My cruise-ship career started last century with a phone call which I thought was a scam.
I was known as the Indiana Jones of Scent after my career in the perfume business. The career has its advantages. If I didn’t come home smelling of perfume, my wife would shout, ‘Where the hell have you been?’
The man at the other end of the phone asked if I would like to give a 45-minute talk about perfumes on a two-week cruise for me and my wife in the Indian Ocean. I hung up. The next call, a few minutes later, was more insistent and infinitely more believable.
After many years aboard, I’ve grown used to all the jokes on the more- advanced-age cruises: ‘I’m the only one on board with my own hips;’ ‘Even the portholes are bifocal.’ The best one was ‘I don’t know how old the lady is that I danced with last night but her National Insurance number was 4!’
Despite my decades at sea, I must still look young for my age – they haven’t started to put prunes on the pillow at night instead of chocolates.
I now have 52 presentations – like a pack of cards. Crossing the Atlantic, I have a talk on my Dragons’ Den experience, recreating perfume found on the Titanic. If it’s Norway, it’s Vikings. If it’s the Caribbean, it’s got to be pirates.
As most cruise-directors came from the dancing and singing world, they lean towards favouring that kind of entertainment. Speakers are way down the list of importance, often because we are sage and experienced and they frankly don’t understand us or our topics.
The hierarchy goes like this:
- Celebrities
- Song and dance groups
- Singers
- Comedians
- Magicians
- Ship’s personnel
- Speakers
Within the speaker family, there’s another hierarchy:
• Celebrity speakers who talk of their experiences in sport, comedy or politics
• Destination speakers who give port talks on the itinerary destinations
• Special-interest speakers on everything from ‘Moths I have known’ to ‘The bones of the body’
• Craft nstructors for talents from banjo-playing to making sprinkled Christmas cards
• Jobbing speakers like me, the Jacks and Jills of all trades
There are talks to avoid if you aren’t an expert. Politics, sport or religion can foment mutiny or a minor punch-up.
And be prepared for varying audiences. In a 600-seat theatre, a crowd of 20 isn’t exactly enthralling.
This gets particularly bothersome when you are on at the same time as the big football match shown live, an interview with the captain or the final of the quoits championship.
Worse still, the captain may decide to make a prolonged announcement about the age of a nearby Norwegian glacier, right in the middle of your presentation. The ability to mime or tap-dance comes in handy at these moments.
Fear of public speaking is said to be a greater worry for the British than the prospect of dying. At least it keeps me in work. But who’d have thought that, at a funeral, people would rather be in the coffin than giving the eulogy?
In the bad old days before 2010, speakers were designated as crew, and given crew cabins. This could be a cabin with a torpedo-tube porthole or one next to the morgue – quiet enough, I suppose.
If you were lucky, you’d get upgraded to a ‘condemned’ passenger cabin, which had either a restricted view, such as of a lifeboat across the porthole, or noise from a dough-making machine in the bakery above, which started at 4am. My least favourite was one I christened the Anchor Suite (no prizes for guessing why).
Despite these little grumps, I love it. I’ve travelled the world (115 countries and islands to date), been on great cruise liners and met some fabulous people who are all out to have a terrific holiday.
And they do make me chortle with their queries and complaints. One was upset that he couldn’t get his daily paper. At the time, we were four days out into the Atlantic. I imagined the little newspaper lad frantically rowing his dinghy to catch us up.
I once heard a frightened lady approach the captain with the worried comment that there was water going down the stairs – it was a force 8 gale. He responded, ‘Madam, the time to concern yourself is when the water is coming up the stairs!’
And the question ‘Do the crew sleep on board?’ always gets a chuckle.
Life at sea does sometimes leave you all at sea. But I wouldn’t miss it for the world.
