 

Happy 21st Caitlin

Today is Caitlin’s 21st birthday. She’s a little hard to get ahold of at this point in her life, but maybe she’ll stumble across this posting in her old man’s blog. Happy birthday Caitlin!

I remember two things about my 21st, back when the earth had just cooled. I remember going to Bonisio’s Liquor on Pacific Avenue in Santa Cruz and demanding that the clerk check my ID, at which time he said, “Well, you could have fooled me.” To which I replied, “Well I have been, for the last 3 years.”

And Margie Baer and Ginger gave me a cheese, an Edam if I remember right. Thanks, Ginger, and thanks, Margie, wherever you are.

December 14-15, 2007

We’re experiencing the other side of the English gene pool. More specifically, the people on this cruise--the 2-day booze cruise to the city of Zeebrugge in Belgium (actually little more than a ferry terminal with a railhead. We left Southampton Friday at 5 in the afternoon (which is night here this time of year), spending Saturday in Zeebrugge, arriving back to Southampton at 8 in the morning on Sunday. At that time we will have the turnaround for the Caribbean, but that’s another story. 

When you have a sale like this, allowing anyone with 500 pounds to sail on the once-mighty QE2, you’re throwing the doors open to folks the likes of whom are unable to normally make the usual trips. A lot of folks arrived drunk, the rest of whom soon caught up with these pioneers. To say that this situation has changed the feel of the ship would be a gross understatement. There are drunks everywhere, even in the corridors.

At the end of the night I had a seventy-something passenger come up to me and try to pick a fight over Dean Martin’s music. Jim interceded, or there’s no telling where this guy’s aggressive attitude might have ended up.

I guess the best way to explain the passengers is to think of Hyacinth from Keeping Up Appearances, the BBC show that ran on PBS a few years ago, where she has the bad fortune to have been born into a family of utter sods, who she tries valiantly to distance herself from or even to disown. That lot, the brother-in-law with the wife beater t-shirts and the father who can no longer speak but still wanders off to the town, the heavily made up and frequently divorced sister, these are the people making up our passengers for this cruise.

And the ship isn’t helping either, by not feeding the drunk passengers enough food at the buffet. We musicians get to do the buffet in its last 20 minutes, from 12:10 to 12:30. Usually there are 4 servers behind the buffet line, which makes for an efficient delivery system of a half-full room. Last night, 12:10, a full room, there were two servers and about half a load of food on the buffet line. 

Trevor, whom I have reason to believe because he genuinely loves this ship, overheard some bloke say, in pure Cockney, “Here now, give us some fucking chicken here!” There were reports of passengers snatching serving spoons and in other ways taking command of the situation. 

Now, this is the same Lido Buffet where we are prevented from going into the chow line before 12:10 am by the manager, who often will prevent us until later when the passenger count is perceived by him to be high. And where, you might ask, was the manager when this anarchy was breaking out in the buffet line? Nowhere to be seen, that’s where.

After the buffet closed, 8 minutes early, Stevie, Sian and I went down to the mess to have a cup of tea (yes, it’s come to this, but there are worse habits I suppose). Sian was obsessing about a change in the IPM schedule that put her on the list for the day, preventing her from going to town. There was also a unannounced schedule change in the rotation on tea time, where she plays the harp with the two piano players. Stevie and I just advised her to do what she wanted, obtaining forgiveness if needed rather than permission.

But the most interesting thing when we came out of the mess around 2 into the corridor of Deck 1.  There was a passenger coming our way when we came out who had the most zombie-like expression, drunk to beat the band.

When we arrived at Zeebrugge at 8 am the captain announced that the trains had gone on strike, which kind of killed my plan to go to Brugge for the day. It turns out that Belgium hasn’t had a working government for 5 months because of tension between the Flemish and the Walloons, so the rail workers don’t have a clue who they’re dealing with. There were trains coming and going, but the feeling was that the passengers might be surprised where they might end up. All of the taxies were booked, busses were full, and I just decided to boot it and do a bit of shopping for things like detergent. Had a nice coffee with Jim in a cafe owned by a expat Brit from Manchester. Jim too is horrified that the passengers are so crude by comparison. Well, it’s just a couple days after all. 

Tomorrow we’re in Southampton until 5, when we head for warm waters by way of the Azores.

December 7-14, 2007

There’s sure to be a special place in hell for marketing geniuses who plan voyages for cruise ships. Much is promised, little often delivered. Our parent company, Carnival, is notorious for painting lipstick on the pig that is the Caribbean, for example. 

