Blog, this will be a long one.  I think the internet would deem it TLTR, but it’s just between you and me really, so I can look back some day and think ‘oh, that’s what happened,’ or ‘doesn’t time fly.’  I’ll break it up into instalments I think, relieving us all of time wasted spent reading (and writing) a copious amount of holiday journal drivel. Whether I have the stamina to finish it is another thing altogether.

On Tuesday 11^th July the husband and I set off on a two-week cruise to Norway, Iceland and Ireland.  We’d booked it a year ago, after developing a ‘we must do things now’ mindset; for time is fleeting, we are old and Covid robbed us of two years of whatever rapidly diminishing timespan we have left.  It had seemed like a good idea at the time blog, booking a cruise in a spirit of excitement and joy – “we’ll be going to Iceland!” I would regularly squeal at the husband, whilst completely forgetting that I am, in fact, the last person on earth who should ever attempt a holiday that involves getting anywhere near the Arctic Circle – in a boat – on the high seas.  So why cruise then?  Cruising gets an awfully bad rap and deservedly so when it comes to climate change.  Well, I won’t fly you see, and cruising has always seemed like the lesser of two enormous travelling evils, until I’m on the ship that is.

How to do this?  How to write up the myriad sensations and events that occurred whilst I was floating about in a giant tin can in the North Sea. Let’s go with headings. First things first.

Packing and Pre-Cruise Problems

I’m a believer in packing light. I managed to stuff all our cruising accoutrements into one largish suitcase, one smaller case and two small rucksacks. I printed off luggage labels and placed them in snazzy plastic pouches that came with stainless steel wires. These you affixed to the cases via a tiny screw mechanism, and I can use them again and again, should I ever be mad enough to go on another cruise.

I eschewed posh frocks, and a suit for hubby, as we would not be attending black tie evenings, neither would we be setting foot in MDR (main dining room.)  We perhaps would have done had the husband not booked our cruise as an Early Saver, forgetting to ask what that actually meant and I (who blocked out the cruise for an entire year due to anticipatory anxiety) didn’t bother to look it up.

As Early Savers we were effectively denied just about everything. We were like those impoverished emigrants on the Titanic, packed into our hovel quarters in the very bowels of the ship, as the gentry above us dined in the MDR every evening sipping on fine wines and champagne, whilst we danced a sad little Irish jig in our tiny, cramped cabin.

As Early Saver hoi polloi we were given the later MDR time slot of 8.30 pm every day. This meant we’d miss every entertainment show, being they all began at 8.30, whilst also being forced to eat at what, for me, was an ungodly hour. Oh, the perils of the husband’s natural money saving tendencies. Early Saver status also denied us complementary car parking at the port. Something we were to discover far too late, and which led to a frantic phone call to one of the husband’s mates, just a few days before departure, asking if he could drive us to Southampton.  The friend was happy to. We were grateful. That the friend was 80 was neither here nor there.  I won’t fully describe the perils of the drive that ensued; enough to say it involved multiple slammings-on of the brakes, a couple of wrong turns and several near misses.  ‘That’s the last time you book Early Saver for anything’ I hissed at the husband as we arrived at the port shaken but unscathed. But I remain every so grateful to the friend.

Day One 11^th July – Embarkation

We’d partially chosen our cruise because we’d be travelling on P&O’s Aurora and she (ships are anthropomorphised) had previously taken us, and the sons, to Norway in 2012, just for a week.

I like Aurora. She’s small (all things relative when you’re talking about a ship that weighs over 76,000 tonnes), holds 1868 passengers, is very manageable in terms of getting around onboard and has a pleasing understated Britishness – all wooden railings, wooden decks, hints of 1930s Art Deco and every kind of tea available in the buffet.  She’s now adult only. The average age of those who boarded with us must easily have been 70+, meaning the husband and I felt quite the spring chickens, a definite unforeseen perk.  There were also a good many passengers way past the 70+ mark and I take my hat off to them for managing a holiday that very nearly scuppered my sanity.

We were relieved of our baggage as soon as we got out of the car and then directed to a queue in the distance. It took 10 minutes to get into the departure lounge, a further 10 to show our passports etc before being directed to sit down in a waiting area. We sat a while before being called to the security area where we took off our coats, emptied our pockets, removed metal items and plonked our rucksacks on a conveyor belt. I sailed through the metal detector archway only to be approached by a woman, who tapped me on the arm, asking that I open my rucksack as it came through the conveyor belt. ‘She (pointing at the lady viewing the scanner) saw something’ she whispered urgently into my face.  Oh heck, thought I. Has someone planted something nefarious in my rucksack?  Surely the horde of septuagenarian and octogenarian cruisers behind me did not include drug smugglers in their midst. I opened my rucksack and invited her to rummage around; instead, she ordered that I empty the contents. I did so in the most obsequious manner possible. ‘Do you have a hair straightener in there? she asked with a sudden ferocity.  Now, I am such a stranger to hair appliances that this question momentarily sidelined me. What’s a hair straightener? my addled brain asked itself, having lost the ability to think straight in the face of possible incarceration in a cruise prison block. Is it some kind of weapon?  And, at that point, I gently sank down into the twilight zone.

