N is for Nautical
“…and inevitably for nostalgic, in my own alphabet.” – M.F.K Fisher
At first, I thought I’d recreate the Titanic’s final meal.
Then I read the menu: ten courses—oysters, filet mignon, lamb with mint sauce, roast duckling, sirloin, squab, foie gras, three types of potatoes, and something called Punch Romaine, which sounds less like dessert and more like assault. I wasn’t about to bankrupt myself for historically accurate Waldorf pudding, so I let that idea sink.
If not that, then perhaps this was the moment to wax poetic about the impossible glamour of dining at sea—the slow unfurling of a meal as a ship slices through dark waters like a knife through butter. After all, it was M.F.K. Fisher who—back in her original N is for Nautical—noted that “dinners aboard ship have a special poignancy,” each course elevated by “an intensity peculiar to the moment.” That may have been true in 1947, but the only intensity I associate with the Dover–Calais crossing is its uncanny resemblance to the D-Day landings.
If you hadn’t already guessed, my relationship with the sea is distinctly unromantic. I don’t sail, I wouldn’t know my stern from my starboard, and I’ve never stepped foot on a yacht. The closest I’ve come to culinary transcendence at sea was the Kit-Kat I once wolfed down on a Bali to Gili Islands crossing that nearly killed my best friend and me. In short, I’m about as nautical as a train.
And yet, I find myself stuck with another obscure topic, gifted to me by a long-dead American woman whose nostalgia for the sea feels about as relatable as a billion-dollar yacht. Surely this is an assignment for the tweedy 20th-century chattering classes, not someone who looks at a ferry and thinks mortal peril! But just as I was about ready to jump ship, my phone buzzed—like a tiny life raft bobbing in a sea of indecision.
On This Day in 2020
The English Channel
A slideshow flickered across my screen, each frame dotted with ghosts of a half-forgotten past. My stomach churned as a wave of phantom seasickness dragged me backward into a blinding white void.
I awake, blinking into the neon glare of a cruise ship. Decks stretch endlessly, corridors splinter into an impossible maze. Ahead stands a man in a rhinestone-studded captain’s hat, performing a solemn spoken-word rendition of “WAP.” Before I can process what’s happening, a merman DJ appears from nowhere. And with a dramatic flourish of his tail, he slams a giant red button. Confetti explodes around me. The bass drops—and so do I.
I tumble down a slide, landing in a grand ballroom filled wall-to-wall with identical gay men in pristine white trousers, their radioactive Aperol Spritzes glowing ominously. They turn their heads in unison:
“You’re late.”
The ship lurches violently. Suddenly, I’m alone in a deserted teppanyaki restaurant. Across from me stands drag Maggie Thatcher, dousing herself in cartons of milk. Her bosom swells grotesquely, expanding until it bursts into molten béarnaise sauce, knocking me backward. I skid helplessly across the deck, watching the hull rush up to swallow me. Someone screams my name.
Darkness.
I re-emerge as the montage fades to black, the images still burning behind my eyes. Horrifyingly, what I’d just seen wasn’t pure fantasy—it was a memory, of sorts. Not quite a fever dream, but a warped replay of something that really happened. M.F.K. Fisher might have experienced moonlit dinners and quiet elegance—but my own life at sea was something else entirely. This was nautical escapism at its most dangerous. Denial dressed up as glamour, drifting further from reality while pretending not to see the giant iceberg looming just ahead.
“So we’re going to smash it out of the park in just four weeks,” my boss announced with the kind of cheeriness usually reserved only for professional murder-suicide pacts.
He billed it as the launch of a groundbreaking new leisure concept: a sexy, adults-only cruise line so risqué and luxurious it would make Studio 54 look like Sunday school. Of course, his confidence in us—as one of the UK’s top PR agencies—was so unwavering that he was already halfway through booking flights to Florida for the far more glamorous American launch.
Perhaps that wouldn’t have been so bad, except I seemed to be the only team member not browsing Skyscanner. One colleague was planning a drone show over New York’s skyline, another touring shipyards in Genoa, and the luckiest bastard of all was tasked with securing front-row seats to a private J-Lo concert in Miami. Meanwhile, I was stuck corralling a band of geriatric, resolutely sexless British “cruise influencers” for a weekend in Dover—just me and the Great Unshagged, gazing bleakly toward the White Cliffs and, if we squinted, the faintest outline of Ramsgate.
Before I knew it, I was staring out the taxi window as the ship loomed into view—a hulking, neon migraine waiting to happen. To distract myself from the next three days of floating purgatory, I thumbed through our 200-page press Q&A. Each page offered a new delight: Did passengers need to sign a waiver in case the drag brunch turned violent? How quickly could crew members dispose of a dead body? Had the captain had an intimate relationship with the mermaid ice sculpture—and, if so, was it consensual?
But then, nestled among the bonkers, my finger landed on something serious—Crisis Management. Finally, some actual “world event” stuff. Except… that’s odd. Where I expected meticulously crafted statements covering every scenario from war to zombie apocalypse, I found only limp reassurances and corporate waffle about “maintaining operational excellence in challenging circumstances.” A shrug so disinterested it might as well have been signed off by whichever Netflix exec green lit With Love, Meghan.
Thankfully, nothing ever goes wrong at sea.
“Welcome to Dover!”
