The last couple weeks have been intentionally low key — in addition to the week of Christmas, I spent a week on the Queen Mary II, cruising over the classic¹ route from Southampton to New York City. It’s described by at least one person as “… the most civilized, romantic and exciting way to arrive in New York.” I don’t know about that.² But it’s certainly nice.

Cruise ships are all about selling a particular vision of luxury. At the level I’m at — this cruise cost about £100/day³ for seven days — it’s been pretty consistent across a lot of the ships I’ve been on. There’s a formal dinner service nightly with two seatings,⁴ a number of more relaxed places for table service and a few fancier places like a steakhouse and an Italian restaurant, and a buffet that’s running almost 24 hours a day, all free of charge.⁵ There’s an indoor pool and an outdoor pool, a spa and a golf simulator and a casino, and a theater with the range of lectures and shows. Most of these gigantic ships have some ridiculous feature as a focal point; the Queen Mary II features a planetarium.⁶

The weird thing is all the vestiges of what was once clearly a more luxurious experience. If you’re dining in the formal dining room you’re expected to wear “smart trousers with a shirt and jacket for gentlemen; tie is optional.” That’s unless it’s a “gala evening” — there are three scheduled this trip — in which case they want black tie or tuxedo. I’m sure this was de rigueur 100 years ago. These days I can’t even imagine being excited to dress up for dinner; I grudgingly packed a suit⁷ but gala evenings I’ve been making do with the half-dozen other dining options on the ship.

There’s also the fact that soda drinks aren’t free. The lowest tier of the drinks packages costs $10/day, and entitles you to as much fountain soda as you like. Paying extra for Coca-Cola makes sense if it’s coming in little glass bottles as if it were the 1930s,⁸ I’m sure this makes economic sense — lot of parents buying that package for their kids — but it’s a serious disincentive for me to buy alcohol. I can either pay $7 for a beer or $10 for a cocktail or instead get as much use of the drinks package I’ve paid for and have as much soda as I can stand. I know this is the sunk cost fallacy, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to drink less than $10 worth of soda every day. If soda were simply free, I’d be drinking more alcohol, which has got to be a bigger profit center for them.

But really, cruises are mostly about doing nothing. I’ve been disconnected from the world⁹ and spending my time just sitting in one or another of the various lounges¹⁰ reading or writing. And that’s turned out to be a good thing, because I totally fucked up my knee in Southampton.

Okay, so I don’t really know what happened with my knee. I suppose the first hint was three weeks ago, when I squatted down to get to an electrical outlet and there was a kind of pain in my right knee. It wasn’t really painful, more like someone with long fingernails jabbed me in the side just under the kneecap, but my leg gave out and I had to find a different position to plug in my computer gear.

I didn’t really think anything of it, but I noticed my knee was kind of feeling odd while I was walking around Winchester. Not painful, just off in some inchoate manner. And the next day when I woke up my knee was stiff and I couldn’t bend it completely. Still not painful, and I was able to walk around on it all day on the Isle of Wight, although it started getting a little swollen and tricker to put weight on as the day progressed.

But the morning of the cruise, it was done for. I literally could not walk on it at all. My goals for the day quickly shrank from a nice brunch before getting on board the cruise ship to just getting on the cruise ship and putting my leg up to figuring out how I was going to get to the hospital.

It eventually took borrowing the hotel wheelchair to get downstairs and into a cab. I was dropped off at the emergency room¹¹ at the local hospital. I had been advised to tell everyone I needed to be getting on a cruise ship in five hours which I think affected my treatment — the nurse practitioner didn’t run any fluid tests, which he thought might take a couple hours to come back — but within an hour they had done a physical examination, wheeled me in to get X-rays taken, and had a treatment plan.

