Letters From Venice #5: Life on an Ocean Liner

Thanks to my partner, Robert, I have a small but growing collection of extremely expensive pens. The pens were actually free; it's just the places that he took them from that are costly.

I have pens from two of London's most prestigious hotels (The Connaught and Claridge's), another from one of London's most elite private clubs (The Tory Party's Carleton Club), another from one of New York's most historic hotels (home of the famous - and infamous - New Yorker Round Table), The Algonquin, and my favourite, due to its sleek design, from Virgin Atlantic's upper class.  Now, thanks to our voyage from New York to Southampton, England, aboard the Queen Mary 2 (QM2), en route to Venice, I have a pen from the Cunard line with which I jotted down these very notes.

The QM2 is an ocean liner ("the only one of her kind left," as two of the ship's Officers independently shared over dinner), not to be confused with a cruise liner. The distinction is a matter of which comes first: the ship or the hotel. A cruise liner is a hotel that just happens to have a hull, whereas an ocean liner is a double-plated hull that just happens to be shipping a hotel from port to port.

The resulting difference can be summarized as follows: I was previously on the cruise liner The Caribbean Princess (fitting on so many levels). The suite was large and chock-a-block with amenities, including a full four-piece bathroom. Comparatively, on the QM2, Robert and I were in one of the more upscale top deck staterooms. While equivalent in creature comforts to a four- or five-star hotel, it was not nearly as spacious as what I had experienced on the Caribbean Princess, and the bathroom was missing the tub.

On the other hand, to put things in perspective, the QM2 is built to weather an ocean crossing with maelstrom seas of 90-foot waves (roughly nine stories). The Caribbean Princess... well, not so much. I didn't miss the bathtub.

I should design the Cunard brochures. "You want a tub? I've got your tub! It's in your cruise liner Jacuzzi crypt on the muddy seabed of the Atlantic! There's your tub!"

The QM2 is a British liner and has few North American electrical sockets outside of the stateroom. Robert was aware that I was working on my third manuscript, so he offered to loan me a converter for my laptop; I would then have full range of the ship. Frequently traveling between England, Italy, and the United States, Robert has an inventory of plug converters in various permutations. On our trip, he had wisely brought along one (and only one).  It took the relatively delicate and innocuous North American prongs and capped them with the British, "Electricity is a damn bit of serious business, and we'll have no tomfoolery about it," industrial strength claw-like trident.

I came to discover, however, that it was a boomerang loan.  In short order, the converter found its way back to him, for he too wanted to use his laptop beyond the confines of our room. Fair enough.

During my first afternoon of socket scouting, I found myself in the Golden Lion Pub at the end of a long red-leather banquette beside a tiny bandstand.  It was there that the prized North American outlet was discovered. In a Jungian case of bizarre synchronicity (the meaning of which eludes me) it was at that exact day and time that the QM2 passed over the wreckage of the Titanic.

The sea was suddenly the calmest it had been since we had embarked.  Fog, seemingly from nowhere, closed in around the ship.  It was the kind of silver-gray soup that an iceberg could hide in.  Less than an hour earlier people had been sunning on the top decks. Make of it what you will. I personally had made it a double.

(As an aside, the QM2 can go from top speed to a full stop in six minutes, during which it will have traveled three thousand meters. Jarring, but awesome.  Yet with visibility looking to be no more than five hundred meters there was a whole lot of techno-trust going on that I wasn't entirely comfortable with. )

Whenever possible, the pub became my literary haunt of choice. With six nights at sea, and no ports of call, there is a lot of free time to people watch, should one be so inclined, which I was. And where better to do so than at a pub in the middle of the Atlantic?

The establishment was relatively empty one mid-afternoon, with just enough patrons to keep it interesting, but not enough to be distracting. No sooner had I set up my laptop when a middle-aged man, appearing somewhat worn and thin, plopped himself at the table directly beside me. In retrospect, I doubt that he even noticed me sitting there. With a notable British accent, he ordered a rum and coke in a tall class with a straw and lemon wedge.  (In hindsight, I realize he was attempting to camouflage it as purely a soda).

He had managed a couple of sips before his exasperated wife, with her mother in tow, arrived (both assumptions about the relationships involved are fairly safe bets, I assure you). As the two sat down at the gentleman's table his spine went a little rigid. His wife sniffed the drink and then looked straight at him as a prelude to her scolding.  She at once asked a question and, in no uncertain terms, provided the answer. "It's a little early don't you think?"

People are the best show in town.

Neither here nor there, I suppose, but to be accurate, it was 3:30 in the afternoon.

"Since I've been married to you there is no such thing as too early for a drink," would have been my answer, but then I'm not the best counsel in such situations.

Of related interest, the QM2 has a theatre for live performance which seconds as a non-denominational chapel for private weddings. Conversely, the ship also has a huge expanse of railing from which to sightsee, sections of which could second as a rather secluded place for a witness-free divorce...

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