The security woman brought me back to reality by saying the scanner had seen something long and metal in my bag. I found my voice and pointed out that there was nothing in my bag other than a bog roll (multi-purpose) a kindle (I’d brought The Brontes by Juliet Barker along with me) a phone and a charger.  The woman then sighed and said in a world-weary kind of way, ‘Oh just carry on, she probably saw it in someone else’s bag and got confused.’   What? I inwardly screamed; P&O security measures rely on staff who get a bit muddled? 

Once we got past what I’m now, laughingly, calling security, we hastened along a metal ramp and, before we knew it, were stepping onto Aurora.

Onboard

My first impression on boarding was that the ship looked slightly faded, slightly tatty around the edges – my eyes homed in on scuff marks on the walls, gouge marks in the plaster, some areas in need of a paint job.  The husband was oblivious to all this, but then not everyone is blessed with ‘really remarkable vision’ as my optometrist pointed out during my annual review just two days after the cruise. He was so taken with my visual acuity, being also amazed to find it had improved since I last saw him due to a posterior vitreous detachment, that he urged me to now submit my application to be a fighter pilot which was, of course, funny since I’m an old, old woman.

We were directed to deck 7 and shown our muster station C where we would meet should a catastrophe at sea occur. Here a girl recorded our arrival and directed us to our cabin. We were in our cabin almost immediately, second deck up from the bottom but with a lovely large window to look out of due to a surprise upgrade we’d had a few weeks before.  ‘Oh, thank you, thank you P&O,‘ I’d silently intoned. It’s amazing how servile you get when you’re an Early Saver.

One of the big Covid changes, since we last cruised, was that you no longer need to attend the emergency drill. Instead, an emergency drill film was shown repeatedly on our cabin telly and we only had to faff about with our life jackets in the privacy of our own room. This mostly consisted of the husband donning his life jacket, then taking a photo of himself looking terrified (as in, in mortal peril at sea) and sending it to the ‘kids’. This I did not find even slightly amusing.

I kept my lifejacket at the bottom of my bed, close to hand, along with a change of clothes, my hiking boots and a hat, should the 7 beep emergency horn ever go off.  Upon conducting some serious research on lifeboats however, prior to the cruise, I now know that they’re pretty useless should a calamity occur, especially if the sea is a storm ridden mess. Being in a lifeboat is a nightmare scenario.  There’s no bog onboard – imagine that hell should you be stuck in one for a week. You’re crammed into them to the point of practically sitting on top of one another and they’ve only got enough food stores (a dried biscuit a day and a sip of water) to last a week, and limited fuel to get you to safety.  ‘Why am I going on a cruise?’ I would repeatedly ask myself as departure day loomed.

After rapidly unpacking and hanging everything up, we raced for the Horizon buffet on deck 12, quite a way up from our cabin. The buffet was practically empty.  ‘Remember what we said’, I reminded the husband as we sat at our table for two, munching on salad. ‘We’re following our usual healthy eating plan for two weeks. We are not descending to the level of cruise binging.’  ‘Totally agree,’ the husband replied and, as I looked out the buffet windows, I felt a pleasing holiday spirit rise within me. This buffet area is nice, thought I, with its pleasingly blue and cream striped chairs and little beige tables, and its tea, coffee, and fruit juice dispensers.  But most of all the ship isn’t moving yet. It’s like being in a nice café on land where you’re safe.

At around 4.30 pm the captain announced that Aurora would begin her motions to leave port. The sky was blue, the sun was out, the sea was like a mill pond. We went out on deck 12 to watch her leave Southampton. The husband took a photo of me standing at the railing. Suddenly a nice aged man appeared as from nowhere.  ‘Do you want me to take a photo of the two of you together?’  I didn’t want him to do that, such was my cruising tension on leaving the safety of port, but felt I couldn’t rudely turn him down. ‘Okay’ I said, thinking ‘well, it’s just one quick photo and nice of him to suggest it.‘

He took my phone and said: ‘Right, you two stand over there, put your arms around each other and look off to your right into the distance. I just saw you doing that and thought it would make a really good photo.’   Words cannot describe how my stomach sank upon learning I’d inadvertently met with an amateur ‘auteur’ photographer.  The husband and I (in a kind of shock) dutifully put our arms around each other’s waists and looked out at Southampton port, in an enigmatic manner, similar to that used by Garbo onboard a ship in the film Queen Christina.  Our photographer tapped the button. ‘Nothing’s happened,’ he cried. The husband checked he was tapping the correct button. He was, so he tried again.  After roughly 12 excruciating, aborted attempts at taking our posed photograph (wherein our facial expressions got kind of stuck) and during which the husband informed him, several times, that his finger was covering the camera (a fact he completely ignored) I suggested it was a doomed effort and we really didn’t mind about not getting the photo.  ‘Oh well, he said, disappointed and dejected, ‘I was just trying to help‘.  Blimey, who’d be a fashion model, thought I (as he and his wife walked away) if our limited experience of being photographed in totally unnatural poses was anything to go by.

That night we were instructed to put our clocks forward by an hour at 2.00am.

To be continued…..