The latest disappointment is the current cruise, which the geniuses in the marketing department dubbed the Christmas Markets cruise, voyage number QE722. The only problem is that the Christmas markets which we’re supposed to visit are on land, while we are at sea. We left Thursday, and we are still plowing the waters well into Sunday. 

Why? Well, it would be useful and instructive to consult a historical weather map for December for the following countries before planning this one out: England, Germany, Norway, Holland and Belgium. An expectation for stormy conditions would have been drawn from these readily-available documents, and maybe even a whopper of a winter storm. 

So what is it, then, that made the 1700-odd passengers, many of them Germans, most English, and 71 of us Yanks presume that historical trends would be suspended and a ray of sunshine would light QE2’s way through the Christmas markets of northern Europe in the middle of December?

Whoever that was has been proven wrong. First, two of the ports were switched. Hamburg was to have been our first, on the day after leaving Southampton. Originally that was supposed to have been Oslo, after a sea day. But nooooo, Hamburg it is. Or it wasn’t, because while we left in a force 9 gale, we approached in a force 10, enough to scare off the pilot boat if we’re to believe the captain. His hasty plan for an alternative was to contact Oslo and advise that we would be arriving early, only, only . . . 

When we came to the bay at the top of Jutland, where we used to come with the Star and slip without delay into the Oslo fjord. we suddenly went from heading 360 degrees to heading 240, going northwest, and made lazy circles in the bay for a good 16 hours. This is open water, in the North Sea, mind you. More bumps, but at least the weather had improved. We did not enter the Oslo fjord, smooth as glass, until well into the afternoon. The captain had made the announcement at 9 in the morning that we were delayed this afternoon, but the crew had the 5:30 arrival last night by 8:00. So what’s the real story? Who knows? But there are a lot of disgruntled Christmas shoppers aboard this vessel right now. 

Last night there was a as interment of the ashes of one of the guys who used to play trombone on the ship’s band a decade or so ago. He had met an American woman passenger while he was working on QE2, married her, became an American citizen and, before his death, expressed the wish that half his ashes be spread in the sea from this ship, and half of them in the area of England where he was brought up. Aside from the tragedy of this event, there are instructive dimensions to this, because I can’t think of another ship that would inspire this kind of loyalty. Not one of the Princess ships I worked on could fill the bill.  

The Illusionist was the movie in the afternoon, guaranteeing that I’d be missing the twilight minutes when we could make out the contours of the Fjord.. In Norway, the sun rose at 8:06 and set at 4:10. That explains a lot about the Norwegians--for example why so many of them moved to the tropical paradise which is Minnesota.

After the Illusionist, I met Jim Coglan, a very interesting Irish priest who’s the chaplain on board. Talk about an interesting guy! A counsellor, he’s been doing woodturning for a hobby for four years and he’s used the prodigious skills he’s developed to create a symbology for healing of multi-generational family issues. He’s a Jungian therapist, among a lot of other stuff. I think he’s on to something and you can look up his website by Googling his name if you want more information.

So we finally pull in to Oslo, dark, cold and expensive, and I am informed that, due to the missed port, Oslo would be my turn for in-port manning and, because there were auditors aboard, the security system wouldn’t allow me to go ashore. 

With the sea days, scheduled and unscheduled I haven’t been ashore since Southampton, and there’s another sea day ahead with a boat drill in Rotterdam on Wednesday, the 12th. But I’ve decided that I will go ashore in Rotterdam, maybe not the rail trip to Amsterdam some people are planning, but less stressful, time-consuming. (I ended up walking the pier in Rotterdam, having more a extensive shoreside in Zeebrugge. An the wily Belgians!)

A couple guys are flying home for the holidays, including Pete, whose home is Plano, Texas, on his first contract with the company. How he pulled that one off I’ll never know! Oh well, you don’t ask you don’t get. So I didn’t and I won’t. Next time, though . . . 

My friend Sian is engaged, her boyfriend having done the kneel down thing when he came down in Southampton complete with a rock. Nice sensible guy, knows what he’s getting himself into. 

Off to the ever-popular costume ball, where the masks are sold by the dancing instructors and then to sleep. Last night, after we left Oslo we entered into the North Sea once again instead of the bathwater-still Baltic through the Belt by Copenhagen, resulting in much loss of sleep.

