taking a Bearing
MEL Bartlett: You must be joking!
Two thousand years ago, I’m sure, Grecian urn makers were sending their neophytes off to the stores for a long stand. A thousand years later, mediaeval stonemasons must have fallen off their scaffolding as they watched their apprentices trot off in search of left-handed chisels. And even the young Isambard Brunel probably spent his first day at work trying to find a box of sparks.
Almost every trade has its own stock of such practical jokes, intended to give old hands a laugh at the expense of some hapless trainee. The navy, of course, has dozens of these wild goose chases – the golden rivet, relative bearing grease, and (my personal favourite) the key to the officers’ billiard room (because surely there’s nothing more self-evidently implausible than a room devoted to a game whose most fundamental requirement is a flat and stationary surface)!
But it seems I may yet be proved wrong. Ship-borne billiards is still – so far as I know – the stuff of tricksters’ fantasies, but I recently heard a radio advert for a cruise line plugging real grass croquet lawns as a unique feature of its ships.
For a moment, I was impressed, just as I am by Youtube videos of cats walking on their hind legs, or curling themselves up into goldfish bowls. But it wasn’t many seconds before “Wow!” turned to “Why?”
I’m no marketing expert, but my guess is they are trying to sell their ships as floating hotels rather than as ships. But why? If you want something that is like a hotel, surely you should go to an actual hotel!
Where a ship scores is in things that a hotel can never hope to emulate – the excitement of waking up in a foreign port, the luxury of being lulled to sleep by the gentle roll and the lazy thrum of the engines.
But like-a-hotel syndrome isn’t confined to ships. Motor boats, too, seem to have evolved into 30-knot luxury flats with granite worktops, marble bathrooms and giant TVS.
Looking around at boat shows, I’m as impressed by the ostentatious luxury as anyone else. Then a cynical cluster of synapses at the back of my mind start to mutter, “Weight is only useful in a steamroller.”
I’m not suggesting a return to the days of finger-trapping manual anchor winches, when you could choose any colour upholstery so long as it was blue vinyl with white piping, and going to the loo involved twiddling more valves and levers than driving the Flying Scotsman.
But I can’t help wondering what would happen if boatbuilders were to revive the old engineering maxim of ‘simplify, then add lightness,’ and start removing luxury features instead of adding them. Boats would get lighter, less expensive. But would it be worth it? However would we cope if we couldn’t change the colour of the mood lighting in the master stateroom?