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Pleasure boats

Andrew Roberts

Wednesday, 27th February 2008

Andrew Roberts says cruises are the best way to see the world

If ever you want to murder your husband by hitting him over the head with a bottle, always choose champagne. The glass is over twice as thick as normal wine bottles, and so it’s unlikely to smash. It is therefore very unfair to criticise the Duchess of Cornwall for the fact that the Veuve Clicquot failed to smash against the side of the new 90,000-ton Cunard liner, the Queen Victoria, let alone for the norovirus that has struck 78 of the 3,000 passengers — only 2.6 per cent, after all — aboard the maiden voyage.

Cruises are always in the news this time of year, providing the perfect opportunity for the British press simultaneously to exhibit its two favourite traits of envy and condescension. The subtext of much of the coverage is, ‘As metropolitan Britain freezes and trains stop running, how wonderful that those rich swine on cruises in the tropical sunshine are stricken with diarrhoea and vomiting’, while, as well as schadenfreude, there’s also the supercilious sneer that cruising is only for the ‘newly wed, well fed and nearly dead’.

Well, I love going on cruises so much that friends have nicknamed me the Saga Khan, and I will now convert you to the concept. Admittedly, as an itinerant guest-lecturer I don’t actually pay the £9,000 per couple that a really good fortnight on one of the ‘top six’ cruise-lines will cost you, but that often includes free drink, all tips and the Malossol sevruga at lunch.

The first glory of cruising is that you can visit eight or nine fascinating historic cities in a fortnight, yet only unpack and pack once. Once you’ve spread out in your cabin — 287 square feet with 58 square foot balconies on Silversea, for example — the cities are brought to you. You open your curtains on to the Acropolis one morning, a couple of days later it’s the Topkapi palace, then Sebastopol, Yalta and so on, all without having to catch cabs to airports, unlace your shoes for security screenings and check in and out of a series of hotels. The sheer ease of it all is dreamlike.

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