The morning of the 12th of December, at nine o’clock, in Rotterdam, after we’d parked the boat for about 2 hours, the Queen Victoria went by the QE2 for the first time. Preceded by a spouting fireboat, the Queen Victoria was on its shakedown cruise, having had her naming ceremony in Southampton a couple days before, in a ceremony that must have cost the company a decade of entertainment budgets for the entire fleet from Carnival to Princess to Costa to Cunard. 

The Victoria, representing the new and snazzy Cunard, will follow us like a Doppelganger when we cross in advance of our World Cruise.) It somehow escaped my notice that the Queen Elizabeth 3 was announced, to be sailing in 2010.) The QV was made by Fincantierri, the maker of most of the modern Princess ships (except for the Sapphire and  Diamond, which were made by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Japan). 

This is quite a departure for Cunard, which has had every ship since the earth cooled made by the John Brown shipyard outside Glasgow. Don’t think little details like this go unnoticed by the passengers. Although most of the people looking at the QV were just blown away by the sight of her, some had comments deriding the new design, which follows the current design among not just Princess, but RCL and every other profitable cruise line: The Holiday Inn with a hull. 

QE2 is so far away from this design that it looks by comparison like a battleship with a fancy paint job. It’s not a cruiser, it’s a liner. And it’s the last one out there.

Of course, it’s easy to reject modernism out of hand, and that was the source of most of the comments above decks this morning. So many things have changed for the worse. Strong opinions, but maybe they’re right. Look at how music turned out, becoming a crap tool of capital to market consumerism. 

Jan thinks that big band music, even when played by little bands, is sounding its death knell as the generation which occupies QE2’s cabins passes from the scene. I held out hope that quality would rise to the occasion. Maybe I’ve been hopelessly naive. Maybe it’ll all disappear. Well, that’s the risk we take I guess. 

Coming up: Stevie has been here 22 years, playing guitar. Trevor has been here 13 years, playing drums. They adapt and they endure. Both of them are horrified at the changes that have taken place around here. 

I’m having a wonderful time with the new Mac OS. How they’ve pulled off another distinctive, functional upgrade in OS 10.5 I’ll never know. Too bad Apple doesn’t make cruise ships. Or liners.

Hope you’re all well and enjoying your Christmas shopping, more so than the passengers of this unhappy vessel.  

Next: a booze cruise to challenge even the Azure Seas, and a three-week Caribbean adventure, from and to Southampton. When that’s over, we do an Atlantic crossing and the World Cruise starts.

Innocents Abroad, here we come!

Last trip through the Canaries

There ought to be a law that I have to follow about keeping up with my writing. I’ve been doing some, but I haven’t been very systematic about it, like I was on the Star, where I kept a journal that fed the blog. I’m near the seventh week of my contract on QE2, and although adjusting to the ship has been tough, I think it’s time to get the old daily or at least a couple times weekly routing going. 

I’ve had some health problems, probably the result of the whole Orpheus fiasco, with my blood pressure cresting at just under 200 over 100. The doctor aboard the ship has been patient, and I brought it down to normal because of the drugs I got from Dr. Moran before I left Austin. 

There have been several challenges otherwise, but nothing serious. The thing about having high blood pressure is that you can get sent home any time they decide to. I’d been obsessing about the implications of being sent home, and that’s not a good idea. Not only will you leave an unfulfilled contract, probably meaning you won’t work again, but there’s that little matter of getting past security at Heathrow with 2 saxophones over my shoulder. That’s enough to raise my blood pressure all over again.

This ship has its moments. When I ran into Kerry at the Colosseum in Rome and told him what I’ve been doing, he said he’d heard that the Queen’s Room was a brutal gig. I enjoy it, though. Three hours of face time is enough to help me through a lot of difficulties in my playing. The guys in the band were strangers, then cordial, then they all came together musically. Well, there’s still a problem with Pedro, who is trying his best to make the gig and the band into something they are not, which is more hip but not the point. 

The other band is another story. Everybody does their job, a part of which is complaining about the musical triviality of the acts. But much of it is good-natured kvetching, because otherwise why the hell wouldn’t guys in the show band make their own shows, in light of their superior musical tastes. (The desire not to stand out is strong in the herd mentality that is musicians’ lives. Fear of flopping might also have a lot to do with it.)