They figured it was probably bursitis, or maybe an infection. The treatment plan was penicillin (in case it was an infection), paracetamol¹² and ibuprofen (to reduce pain and swelling), and a pair of crutches. The total cost of all of this? £9.¹³

So I used the crutches to limp onto the ship, and I spent most of the week trying to avoid walking around. By the end of the second day my knee had improved enough to walk without the crutches, which made visiting the buffet significantly easier. The nurse thought it would improve by the end of the week, which it did, but not completely. Even now it’s world’s better than it was, but it still feels like I don’t want to really be going up or down stairs with it or walk around a lot, so I’m still dosing myself with the ibuprofen and hoping for the best.

So I spent a lot of time in the pool and the hot tub¹⁴ on the boat. Played in the trivia pub quiz twice a day. Attended a couple lectures.¹⁵ Got through a lot of pages in Gravity’s Rainbow.¹⁶ And I stayed offline the whole week.¹⁷ There’s just not much to do on an ocean liner, at least that appealed to me.

That’s probably the biggest issue for me, and I gather it’s especially bad for Cunard. Cruises tend to cater to people that have the money and the time to spend to spend weeks out of touch with the mainland. That usually means retired people. If millennials want to know where all the money in the economy went, well, your grandparents are spending it motoring around the Bahamas.

That doesn’t bother me per se, but it does mean there’s a lot about the experience which doesn’t really click with me. The food was all very good, but there weren’t a huge number of vegetarian options¹⁸ and even beyond that the style of the food was either fancy-but-it’ll-take-two-hours-to-eat in the dining room or very unfussy middle American: prime rib and mashed potatoes and roasted vegetables and soft-serve ice cream.

There’s also the politics. The last time I was on a cruise was shortly after the 2016 election in the United States, and being in a crowd of retired septuagenarians who were rather well off¹⁹ made for some uncomfortable interactions.²⁰ I was glad, post-Brexit-election, to have avoided that at least.²¹

So I’m glad I did it. I got to hang out after dark on the top deck of an ocean liner, relaxing in a hot tub, just staring at the stars, days from civilization. And Cunard has a ton of history behind it. And maybe I’ll do another ocean cruise again, someday. But I’d want one with a younger crowd, more exciting food, and a more interesting set of activities. I know the cruise industry is changing — they have to, since I don’t think the things which excite Baby Boomers are going to excite everyone following in their wake. Maybe eventually they’ll all be featuring high-speed WiFi, Momofuku outposts, and Super Smash Brothers tournaments. I’d probably consider that.

After landing in New York I only spent the holidays catching up with friends and family. I can’t say I did much: visited my brother’s family, including my new niece,²² played some new board games, ate at my favorite pizza place in the city²³ and even got to try a new burger joint from my favorite restaurant.²⁴ I even managed to fit in a matinee of Oklahoma with a friend.²⁵

But by then it was time to go, and I was catching an overnight flight to London to hop a flight to Casablanca and another flight to Lagos to visit more friends. I don’t know when I’ll be back in the United States in general, or New York in particular, but it probably won’t be until November. I guess I’ll just look forward to missing the next 11 months of the election. But as big as New York is, there’s still more world out here than there is back there.

Next: Lagos (LOS) to London (LGW)
Prev: Christmas Eve, 2019, New York City

Footnotes

¹ The RMS Queen Mary first sailed from Southampton to New York City in 1936, although Cunard’s been operating ships between the UK and the United States since 1840.

² I still say it’s flying in by dirigible and mooring at the Empire State Building. This is a real thing which actually happened. I’m not kidding.

³ That’s per person, for seven nights, all food included but no alcohol, and including one-way airfare back to London on British Air.

I understand if you hunt for a deal and are flexible about travel you can book passage for about half that.

⁴ At over 3,000 passengers, they literally can’t seat everyone at once

⁵ Some of the fancier places charge a small surcharge

⁶ The current show is narrated by Liam Neeson.

⁷ The same tweed suit I wore for Immertreu, which has the advantage of not really getting rumpled despite being crammed in a carry-on for weeks.

⁸ In fact, somewhat oddly, it does come in little glass bottles if you order a Coke. But all the fountain drinks are Pepsi products.

