Beyond the sea

Hello again, readers. As I type this, I’m on a ship crossing the Atlantic. One of the things I do is cruise ship lectures, and right now I’m on a luxury ship headed for Cape Verde.

I’ve probably spent more than six months on ships, when I add it up. Which means I spend quite a bit of time thinking about ocean travel (if you want any cruise tips, drop me a line).

In the days of ocean liners, old movies showed people with pets on board, hence my illustration above. I’ve heard of disability support dogs on ships, but I’ve never seen one (Cunard will take pets on their New York - Southampton route but they have to stay in cages in the pet area).

The wifi out here is patchy, but I get headlines floating up my phone screen from where it has managed to grab snatches of signal overnight. So I feel oddly disconnected. My podcast subscriptions pile up (undownloaded), my substack inbox fills. I’ll probably post this and have to wait and see what happens.

But travelling like this makes one appreciate distances, distances that get blurred and distorted when you’re packed into an airline seat with a Tom Cruise movie and a Xanax. There’s a different sense of knowing you’re literally thousands of miles from anywhere.

Where else I’ve been: I wrote about Rachel Gross’ book Shopping All The Way To The Woods for the Wall St Journal.