I’m sitting in the Grand Lounge for a rehearsal of Kyle Esplin’s show, which is something I was on the other side of on the Star. Between Kyle and Mac Frampton, no piano was safe. I remember all the complaining Kyle generated because he was Scottish and did Jerry Lee Lewis and played the piano and had inferior charts and aside from the fact that each criticism was demonstrably right, it’s pointless to criticize the acts. It’s an exercise in futility. They’re acts and we’re musicians and there are few transfers processed across that membrane. 

And then there’s the individual musicians, like Sian the harp player from Wales, Simon the chauvinistic Brit from Cornwall and Frankie the Israeli loudmouth who plays piano and sings with the reverb at painful levels. 

We in the Queens Room band get a lot exposure to the Gentlemen Hosts, who are there to keep the single women dancing. I’ve been wondering if they ever got lucky, and maybe at some point between now and when he leaves I’ll be able to ask Cornelius Cousins from New Orleans what the deal is. I know they pay their way at reduced rates. They pay their own way. They help out on tours in the daytime. But no idea right now. There’s a story there, though, somewhere. 

Last night, coming in close to Southampton, we had one of those tipping things happen at around 7:40. I was setting up my horns for the 8:00 set when one of the speakers that has a corner of the stage started slipping with the ship’s tipping, and finally fell. Not a problem in and of itself, but the line of fronts was in the way and so they went too, and along with them a mic stand and my flute, which I’d set up already and put on its stand. Just then Jim, the bandleader, came into the room and knew something had to be done, some decision had to be made, and went to find one of his superior officers so he could consult. The word came back from Warren, the cruise director, to leave the pile and play anyway. Which would have been fine, except the ship kept doing tips, so we were obliged to tip with it. Brian, the pianist, almost tipped backwards. Tentatively, dancers started to do their thing, but there was an almost comical incident on a quickstep where a couple was so driven by inertia that they had no choice but to tumble into another couple who were seated at ringside. The comedy was their faces as they danced by the band knowing that they were headed for a certain collision 10 meters away. Someone could have been really hurt, but luckily they had enough time to plan out their landing so the damage was minimal (though I’ll bet the lady had a few bruises). But clearly someone could have been hurt. Jim, to his credit, closed the dance floor and suddenly and unexpectedly we were playing at a jazz club to an attentive audience of non-dancers. Too band we didn’t think about taking advantage of the situation and modifying the repertoire. We could have lost the tango medleys. 

My mood darkened. Clearly the cruise director was not reasoning well, making us play when the ship was lurching side to side. I have many thousands of dollars of equipment on the stage, to say nothing of my health, and I was risking all in this situation so that there would be dance music in the Queens Room. I believe in fighting the good fight, but this is ridiculous. 

All forgotten now, I’m in an upstairs Starbucks sipping coffee and NOT using their T-Mobile connection, which costs 10 pounds for 24 hours of internet. I’ll be hoofing it to the internet place in the class C mall’s basement as soon as the coffee’s gone. 

This is the place where the QE2’s cruises, which to date have been to the Med and the Canaries--basically from the dreary, gloomy Southampton, change. We’re going to Oslo, Hamburg, Rotterdam, and Zebrugge on the cruise starting this afternoon. Then a 2 day back to Zebrugge. Followed by the long march to the Caribbean, where we’ll be having sea days galore (including Christmas and New Years days).We’ll be back in Southampton in the middle of January and off we’ll go to the World Cruise.

23 November 2007

We pulled into Civitiavecchia early in the morning of the 21st, but the crew bus to Rome ($20 for us--Do not discuss this rate with passengers!) did not leave until 10 am. After the Giza experience I didn’t know what to expect. A nice bus (or coach as the British insist on calling it) certainly. No tour guide this time, though. When the flyers advertising the crew bus was put up it made no bones about this being a bus ride to the Vatican’s bus parking lot, from which we could spread out independently on the town.

That’s exactly what we did. As for me, I was the first on the crew bus at 9:30. We left on schedule. As we left the port I caught sight of the Star Princess, parked on the other side of the harbor. That ship was my home in the Baltic in the summer of 2006, and again last December for two weeks when I did a short subbing gig in the Caribbean. We climbed out of the harbor and the city to the hills toward Rome. The hills, dotted with greenhouses for flower growing and truck farmers, reminded me of Encinitas and Pacific Beach before the developers remade the land. Even the gullies between the hills, seen from the bridges as we sped along the Autostrada resembled the trenches along 101 in the old days. How long these flower gardens and truck farms will last is anyone’s guess. I’m betting that the EU with its support of local farming will preserve this stretch of coastline for at least a little while.

