Ieuan Dolby

The Ventura - P&O's latest and largest addition!



Posted: Saturday, June 14, 2008

by
The Mariners Articles

I was sitting in Southampton airport twiddling my thumbs and minding my own business when I noticed that I was being swamped by people who were certainly double my age, if not more! Some were scraping skin off my knees in clumsy airport style wheelchairs, others prodded my feet blindly with a variety of walking sticks (how they got those lethal weapons through airport security is beyond me) whilst other simply used my body as a point from which to bounce off whilst finding a chair to sit on!

After some grunts and groans they settled down and I couldn't help but over hear their conversations! One jovial man told the whole airport "I wouldn't be surprised if there is a bus outside to take us all back to Edinburgh, just like P&O to get it wrong again"! He even told this to a Flybe girl who was walking past, she smiled politely, even chuckled in suitable response but I could see it in her eyes, she hadn't a clue as to what he was talking about

An old lady with her face scraping the floor complained about queues, a queue for the toilet (hopefully not in her cabin), a queue for an orange juice, a queue for this and a queue for that, two hours to get onto the chair lift in Gibraltar! Another old caricature of wrinkles who probably made queues form behind him whilst getting from A to B simply said "I hate queues".

One old man, obviously not short of a penny or two compared life to a whore house, cheap and nasty with everybody selling something! Not sure where he was going with that one! Not short of a penny but a couple of screws perhaps? But many wizened jowls nodded in agreement to his words, "hairdressers; shops; pubs; self-service crap; all money and no essence" they harmonized!

One wise looking soul said "....and everybody I talked to told me that they would never, ever, ever, go on a cruise again, and neither will I" she added for good measure! Another monument to a bad diet agreed (I think he was her husband) but then added "after the cruise I've booked from Miami in November that is"!

These conversations and the many others, including those about how everybody had to wash their hands and feet ten times a day (something to do with some outbreak or other) had me wandering about these new megalith cruise liners! Have they gone a step to far? Have these floating towns simply shifted the hectic lifestyle of ashore to the sea, something that maybe cruise goers don't actually want? Certainly, to make money these cruise liners sell everything they can and unfortunately this might have retracted from the romance and the relaxation, the pomp and ceremony, the glitter and the glamor that was once all that was behind taking a cruise in the first place!`

It seems so or was this simply a group of typical old age pensioners doing what they usually do - complain!
Ieuan Dolby is the Author and Webmaster of The Scribbling Mariners. As a Chief Engineer in the Merchant Navy he has sailed the world for twenty years on a variety of rust buckets and state of the art vessels. Now living in Edinburgh, Scotland with his wife and son he writes about cultures across the globe and life as he sees it; a seafarers escapades with a few tall tales thrown in for good measure! Further articles and photographs of his travels can be found at his blog The Seadolby Articles and Tall Tales.

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