To the Arctic Circle by Cruise Ship

Angeles to San Francisco, but seems to take several hours. Perhaps imagining that I support Donald Trump’s (hereinafter the Vile Excrescence) plan to seize Greenland, the customs lady who stamps by passport seems to wish she could compel me back onto the plane. A Kurdish Dane whose parents immigrated to Denmark from Turkey in the mid-‘60s drives us to our hotel, in desolate, charmless neighborhood. Much of the modern architecture strikes me as a refutation of the human spirit. The streets are almost empton a late Saturday afternoon, and there are no trees in sight. Our hotel room is tiny and TV-less. The elevator can elevate or lower only one passenger at a time. For what we have paid for our one-night stay, we might have hired a suite at the Dorchester. No, not really, but restaurant prices are exorbitant.

An Indian Dane drive us to the appropriate dock, and we board without having to stand in a queue for 17 hours, as before our voyage to Hawaii in 2023. Having eaten only a small croissaint (£350 kroner at the 7 Eleven) all morning, I intend to make the Norwegian Star wonder what’s hitting them, but the food at the buffet restaurant is inglorious, though I do find the charred cauliflower salad delicious. We traipse around carrying our heavy coats and by laptop case at great length before the blessed announcement that our stateroom is ready.

Once therein, Mrs. Mendelsohn (she prefers the original, legal spelling) turns on Fox News. In around 14 seconds, incredulity has made my jaw plummet. Talking heads are marveling at the marvelousness of the Big Beautiful Bill. I wish I were Elvis, and that I had a pistol with which to assassinate the TV.

One cannot visit Copenhagen without photographing its iconic spire!

To our astonishment, we voyagers are around half Chinese nd half American. Mrs. Mendelsohn points out that there seem to be far fewer mobiility scooters than on our previous voyages,

The evening’s entertainment consists mostly of the ship’s cruise director introducing the bosses of various jurisdicitons — housekeeping, dining, and so on — and our applauding them, even though there isn’t been time for any of them to earn applause. I suppress my desire to shout, “Poor showing, sir!” when the inevitably Filipino head chef is introduced.

Our first port of call is the idyllic and charming Kristiansard, which is full of sculpture and water features and dazzling green lawns and closed shops, whose closedness we learn has to do with its being a religious holiday. We marvel at the city’s huge opera house, whose roof evokes thatched cottages. Two of my most cherished ambitions in life are to ask fellow voyagers and vacationers, “May I take a selfie of you?” A middle-aged solo traveler from northern Minnesota offers to photograph us. She is very nice, and fractures my heart by informing us that she’s a Trumper. I bite my tongue even without Mrs. Mendelsohn’s sharp elbows.

Wishing to avoid the teeming masses yearning to breathe free in the buffet restaurant, we breakfasted in the full-service restaurant, on shakshura, which Mrs. Mendelsohn tells is a big favorite of fashionable ladies (and gentlemen) who brunch in swinging London. Poached eggs in a spicy tomato sauce, you see. Because I believe smoked salmon to be the most delicious foodstuff on earth, I order two bagels with smoked salmon, hold the bagels, and am disappointed to discover they the kitchen has also withheld the capers and lemon slices one gets with the full monty.

We attend a napkin-folding workshop in the ship’s main niteclubby venue. To the surprise of no one the instructor, as far as I’m concerned, might as well be speaking Urdu. I am as good at napkin-folding as I was at assembling model cars and airplanes at 12 years old, and am pleased that the instructor thinks I’m joking, which I am not. Mrs. Mendelsohn manages an estimable Sydney Opera House.

We go to the gym together — a first! — and then repair to our stateroom to watch the horrifying news from what I consider my hometown, where American servicemen are now pointing deadly weapons at American citizens outraged by Czar Homan’s fascist goons snatching alleged undcoumented aliens off the streets while the UAs’ children wail and plead. I think of my 10-years-ago English-as-a-second-language student Isai Salvador, one of the sweetest people I’ve ever known. He worked as a busboy to earn money for his mother and sister back in Oaxaca. He is the descendant of indigenous Oaxacans, and very dark-skinned, and I can easily imagine him living in fear now, even though he was born in the USA. I wished prolonged agonizing deaths on Czar Holman and the Vile Excrescence and Pete fucking Hegseth and Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller and Karoline Leavitt, among many others. The marines you deployed at the VE’s command, Secretary Hegseth? Are they exemplars of the warrior mentality you think it so manly to admire?

