Cruise!

Or elegance and eloquence!

Last year my wife asked me if I’d like to go on a cruise for holiday this year.

My first reaction was ‘really!’

For me holidays are about getting away from the madding crowd, not getting locked in with them. Never mind the massive carbon footprint that we leave behind us. Or spending more time on a coach getting to and from somewhere than we actually get to spend there.

There was a time when my answer would have been ‘No, categorically NO!’

However, I knew she really wanted to go, and also that she really wanted to go with me, I also know that having had a really tough year as a Rotary President, she really needed a complete break.  It’s my sixtieth this year too, that got thrown into the mix too.

I’ve come a long way in the last few years, and I began to think what would be the positives. 

I get to wear my favourite frock coats. Obviously of paramount importance.

With approximately eighteen hundred people on board, and we were on a small one, that’s an awful lot of networking opportunities.

Right from the beginning though the real payoff would be two weeks spent with my wife, everything else was periphery to me. I also promised myself I wouldn’t dwell on any other holiday we could have had for what the cruise cost.

I was though, as the holiday approached really beginning to look forward to it.

…………..

So, looking back. Let’s get the grumbles out of the way.   Well, apart from the carbon footprint, there aren’t any, well apart from a correct assessment of coach trips. The only redeeming feature here though would that when we went to see the glacier in Norway, at Jostedal, it was raining and almost everybody spent the whole half hour we were there, in the visitor centre. 

I was at peace with the glacier. I know a glacier is not a sentient being, but it is very old and I definitely felt a sense of ‘old’ in that place, and old, calm longevity, I guess. Very still. It was quite moving. Much easier without lots of well-intentioned folk bustling away.

One of the high spots of our time.

I was gutted when we could get into the port that we were going to fly into the arctic circle from, but the trade off 4X4 adventure up into the heart of Langjoquil, the long glacier near Reykjavik was a massive consolation. A real boys own adventure into the ice tunnels within the glacier.  Just eight of us in a 4 X 4 the like of which I have never seen before.

Yes, did lots of networking over lots of amazing dinners and wore my frock coats all the time. I think if I added all the compliments I have received for my elegance throughout my life they would have been overturned on this one trip!

I even kissed the Blarney Stone, and that’s not easy, so as well as elegance I now have the gift of eloquence.

There might have been eighteen hundred of us on the boat, but it never felt like it.

Bizarrely, time slowed too. It really did. Time slowed.  I thought so at the time, but we’ve now been back nine days as I write this, and the time has flown by.

The real payoff though, and maybe because time seemed to slow is that I had space to find creativity.  We didn’t have to do anything at any specific time, at any time, well except for coach trips. If we wanted entertainment, it was there, if we wanted solitude it was there, as was food, shopping, libraries and movies etc.

Actually, that’s not the real payoff.

The real payoff is remembering that there are stunning locations right on our own front door. But we take them for granted.

We are only here for a limited time.  All the issues and problems we endure or create don’t matter one jot. Within fifty years of our deaths, the majority of us will be forgotten and the ‘things’ we worked so hard for will be someone else’s.

I know there are bills to pay, but our responsibility is to be awake, at peace, living life as slowly as possible.

It’s taken me a week to remember that.

We have all we need. We always have.

Yesterday my wife asked me if I would go on another cruise.

‘Yes, I would, but not straight away.’

Because actually, the real pay off was two weeks with her. That’s a lot of real pay offs!

What unexpectedly blew your mind?

Simon Pollard                   Urban Countryman                     July 2024