⁹ Internet to the outside world is abominably slow, and costs $0.30/minute as well. Not today, Satan.

¹⁰ I’d be sitting deckside, but the North Atlantic in winter turns out to be not the best place to sun yourself, what with the storms and the gale-force winds.

¹¹ A&E, in British terms

¹² Which turns out to be acetaminophen

¹³ Which was the cost of the penicillin. The doctor refused to give me either of the other medications, since you can pick them up without a prescription for a tenth the cost. Everything else — the consultation, the X-rays, the crutches — was gratis.

I kept thinking about the sheer terror going to the emergency room is in the United States, since you have no idea how much it’s going to cost or how much your insurance will decide you’re entitled to. But, sure, I bet letting those companies into the British health care system will vastly improve things.

¹⁴ I highly recommend sitting in a hot tub on a ship that’s rocking from side to side, with the water sloshing from one side to the other.

¹⁵ One by Simon Weston CBE, talking about his injuries from the Falklands, and another by Derek Tedder, talking about the media coverage of Princess Diana’s death. Cunard caters to a pretty British crowd, it seems.

¹⁶ It’s a big book.

¹⁷ To be fair, I used the ridiculously expensive internet to ensure I kept my Duolingo streak going. But that was like ten minutes a day.

¹⁸ Although a great deal more than there used to be, about a decade ago

¹⁹ There were announcements during dinner celebrating people who had taken more than 80 cruises, including a couple who had spent more than 180 contiguous days at sea. I guess that’s one retirement package.

²⁰ I recall one elderly lady who struck up a conversation with me which swerved rather disastrously into her delight that someone was finally going to do something about all the Mexicans moving into her neighborhood. She was especially offended by all the street signs in Spanish. Lady, you live in Southern California. They were here first.

²¹ I did run into one guy sitting behind me who was ranting about politics, but after a couple minutes I figured out he was pissed off about austerity, having survived the Thatcher years. He then segued into complaints about how immigration policy was going to ruin the NHS, since the aging population of the UK required younger workers to supply a tax base and there weren’t enough nurses without pulling from the EU to staff the hospitals. Then he went into how after WWII it was all about scapegoating the Germans, then Asians, then Indians, and now it was all about Syrians, all as a way for the Tories to deflect blame for their own failings.

So I guess I’m pretty comfortable with people popping off about politics depending on which side they’re angry about.

²² My niece is less than a year old, so I haven’t had a chance to meet her before. And she’s heartbreakingly adorable.

²³ Paulie Gee’s. Been too long.

²⁴ Dirt Candy was where I had my last birthday in the city, and I was really excited to discover the chef, Amanda Cohen, had opened Lekka Burger just before I was visiting. We hit it the day after Christmas around lunch, and I was delighted to find out she was hanging out in the restaurant, doing some paperwork. Even better, she recognized me, so we were able to chat for a few minutes.

Had the cheeseburger and the messy fries. The patty was great — it’s one of those that’s not trying to pretend to be meat, but it had a great texture and a solid, tasty umami flavor all the same — but I think the real secret to all these burger wars is the toppings, and this was exemplary. A fresh bun, crisp lettuce with a little flavor to it, chunky house-made pickles, ketchup and mustard and mayo and tomatoes under a pleasantly cheesy sauce topped with a few rings of raw onions?

All I’m saying is, if you’re in the area, you better visit, since I certainly can’t go back for a while.

²⁵ Oklahoma is one of those massively popular musicals that everyone knows the songs to, but it has a reputation for being a simplistic, jingoistic whitewashing of the settling of the West. This production makes a pretty convincing argument that it’s a good deal more complicated than that, and leans rather aggressively into the more disturbing aspects in the book; this is a musical that ends with an extra-judicial killing where the townfolk just decide there’s no real need to go to the trouble of a trial.

So it felt a lot to me a little like The Merchant of Venice, where it’s all ostensibly a comedy as long as you’re not bothered by the community breaking the law to humiliate, bankrupt, and forcibly convert Shylock.