四季のヨットからのもう1枚のポストカード

“You can’t not be on a boat,” says Guildenstern, in the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The pair of them are travelling by sea and he means something quite existential about life itself, but his companion Rosencrantz disagrees and says he has frequently not been on boats. “No no,” insists Guildenstern, “what you’ve been is not on boats.” 

It is a line my mother has muttered all my life – you can’t not be on a boat – but until this cruise (sorry, yacht experience, Four Seasons don’t call it a cruise, you can’t be on a Four Seasons cruise) I haven’t fully felt it. I spend the first few days attempting a lot of doing before I slip into simply being on this boat. Exploring the gym, and then the cigar lounge, for balance. The restaurant Sedna, with its Michelin-starred French chef from Hong Kong. The cinema which feels decadently empty. The spa with not just a sauna but a mosaic-lined hammam and also an infrared sauna if you’re someone who doesn’t like to sweat, as it’s merely warm and has a massive screen so you can choose a film and why did nobody tell me that Hamnet involved Paul Mescal having some quite close-up sex for God’s sake, I’m half naked, anyone could walk in on this. 

One evening we sit on the very top deck of the 11-storey yacht and watch the sun set from the Caviar and Champagne bar. A waiter asks me how I take my caviar and a momentary panic sets in. Medium rare? With chips? I ask for the options, they say hard or soft, so I pick soft. Then my daughter arrives and just as I’m explaining to the waiter that no, she won’t be having any of it, she only eats plain pasta anywhere we go and has done so for 14 years and that’s just the way it is and please don’t worry about it we’ve been to the therapists and everything and I know it seems bad but what the doctor said is – I turn around and she is tucking into the caviar. 

“Thought it’d be more crunchy,” she says, discerningly. Someone tells her it would have been if her mother hadn’t ordered it soft. The sun is turning the whole sky pink and my heart is a mixture of emotions when she looks at me with pure disdain. This is my fate now: caviar-mogged by a 14-year-old with purple hair.

***

Other reviewers go on about the cost, the cabins, the service or the food – but all I can think about is the steering. You book a guided tour of the control room, see the captains at work, hear about the rotating propulsion system (because rudders are so passé) and all I can think is: witchcraft. It’s not even that there’s no wobbling about or choppy moments, though there aren’t. It’s that we simply cannot feel it moving at all. Unless we look, my kid and I don’t know if we’re sailing or moored. 

We wake up in the morning, press the bedside button that opens our curtains, and discover that the bed moved 50 miles in the night. Where there was once a medieval walled island in Croatia, or a vast stretch of Adriatic sea out the window, now there’s a fancy marina built on the site of a communist naval base in the former Yugoslavia. It’s like Bedknobs and Broomsticks but with added caviar. 

So now we’re in Montenegro, the part of the Balkans that never ceded to Ottoman invasion, the mountains too strong and the rivers too tight. Where clans maintained blood feuds and men carried daggers, and where we pull right up to the shiny new marina in Portonovi and there’s a beach club and a steakhouse and somewhere not too far away there are Nigel Farage’s pals drinking a bottle of white while their money moves around like water. That’s frictionless too. There will be no daggers or blood feuds aboard the yacht, however, as every time you return to it, after a day or a dinner on land, airport style security scanners await you and your shopping bags.

***

Funny how the minute you’re offered perfection you start finding flaws. My daughter writes a list of complaints in her notebook. The Wi-Fi is too fast, so she can’t stop scrolling. The green marble en suite bathroom is the most beautiful I think we have ever seen, but the lights in the walk-in wardrobe take a couple of moments, “would prefer immediately.” The yacht is so “empty and peaceful, no noise or chaos,” she writes – as someone born in Hackney, she finds this troubling.  

As for my complaints: the massage is unremarkable, but who cares when the massage room has portholes, and the sauna’s portholes send everyone on my Instagram nuts. The way they turn down your room twice a day isn’t very noticeable and the room service breakfast eggs don’t come quickly and they are mid. I don’t want you to think that I care about any of this though – after a few days all I can think about is never leaving this boat again. 

