I’m saving up for a cruise. Not words I ever thought I’d write, but times change and we change with them if we’ve any sense at all.
For this will be the cruise of a lifetime. Literally. As soon as I retire/am sacked/have saved enough money, whichever comes first, I’m off. This will come as something of a surprise to those who know me. For I do not travel. For most of my life, I haven’t even had a passport (or a driver’s licence. There are preppers in Montana who live less off-grid than I effectively do). I did a week in France on a school exchange programme when I was 16 (et non merci to doing it une autre fois), three weeks in New York for work in my early thirties (very nice, but you have to fly there and back and I nearly died of terror), then married a man who didn’t have a passport or the urge to travel either, then had a baby who didn’t express a preference either way, so those trips have been the sum total of my adventures abroad.
But, as I read the news this week about the cruise industry finally bouncing back from the knock it took during the pandemic (when ships basically took on a reputation, deserved or not, for being floating petri dishes for the coronavirus) and having a bumper year. Nearly 2.3 million British and Irish holidaymakers took to the seas this year, 14.9 per cent up on even 2019, the last year before all hell broke loose.
And I suddenly got it. Not Covid – the point of cruises. Because what’s the worst part of going on holiday? It’s the goddamn admin, isn’t it? The research, the planning, the catering – if you’ve been daft enough to accumulate a family – to all tastes, finding and booking flights, accommodation, activities, planning daily itineraries. If you try and keep it simple, you just end up doing all the domestic crap you have to do at home but with a washing machine and oven you don’t understand, and if you stay in hotels you go broke.
With a cruise, I realise now, almost all of that goes – if you’ll pardon the pun, though there’s no reason why you should – overboard. You find a ship, get on a ship, and stay on the ship. Get off the ship if and when you want to for the things other people have planned for you, or just to trot round the place it’s resting in on your own for a bit, get back on the ship, go on to the next place. It’s a portable home, effectively bringing the world to your doorstep! But one that does all your laundry and cooking for you! So it’s a portable hotel too, but cheaper (you’ve got to spend some money, people. Although I’m wondering how difficult it is to be a stowaway these days. They’re big, those ships! Got to be some useful nooks and crannies. I’ll investigate and get back to you).
This is surely the closest you are ever going to come to being relieved of all adult responsibilities. Especially if you do it my way and plan to save until the child goes away to university so you don’t have to take him with you, and then take to the high seas yourself at the beginning of every term. All of you meet up on terra firma for his holidays, then you’re off again. Oh, I can’t wait.
I know – I know what you’re about to say. Floating hotel, floating home – but also, floating prison. A floating prison but full of uncaged people, free to roam, free to mingle, free to talk to you at any time. An introvert’s hell, in other words. And it’s true that we must be careful. The introvert must not go on a cruise too young. But let me assure you that once the true introvert is safely out of his or her thirties, all danger has passed. The world, in your forties, is what you make it. Your store of f**ks in all matters – at work, at home, in dealing with British Gas – is rapidly dwindling anyway.
I could isolate myself on a shipful of hundreds of chatterboxes as easily as I now do at a party, at a meeting, at a family gathering or school event. These don’t even register as intrusions any more. I quite fancy the challenge offered by a bigger venue and a longer exposure, to be honest. “See the world and no one” will be my motto.
I do not, despite the constant urging we are all subjected to these days, view ageing particularly positively. Somehow I just can’t get away from the idea that it just means moving further towards death, with an inevitable accrual of aches, pains, grievances and griefs along the way. But this sudden new light cast on an old idea that I had always instantly dismissed, if it even entered my consciousness sufficiently to warrant active rejection, gives me hope that there may be more to life on the downward slope (still towards death, you can’t get away from that) than I can yet appreciate, and which may take the edge off the unrelieved indignities and infirmities I otherwise see lining the way.
Basically, I’ve think I’ve figured out a way to avoid cooking and changing duvet covers for a goodly portion of my remaining years and I am happy. A life on the ocean wave beckons gloriously.