We transited a couple monumental tunnels, which the Italians have excelled at since the Romans built roads, and then suddenly we were in the suburbs of Rome, surrounded by garden centers and supermarkets and car lots selling Fiats and Citroens. The transition was sudden and unexpected. And the traffic was appalling. What space a car could not occupy a scooter would. Yes, they park on the sidewalks. 

Seeing this all from the comfort of our coach was mildly amusing until you realize that you would soon be walking and trying to cross these streets. 

We were dropped off in a multi-story bus parking lot next to the Vatican, as promised, an hour and a half after leaving the port. The driver pointed to the exit that would take us to St. Peter’s Square and told us to be back at 3:30, so we wouldn’t have to compete to get on the gangway with the several buses filled with QE2 passengers who were on various Roman tours. Everyone on the crew lives with a dread fear that they will miss some deadline for some bus somewhere and end up standing on the dock watching their ship sail into the distant horizon, so we don’t have to be told twice about these matters. 

I entered the tunnel, navigating the escalators and stairs until I saw daylight. And there was St. Peter’s, and in the middle of it all, maybe a kilometer away, was the Pope. He was greeting several youth delegations, and his televised image was broadcast throughout the square by 4 Jumbotrons and one of the best PA systems I’ve ever heard.  I took stills and movies of him from the great distance, on the other side of the square entirely, and while he might be a red speck to those looking at the images, I can assure you he is the Pope. 

(I recall a similar event described by Sam’l. Clemens in The Innocents Abroad. In fact, there is enough similarity between this cruise and that book that I’m wondering if there might be a copy up in the library.)

Satisfied that I’d done all the Pope viewing I was likely to do and scared of the stories of the lines inside the Vatican’s walls, I chose to seek the sights of Rome, and immediately got turned around and headed for Civitiavecchia. Soon enough I corrected the error by means of a map generously provided by the bus driver, a map that made Rome look like the crazy quilt of streets that it is.

I was aiming for the Coliseum, because it was on the other side of the map and everyone told me that it was the most interesting thing to see. I knew that there was another monumental Roman construction that stood between the Vatican and the Coliseum that was of more interest to me as a typesetter, though. First I would see Trajan’s Column, the place where modern display typography was more or less born where workers took their chisels and set the elegant Roman capitals which set the stage for my old business a few hundred years later. 

But first I thought I’d break for lunch, it being noon. Given the choice of gastronomic delights available to the saxophonist walking the streets of Rome, you might raise an eyebrow when I tell you that I found McDonalds impossible to resist, but there you are. Back home I hadn’t been in a McDonalds in a couple years. Now I duck in to Madiera and Rome, although in Madiera it was just for coffee. (And it was, I feel sure, Nescafe, which is drunk with impunity on the ship and off.) I had a hamburger and a Coke and felt quite American--an American with 5.50 Euros less in his wallet. But I ended up sitting with an energetic group of 10-year-old Italian students who were on a school excursion. Same deal as the kids in Egypt--the kids were enjoying a connectedness with American culture through their Happy Meals (though the text on the boxes was in Italian). The McDonalds staff was only too happy to bring along these youngsters, of course. They might only buy from the bargain menu, where a bare-bones hamburger is one Euro per, but they’ll buy. And while the other crew delighted in the foccacio and pizza for street food and those who ducked into a trattoria enjoyed spaghetti and other Italian delights, I had a quick burger with the young locals. 

I have to admit that I didn’t exercise my coffee Jones in Rome, which I regret more than the hamburger thing. It may be because I didn’t see any of the green signs of Strabucks on my walk. I might be more American than I think. Maybe if I had more time I’d have felt more adventurous. 

The thing about walking Rome is that all of the buildings are no more than six stories high, which makes spotting even distant structures easy. By the time I was walking out of McDonalds I was seeing the Capitol and the Capitoline Museum peeking past a couple rows of houses. The Forum was just beyond that, and the Colosseum after that, at the other end of the Foro Romano. 

Onward to the mothership of all typography, Trajan’s column, which is in the Forum district, where there’s a ton of archeological activity going on. The whole area being excavated by the look of things, down to the catacombs, basements, and baths. 