The yacht is so well crafted, so well thought out, so aesthetically pleasing that everything feels good as a result. There are 91 suites on board but whenever you call one of the three elevators it seems to come instantly, just for you. You feel total privacy on your terrace, even though it allegedly sits on a row of other suites’ terraces. If you wanted to travel like a honeymooning couple and ignore everybody else, you could. 

You’d dine in the windowless Japanese restaurant with its ten-course tasting menu, then stroll out down the corridor of busts of emperors and ancient maps illuminated by gold that feels like a cross between the Uffizi and Mar-a-Lago. The yacht feels so solid that it is definitely the sea and the islands who are moving past us and not the other way round. 

I go on a day trip to the Marco Polo museum on the Croatian island of Korčula, where some entirely unconvincing evidence lets me happily imagine that Venice’s most famous son came from here. A speedboat journey organised just for me and my daughter, down the river deltas off the Bay of Kotor, thrills us both like nothing else, even before we arrive at Catovica Mlini, a hidden restaurant made from an old mill sitting on a lush green network of waterways. The speedboat also takes us straight up to Our Lady of the Rocks, a church on its own tiny island with many myths attached, as told to us by our personal tourguide. I think I’m having a religious experience when I walk up to the altar and burst into tears at the sight of the Virgin Mary, but I soon discover my period has come early. My daughter finds this instant religious conversion and then unconversion funnier than is legal. 

Another day we say we’ll get off the boat and just chill on the beach, the two of us, but the Four Seasons concierge is very concerned we need to be shown the beach on the map and perhaps be given a detailed itinerary for all possible ways to spend our time there. I realise at this point that many of these wealthy punters simply have no idea how to travel anywhere on their own. I mean, I can see the beach from where we’re standing on the yacht. It’s there. 

***

As a child I had a recurring dream there was a beautifully wrapped present in my hand, but as I went to open it I would always wake up. It came with a lurching, whiplash sensation as I sat up in bed and realised my chance of joy had been robbed again. 

This feeling comes back one afternoon on the yacht, when I’ve finally decided to stop doing things and visiting things and just lie down by the pool like any trophy wife should. The fitted daybeds come with a button that summons a cocktail waiter, and you can move this button around so whatever position you get comfy in, it remains at your fingertips. If there is some other peak of civilisation beyond this, I simply don’t need to hear of it. 

After lying there for a couple of hours, drinking something with champagne in it that I summoned with the button, I start to experience a sensation that might just be relaxation. Calm. Total goddamn peace. My daughter has gone off to the teenagers’ games room to test out the VR headsets and I’m nodding off into total bliss and then CAME IN LIKE A WRECKING BALL, I NEVER HIT SO HARD IN LOVE. 

What. 

There is a man suddenly standing beside the pool with his guitar and he’s belting out Miley Cyrus and small children now start dancing around him. He is in fact supposed to be there, this is his job on the yacht, and what a fascinating choice of job it is for a man whose singing range seems to stop short of one full octave at about five notes, all of them flat. I’m sitting bolt upright like a child who didn’t get to unwrap her present. 

If this isn’t a cruise, Four Seasons seem to have swiped their entertainment offering straight from the nearest all-inclusive liner, such as the Abba tribute act which goes like this: “That was Don’t Stop Believin’ – by Abba! That was Sweet Caroline – by Abba!” This joke goes on, and on. The audience numbers about eight people and one of them is a cleaner who’s wiping down tables during the show. If it was a Tarantino film, a gunman would come in now and shoot us all. 

Another night I bring my daughter to see a pianist singing showtunes but she sneaks out, dying of cringe, as all good teenagers should. Except the pianist stops playing to ask where she’s going. “To the toilet!” I lie.

***

Oh but I have become a stupid beast. A penguin in the zoo who just expects a sardine to be put in my mouth. Push button for cocktail. Push button to open curtain and look at view. This is all I want. This is all I need. I make a start on re-reading The Great Gatsby which I find a copy of on the yacht’s own bookshelves, get as far as the line about living modestly in the “consoling presence of millionaires,” think yes, exactly, and put it down again.

