Last night we had dinner in the Dining Club. This is the poshest restaurant on the ship. Apparently it’s French cuisine which uses molecular something or other and a fusion of something else that I didn’t pay attention to. It’s £35pp (it would probably be twice that on land). If you want to eat there on the ‘dress to impress’ night they charge you £45pp! I don’t see why it should cost you an extra £10 to put on your poshest cloths especially when the dress code in any case is ‘smart’.
For men as far as I’m concerned smart means, as a minimum, a button up shirt with a collar (you could just about get away with a short sleeve shirt but not a polo). A pair of full length trousers (not jeans and definitely no shorts) and a pair of shoes (not trainers or sandals). How much your T-shirt cost just because it has logo of a alligator wrestling a penguin or whatever the latest fashion trend is to part fools from their money, is irrelevant.
The phrase ‘It shouldn’t matter what I dress like’ should only come out of the mouth of a sulky teenager or a Silicon Valley millionaire and in both cases it’s not acceptable or even correct. The fact is it does matter, wether you want it to or not. As my children will testify whenever they were about to complain about some imagined injustice I would ask them ‘What’s life?’ to which the response would be ‘Not fair’ normally accompanied with a sigh.
So when a guy turned up in a T-shirt he should have been asked to go away and come back when he’d dressed appropriately. Ultimately I’m more annoyed with the staff for letting him in. If you set rules then you should enforce them because that’s how a civilised society functions. Otherwise it’s a decent in chaos and rampaging motorcycle gangs… or at the very least continuously failing ‘safe and legal’ audits.
The next morning was our sea day. I was grateful for this as my bowels were complaining about the previous nights over indulgence in both food and wine. I can’t really do rich food or alcohol anymore but fuck it, I’m on holiday. I’ll go back to my almost vegan diet (I’m sure the occasional chicken and fish don’t count as meat) when we get back. I have noticed since going back to a more ‘normal’ diet this week I’m not passing as much wind. If it wasn’t for the methane you could probably use vegetarians as a clean source of wind energy.
Lyn wasn’t feeling great either so apart from emerging for a quick lunch we spent most of the day in our cabin until it was time for afternoon tea. We’ve had one of these before and they are a pleasant way to spend an hour. There’s a dress code for this as well which most people made an effort with. Surprisingly a gay couple were the worst dressed people in the room.
It was dress to impress night and our dinner slot was late for us, 8:30. We got dressed and went down a bit earlier so we could get a drink before we went in. It was very busy in the public areas but we found a table and people watched. It was good to see most people had indeed made an effort and there was a surprising amount of tuxedos on display. We went into dinner and got seated. Lyn was pleased, there was a turkey roast dinner on offer. After the previous evening I just had prawn tagliatelle. I suspect it was just a menu filler and they weren’t expecting people to order it, instead going for the steak. When they waiter did the obligatory ‘how was it’ I said ‘Not very good’. When he bought my dessert, a cheesecake, it was displayed in what suspiciously looked like a cock and balls… maybe it was just a coincidence.
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