Mrs. Mendelsohn and I learned to fold napkins into replicas of Sydney Opera House. Mine is on the left.

Another cruise ship has beaten us to Maloy’s parking place. Maloy is in the process of being dug up and repaved, and isn’t exactly Kristiansand on the charm scale. We visit the town’s big supermarket, Kiwi, and note that an immoderate percentage of the place’s shelf space is devoted El Paso and own-brand Mexican food.

At karaoke the first evening, I won a pleasing amount of applause with my soulful performance of George Jones’ heartstring-tugging “He Stopped Loving Her Today”, but our second experience of Karaoke Madness is very much less satisfying. I open the festivities with a melodramatic interpretation of “My Way” (the Sinatra version, and not the Sd Vicious), and am loudly cheered, but then a succession of young passengers lacking a sense of either pitch or tempo (one claps on two and four, and not on 1.35 and 2.8), but believing themselves to be infinitely adorable, tortures the great hits of everyone from Abba to Pearl Jam.

*

We visit a small city of Alesund, noted for its art nouveu architecture, which I had hoped would remind me of Aubrey Beardsley, whose drawings inspired one of my idols, Fillmore Auditorium poster artist Wes Wilson. No such thing takes place. Inexplicably, Mrs. Mendelsohn who buys a fridge magnet not preferred by the deputy curator of her remarkable collection, admits to finding Alesund even more charming than Kristiansand! I lover her nonetheless.

We dine at one of The Beautiful Norwegian Star’s hotsy-totsy speciality restaurants, at which only the best and brightest may dine. (All passengers are entitled to three speciality restaurant dinners over the course of the voyage.) Mrs. Mendelsohn strikes up a conversation with the adjacent couple, who turn out to be Canadians, but whose male half proudly recounts their son having knocked unconscious someone who cut in line in front of him at a convenience store.

We spend a day at sea, sailing toward the top of the world, where, at this time of year, the sun never sets not only on the British flag, but on anything. At our meals in the restaurant, which, when many of our fellow diners have chosen to dine at the same time as we have, service is glacially slow, we amuse ourselves by re-enacting the funniest scene from the best television series ever, the British version of The Office, that in which Ricky Gervais’s David Brent tried to guide his employee Keith through an employee self-assessment.

I rate the questionnaire sketch alongside Abbott & Costello’s classic “Who’s on First?” among the best written and best acted two-person comedy sketches in history.

In spite of my brilliant showing at the napkin-foliding seminar, we don’t attend the towel-folding seminar, where we might have learned to concoct wonderful white cotton creatures of the sort the more inventive housekeepers leave on the beds of staterooms they’ve just restored to perfection. We do attend a trivia contest at which I learn that Mrs. Mendelsohn’s elbows have lost none of their sharpness, as, for instance, when the MC asks, “America’s Sweetheart died in 2015 at 89. Who was she?” and I loudly speculate, “Britney Spears?”

We do not attend the big art auction. On our 2007 cruise to the Caribbean on The Beautiful Carnival Victory, Mrs. Mendelsohn bought an autographed (by Ali) photo of the Beatles and Muhammad Ali for more than I earned in 2007, and I guess got it out of her system. We go to the gym together again, and then circumnavigate the deck a couple of times. I yearn to play shuffleboard, which I don’t know how to play, but know to have been a staple of cruising life in the days when people got dressed up to travel by aeroplane. Mrs. Mendelsohn does not. We attend the big late-afternoon Abba Trivia Contest. There are no questions about which member’s bottom the Australians went wild over, and we get only eight (of 20) questions right.

Agnetha.

