I wrote an article for Town and Country about cruising the Atlantic on board the Queen Mary 2.
Here’s the published article
And here’s my original unedited version…
‘When the storm clouds are riding through a winter’s sky, sail away, sail away..’
So sang a hero of mine, the great Nöel Coward. And the storm clouds were indeed gathering as I boarded the Queen Mary 2 one chilly Friday in Brooklyn last December.
It has come to my attention that in the same way I seem to have effortlessly glided into middle age, I have also become a middle aged man who cruises.
Let me be clear: both middle age and cruises were once topics I rarely thought of, and when I did it was with utter disdain. Not in any logical sense of course because I had absolutely no experience of either, and though the former is inexorable I had just decided it, like cruising, wasn’t my cup of tea. Middle age sounded like something I’d get around to when I was less busy. And cruising sounded old fashioned and, well, middle aged.
But life has a funny way of confounding all your expectations, doesn’t it? Although I’m still enjoying the same sparkly social life I have reveled in since I moved to New York in my early thirties (even actually opening my own club to ensure both a venue and a constant stream of new friends to party with!) I will very shortly be hitting sixty. And that chilly morning at the Brooklyn Shipyards was the beginning of my third - yes, count them, third – Cunard transatlantic crossing! I am now it seems a seasoned cruiser (and not in the way I used to be!)
So how did this transmogrification occur? Well, the answer to the middle age part is obvious, but the second boils down to my attempts to be a good son.
About fifteen years ago, my mum had recently been bereaved and as a family we had gone through a pretty traumatic time after I appeared on the BBC genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are? and discovered (on camera) that my grandfather (mum’s dad) had died in Malaysia playing Russian roulette, and as if that wasn’t bad enough my estranged father came out of the woodwork to tell me I wasn’t actually his biological son. But he was lying. Yes, really! I wrote a book about it if you want the full gory story.
Anyway, the point is, I thought it would be nice to spend some concentrated, quality time with my mother and I knew that she and her recently deceased partner had enjoyed many Cunard cruises together so I overcame my prejudices, bit the bullet, and took her across the Atlantic aboard the QM2.
It turned out that all my worries, all the things about the journey that I initially baulked at turned out to be the very things I enjoyed most!
First of all the length: seven nights trapped aboard an ocean liner with two thousand white haired wrinklies?! Then there were the fuddy duddy rules about formal dress for dinner some nights and 1920s costume parties and a red and gold ball. And what would I do all day? What would I do with all that time? I mean, really.
Well, yes, the passengers aboard the QM2 definitely skewer a bit older and whiter in both skin tone as well as hair colour (though look who’s talking), but the dressing for dinner and the costume evenings were a kind of fun portal though which I was able to sense the experience of what cruising used to and should still be. Stepping back in time sartorially to another era reminded me that people used to travel this way not for leisure but necessity, and in so doing, like Shakespeare’s wise old sage Jaques, gained their experience. There is a beauty to travel we have lost. In a few hours we can traverse the planet and think little of it. Only our jet-lagged bodies remind us how bizarre such an act actually is. So, in doing such a, yes, old fashioned thing as cruising the Atlantic for a week, I feel I have rediscovered – but personally learned for the first time - that the journey is more important than the destination.
And as for my worries about what I would do with my time? I didn’t have enough. I would cheerfully have turned around at Southampton and stayed onboard for another week! My schedule was packed! There is a great gym and spa, so my physical needs were sorted, and there is also a late night club where many’s a night I whiled away some wee hours on the dance floor (usually with with the children or even grandchildren of my passenger peers!) And who knew about the lectures? On this last cruise there was a series on the history of theatre, so right up my street, including one dedicated to Noel Coward - himself an avid cruiser -and even one about the 17th century playwright Aphra Behn. I mean, come on!! And then there was the planetarium, water colour classes, a talk about impressionism, piano recitals, as well as all the other staples like cinema and Broadway style entertainment in the evenings. There is even a nightly LGBT mixer in the Commodore bar so any withdrawals from communing with my queer tribe were easily sated! (On my first cruise this merry gathering was listed more cryptically on the ship’s daily calendar as Friends of Dorothy and when I asked why this had been replaced by its current, more generic acronym I was told it was because some of the younger passengers didn’t know what the FOD moniker meant. ‘Well, they should learn’, came my slightly crusty reply!).
I ate mostly in the Grills restaurant, the one allotted to Grills suite passengers, and it was always great. I am vegan and gluten free and that was all easily and deliciously accommodated. But every few steps there is some fun or elegant or whatever floats your boat kind of bar or eaterie. And if you want silence and calm and the peace to read a book, you don’t need to stay in your cabin but can go to the beautiful ship’s library.
So in conclusion, I have learned many lessons from cruising the Atlantic and they have infused my land life too:
Question what you abhor in a knee jerk way, for it may be the very thing you end up enjoying most. Then question why you even have a knee jerk prejudice to something without the knowledge or experience to merit it.
And even more importantly, it’s not just about where you get to. If your memory of a vacation is tainted by the sandwich of hideously frantic airport experiences at either end of it, maybe think again about how you travel and why. And finally, try to think of travel in a more holistic way. Sometimes in our rush to get to what’s next, we might miss the best part of now.