I beamed at my motley crew of soap stars, “cruisers,” and national newspaper editors, before announcing cheerily that the gangway was broken. “Really sorry about this, guys!” We were trapped in the ferry terminal for five hours. No food, no water, no escape. Kent’s first-ever hostage crisis.
When we finally boarded, our thinly veiled maritime sex-party was giving less Studio 54 and more especially ambitious youth hostel. Every space was lit with a personal vendetta, as though someone had cranked the saturation up on reality. Neon corridors bled into neon cabins bled into neon people—that’s the crew, by the way, who looked like what might happen if JoJo Siwa had been put in charge of a GAP rebrand.
The welcome orientation—held in the “we-don’t-do-buffets” buffet—had all the warmth of a high-security detention centre. My poor “cruisers,” more comfortable clinging to the remnants of empire on the QE2, looked ready to fling themselves overboard. Wokeness gone mad! I could hear them typing.
“Looks like the Love Island villa’s been bombed,” a sunglassed Good Morning Britain producer whispered in my ear, as we both pretended to listen to the ship’s captain—who somehow looked both overstimulated and freshly dug up.
“Well,” I replied, my grin stretched to breaking point, “it certainly isn’t like any other cruise.”
Suspiciously, everything seemed to be running smoothly as I worked on room allocations, tapping away, “computer says no”-ing a Made in Chelsea cast member who insisted he deserved a cabin upgrade. But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw her: the most terrifying travel editor in the country, marching toward me with a fury that could’ve set the English Channel on fire.
She came to a halt in the reception area and, in her best newsroom voice, announced that she’d walked into her suite to find half the ship’s cabaret ensemble engaged in a Tony Award–winning gay orgy. The chorus line, it seemed, were putting their jazz hands to exceptional use.
We begged. We pleaded. We offered her every perk we could think of. And, by some cosmic miracle, she agreed to bury the story. To this day, I remain convinced that might be my single greatest success in the workplace.
With that tiny victory out of the way, the next few days began to spiral out of control. A fire alarm cleared half the ship, which was definitely not the drill we claimed it to be. The Very Famous CEO’s carefully orchestrated media schedule had been printed backwards, which was definitely not my fault. Dinner became a game of edible roulette—vegans being served steak, ketos being served salad. All the while, influencers cornered me hourly, their tone both saccharine and vaguely homicidal:
“Sweetie, the hot water in my cabin isn’t working.”
“Honey, do we have any Manuka on board?”
“Baby, I’ll destroy your career if you don’t wipe my arse after I’ve done a shit.”
By day three, M.F.K. Fisher and I shared a sliver of common ground: the realisation that life at sea can detach you from reality. For her, that meant drifting from feast to feast, elegantly ensconced in white linen. For me, it meant being trapped in a nautical netherworld, wondering if my parents had filed a missing persons report.
Oh god, yeah—food. I haven’t forgotten that this is what this series is supposed to be about. But the truth is, I’d barely eaten since my train left Waterloo. This was particularly devastating, considering the ship boasted every culturally appropriative eatery imaginable. Instead, though, I had spent an entire weekend surviving on adrenaline and a box of Belvita Breakfast Biscuits I’d stolen from the “still-not-a-buffet” buffet.
But at last, on the final night, as a brief calm fell over the ship, it was my turn to die—pardon me, dine. Out of pure desperation, I settled on the ship’s “Mexican Hacienda,” a restaurant promising a virtual journey through Mexico City. I’d have preferred an actual flight to Mexico, but at this point beggars can’t be choosers.
Inside, the atmosphere was antagonistically festive. Digital murals of Frida Kahlo flickered ominously from wall-mounted screens. Naturally, the menu glowed neon—everything glows neon in Dover. Still, I clung to the faint hope that maybe—just maybe—this could be a simple moment of culinary bliss. Sure, we hadn’t actually moved an inch, but perhaps one perfect bite could deliver the joy of eating on a ship that had so far eluded me.
Naturally, that fragile sliver of hope was obliterated by my phone, which began buzzing violently in my pocket like it knew something I didn’t. Walkie-talkies crackled, and journalists’ phones started humming too—a wave of notifications rippling through the dining room like a Mexican wave of doom.
6,000 Passengers Quarantined on Cruise in Italy Due to Mysterious Virus.
I thought I was going to throw up. Reporters at nearby tables started hammering away at their devices. A senior manager, margarita glass in hand, appeared out of nowhere, panic etched into his fake tan.
“We need a statement!” he hissed. “Just refer them to the Q&A—it’s 300 fucking pages! Everything’s covered in there!”
I snatched up the colossal Q&A document we’d spent weeks painstakingly perfecting and flipped desperately to the Crisis Management section. My stomach twisted; headlines flashed in my peripheral vision, each answer a lifeline I might yet miss.
Past the celebrity meltdowns and foam-party fiascos I skimmed, the answers growing shorter, vaguer, more useless—until finally, I found the words: “Pandemic Preparedness.”
And then—just as Boris Johnson was doing at that very moment in Downing Street—I saw nothing.
Just blank space, stretching endlessly, off the page, and out to sea.
Words by Ben Drinkwater.
Artwork by Laura Sheppard
Note: All recollections are my own. Some scenes may have been mildly dramatised by seasickness and trauma.