Conveniently there are helpful signs which are in Italian (and why not--they are footing the bill I suppose) but you get the general idea what’s going on all around you. The column is portrayed in a series of what look to be travel book illustrations from the 1700s onward, a somewhat disquieting look at the place where you’re standing, only populated by gentlemen in top hats and ladies with wide bustles instead of the modern Rome all around you. The column endures anyway. It portrays, barber pole style, the story of Rome from the beginning to its glory days at the top. It’s at the top that the names of the rulers of Rome are displayed, and it’s here that display type begins. So great is the artistry of the carvers of the letterforms at the top of the column that they started a new and unexpected industry once type met paper, hundreds of years later. There’s even a typeface called Trajan that is built on these capitals, along with a lower case that the designer added. 

I spent a half hour at the column, as close as I could get anyway. The excavations meant that there were fences everywhere. By now it’s getting to be two in the afternoon, and with the Colosseum within spitting distance I know I’ve got to make haste to get back to the Vatican parking lot before the bus leaves. 

It’s here that I stumble into an old pattern which Jan calls hey-manning. That’s when musicians who have played together or who play with one person in common improbably get together in some street corner thousands of miles from home. This is something that doesn’t happen to accountants, apparently, but it happens to me all the time. So here I’m walking up the Foro Romano, past the Forum with the Colosseum in sight and I see someone who I used to play with on the Grand Princess. I noticed that the Star Princess, where I also worked, was across the harbor from QE2, but I had no idea that Kerry was working there. So I caught up with him and we did our hail-fellow-well-met and our hey-manning. I met his girlfriend and took their pictures in front of the Colosseum and it was good, but by then all I could do was circle the fabled building and make haste for the Vatican parking lot. I’ll save the inside visit for another time. 

When I got back to the bus park it was full of tourists, including most of the crew of the USS Harry S. Truman, which was apparently in port as well, in their uniforms. They had security guys following them with coiled wires stuck in their ears and, I assume, packing heat in case there was any trouble. There wasn’t, but there you are.

We made it back to the ship without incident before there was any huge influx of passengers competing for gangway space and got back on board with enough time to eat dinner and get ready for the gig. 

Random Thoughts

This trip was 16 days. I felt like I was watching the passengers age, it was so long. 

We had an incident with a disgruntled dancer, a retired, slide-rule toting pocket protector white short sleeve t-shirt kind of guy from the look of him, who was just not keeping up with the rest of the dancers and looked around for someone to blame for his klutzy dancing and settled on us. We ended a set with a Quickstep, which is like it sounds: pretty snappy tempo where the more advanced dancers glide around the dance floor in cut time (2 to the band’s 4) and the less advanced dancers flail about  comically in the middle, trying to get their feet to do something, anything, to the music. Now, again, I mean this not to ridicule the couple in question, for I know I couldn’t do any better. 

When the tune came to a close Jim announced a break, and this goofus comes up to the stage and announces for the whole room to hear, “Why can’t you play a quickstep that’s slow enough to dance to?”

Of course, the definition of quickstep is fast, at least 180 on the metronome, so my guess is he wanted a swing tempo of around 140, which he could make his feet move to. But that’s no quickstep, and there are plenty of people who can do 180 and higher on the same dance floor. The problem lies not with the band but with the practicing. So Jim suggested that there are other ways to convey the information he had just made a fool of himself blurting out. 

Another gig in the life of a dance band musician. 

We were so long with these passengers that, because of the crew channel showing Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I started to imagine that the more Charles Laughton like among them could very well be Vogons, reading their awful poetry and being obsessed with filling out forms to do everything. Thank you Douglas Adams. You nailed that metaphor and made them speak perfect, though slow, English. 

We had three sea days after Rome, which is a portent of the world cruise to come, where we have just 31 ports in 90 days. There’s a lot of sea we’ll be seeing out in the Pacific. 

The Gentlemen Hosts are starting to interest me as character studies. What makes a retired man pay his own way to England to ride on a cruise ship so he can ride on a ship and dance with women who come on board alone? Do they get lucky? And what would constitute lucky? I’m hoping that my budding friendship with one of the Hosts, Cornelius from New Orleans, will enlighten me. 

Meanwhile we are a day out of Southampton (Starbucks, internet, drug store) heading for the Canaries once more, after which we are going to Oslo, Hamburg, Rotterdam and Zeebruge, then back to Southampton and once back again to Zeebruge for an overnight cruise. Then it’s a long haul to the Caribbean and back. 21 days. Hope there are not any Vogons on that one, and nobody trips on the quickstep.