***

“You can’t not be on a boat,” says Guildenstern, in the Tom Stoppard play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The pair of them are travelling by sea and he means something quite existential about life itself, but his companion Rosencrantz disagrees and says he has frequently not been on boats. “No no,” insists Guildenstern, “what you’ve been is not on boats.” 

It is a line my mother has muttered all my life – you can’t not be on a boat – but until this cruise (sorry, yacht experience, Four Seasons don’t call it a cruise, you can’t be on a Four Seasons cruise) I haven’t fully felt it. I spend the first few days attempting a lot of doing before I slip into simply being on this boat. Exploring the gym, and then the cigar lounge, for balance. The restaurant Sedna, with its Michelin-starred French chef from Hong Kong. The cinema which feels decadently empty. The spa with not just a sauna but a mosaic-lined hammam and also an infrared sauna if you’re someone who doesn’t like to sweat, as it’s merely warm and has a massive screen so you can choose a film and why did nobody tell me that Hamnet involved Paul Mescal having some quite close-up sex for God’s sake, I’m half naked, anyone could walk in on this. 

One evening we sit on the very top deck of the 11-storey yacht and watch the sun set from the Caviar and Champagne bar. A waiter asks me how I take my caviar and a momentary panic sets in. Medium rare? With chips? I ask for the options, they say hard or soft, so I pick soft. Then my daughter arrives and just as I’m explaining to the waiter that no, she won’t be having any of it, she only eats plain pasta anywhere we go and has done so for 14 years and that’s just the way it is and please don’t worry about it we’ve been to the therapists and everything and I know it seems bad but what the doctor said is – I turn around and she is tucking into the caviar. 

“Thought it’d be more crunchy,” she says, discerningly. Someone tells her it would have been if her mother hadn’t ordered it soft. The sun is turning the whole sky pink and my heart is a mixture of emotions when she looks at me with pure disdain. This is my fate now: caviar-mogged by a 14-year-old with purple hair.

***

Other reviewers go on about the cost, the cabins, the service or the food – but all I can think about is the steering. You book a guided tour of the control room, see the captains at work, hear about the rotating propulsion system (because rudders are so passé) and all I can think is: witchcraft. It’s not even that there’s no wobbling about or choppy moments, though there aren’t. It’s that we simply cannot feel it moving at all. Unless we look, my kid and I don’t know if we’re sailing or moored. 

We wake up in the morning, press the bedside button that opens our curtains, and discover that the bed moved 50 miles in the night. Where there was once a medieval walled island in Croatia, or a vast stretch of Adriatic sea out the window, now there’s a fancy marina built on the site of a communist naval base in the former Yugoslavia. It’s like Bedknobs and Broomsticks but with added caviar. 

So now we’re in Montenegro, the part of the Balkans that never ceded to Ottoman invasion, the mountains too strong and the rivers too tight. Where clans maintained blood feuds and men carried daggers, and where we pull right up to the shiny new marina in Portonovi and there’s a beach club and a steakhouse and somewhere not too far away there are Nigel Farage’s pals drinking a bottle of white while their money moves around like water. That’s frictionless too. There will be no daggers or blood feuds aboard the yacht, however, as every time you return to it, after a day or a dinner on land, airport style security scanners await you and your shopping bags.

***

Funny how the minute you’re offered perfection you start finding flaws. My daughter writes a list of complaints in her notebook. The Wi-Fi is too fast, so she can’t stop scrolling. The green marble en suite bathroom is the most beautiful I think we have ever seen, but the lights in the walk-in wardrobe take a couple of moments, “would prefer immediately.” The yacht is so “empty and peaceful, no noise or chaos,” she writes – as someone born in Hackney, she finds this troubling.  

As for my complaints: the massage is unremarkable, but who cares when the massage room has portholes, and the sauna’s portholes send everyone on my Instagram nuts. The way they turn down your room twice a day isn’t very noticeable and the room service breakfast eggs don’t come quickly and they are mid. I don’t want you to think that I care about any of this though – after a few days all I can think about is never leaving this boat again. 

The yacht is so well crafted, so well thought out, so aesthetically pleasing that everything feels good as a result. There are 91 suites on board but whenever you call one of the three elevators it seems to come instantly, just for you. You feel total privacy on your terrace, even though it allegedly sits on a row of other suites’ terraces. If you wanted to travel like a honeymooning couple and ignore everybody else, you could. 

You’d dine in the windowless Japanese restaurant with its ten-course tasting menu, then stroll out down the corridor of busts of emperors and ancient maps illuminated by gold that feels like a cross between the Uffizi and Mar-a-Lago. The yacht feels so solid that it is definitely the sea and the islands who are moving past us and not the other way round. 

I go on a day trip to the Marco Polo museum on the Croatian island of Korčula, where some entirely unconvincing evidence lets me happily imagine that Venice’s most famous son came from here. A speedboat journey organised just for me and my daughter, down the river deltas off the Bay of Kotor, thrills us both like nothing else, even before we arrive at Catovica Mlini, a hidden restaurant made from an old mill sitting on a lush green network of waterways. The speedboat also takes us straight up to Our Lady of the Rocks, a church on its own tiny island with many myths attached, as told to us by our personal tourguide. I think I’m having a religious experience when I walk up to the altar and burst into tears at the sight of the Virgin Mary, but I soon discover my period has come early. My daughter finds this instant religious conversion and then unconversion funnier than is legal. 

Another day we say we’ll get off the boat and just chill on the beach, the two of us, but the Four Seasons concierge is very concerned we need to be shown the beach on the map and perhaps be given a detailed itinerary for all possible ways to spend our time there. I realise at this point that many of these wealthy punters simply have no idea how to travel anywhere on their own. I mean, I can see the beach from where we’re standing on the yacht. It’s there. 

***

As a child I had a recurring dream there was a beautifully wrapped present in my hand, but as I went to open it I would always wake up. It came with a lurching, whiplash sensation as I sat up in bed and realised my chance of joy had been robbed again. 

This feeling comes back one afternoon on the yacht, when I’ve finally decided to stop doing things and visiting things and just lie down by the pool like any trophy wife should. The fitted daybeds come with a button that summons a cocktail waiter, and you can move this button around so whatever position you get comfy in, it remains at your fingertips. If there is some other peak of civilisation beyond this, I simply don’t need to hear of it. 

After lying there for a couple of hours, drinking something with champagne in it that I summoned with the button, I start to experience a sensation that might just be relaxation. Calm. Total goddamn peace. My daughter has gone off to the teenagers’ games room to test out the VR headsets and I’m nodding off into total bliss and then CAME IN LIKE A WRECKING BALL, I NEVER HIT SO HARD IN LOVE. 

What. 

There is a man suddenly standing beside the pool with his guitar and he’s belting out Miley Cyrus and small children now start dancing around him. He is in fact supposed to be there, this is his job on the yacht, and what a fascinating choice of job it is for a man whose singing range seems to stop short of one full octave at about five notes, all of them flat. I’m sitting bolt upright like a child who didn’t get to unwrap her present. 

If this isn’t a cruise, Four Seasons seem to have swiped their entertainment offering straight from the nearest all-inclusive liner, such as the Abba tribute act which goes like this: “That was Don’t Stop Believin’ – by Abba! That was Sweet Caroline – by Abba!” This joke goes on, and on. The audience numbers about eight people and one of them is a cleaner who’s wiping down tables during the show. If it was a Tarantino film, a gunman would come in now and shoot us all. 

Another night I bring my daughter to see a pianist singing showtunes but she sneaks out, dying of cringe, as all good teenagers should. Except the pianist stops playing to ask where she’s going. “To the toilet!” I lie.

***

Oh but I have become a stupid beast. A penguin in the zoo who just expects a sardine to be put in my mouth. Push button for cocktail. Push button to open curtain and look at view. This is all I want. This is all I need. I make a start on re-reading The Great Gatsby which I find a copy of on the yacht’s own bookshelves, get as far as the line about living modestly in the “consoling presence of millionaires,” think yes, exactly, and put it down again.

***