*

I have sushi at one of the limitied-access restaurants for dinner. Mrs. Mendelsohn dissembles a couple of California rolls and eats the avocado out of ‘em. We find the innovative cocktails, based on wasabi and sake, respectively, unpleasant. The evening’s entertainment is a programme of alleged Broadway hits. The only one we enjoy is Monty Python’s “The Song That Goes Like This”.

Because Mrs. Mendelsohn turns into the princess of The Princess and the Pea fame at bedtime, and can’t doze off if there’s even the faintest light visible, and it’s still light and bright outside at nearly eleven, she lies awake for hours while I begin a series of troubling dreams the moment my old gray head touches the plllow.

We have docked at a tiny (3200 inhabitants) town called Hollingsvag, We traipse along its main street, noting boutiques, a hairdresser, and a supermarket, which is obviously the town’s biggest employer. Its Mexican food selection is even more extensive than Maloy’s. We take several photos for my burgeoning statute molestation collection, and Mrs. Mendelsohn buys fridge magnets and a T-shirt, which, this being Scandinavia, costs only slightly less than my entire wardrobe.

I am here seen in Maloy’s high street, which puts many in mind of Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.

We book a bus tour to the northermost point in Europe. Our destination is a 45-minute bus ride away. We enjoy the wry pre-recorded narration of our digital tour guide, which Mrs. Mendelsohn believes to be AI-generated, and marvel at the frigid bleakness. Mrs. Mendelsohn excitedly photographs the local reindeer.

On the day of the Vile Excrescence’s birthday parade in DC, I begin the day with a bowl of sensationally delicious muesli and a bagel that tastes like a hand towel. We attend a demonstration of truit and vegetable carving. One of the ship’s army of chefs, none of whom knows how to toast a bagel, fashions a succession of fanciful creatures out of a lemon, an orange, carrots, and black olvies. At demonstrations end, we passengers are invited to photograph his creations.

I watch the Oklahoma City Thunder defeat the Indian Pacers in Game 4 of the NBA Finals. NBA basketball has become entertainingly brutal since I last watched it a decade ago. (It isn’t shown in the United Kingdom.) Player are forever being upended while in midair, and crashing loudly to the floor. Sometimes the Thunder have two white players playing simultaneously, but the Pacers have cooler names, like Pascal Siakum and Opi Toppin.

Mrs. Mendelsohn admires Maloy’s remarkable selection of Mexican food.

We enjoy five exotic mojitos between us at the mojioto bar on Deck 13, and then dine at the third of our three allotted speciality restaurants, the French one. The servers wear long aprons and walk with their left hands behind their backs, apparently a gesture of deference. Sometimes they form processions. The escargot are delicious, but how could anything swimming in garlic butter not be? My main course is mediocrity itself. Mrs. Mendelsohn believes the chocolate dessert we’ve both ordered as resembling the penis of one of African lineage. It is difficult to disagree.

We karaoke up a storm. I, with my small voice, narrow range, and love of attention, offer two melodramatic interpretations of the venerable Big Voice numbers “Ebb Tide” and “Unchained Melody”, and Conway Twitty’s glorious Elvis impersonation, “It’s Only Make Believe”. The more I perform, the less delighted the audience, which was a little deafening at the end of Ebb Tide, becomes.

*

We have docked in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost urban community, 78 cegrees north of the equator, on Svalbard. It’s a long trudge to the town’s main street, past much ugliness, past the world’s northernmost petrol station and Toyota dealership. The first place we come to, a crowded little cafe run by Samis next door to a Thai shop that is actually a little Thai cafe, requires us to remove our shows before entering. I, of course, have the idea of stealing all the removed shoes and then setting up a shoe concession — We Probably Have Your Size! — outside, but Mrs. Mendelsohn predictably vetoes the idea. Shoed anew, we walk farther…into town and find that the town has a little cinema and cultural center, but we are more interested in its huge, very modern supermarket, whose Mexican food section is twice the size of the Maloy’s Kiwi’s.

In the evening, Mrs. Mendelsohn goes on a guided tour of the Even-Farther-North, and I traipse back into town, now nearly deserted, and desolate. I take lots of photos, and espy a mob of children, one in a T-shirt, frolicking on the playground of the local school.

Back aboard The Beautiful Norwegian Star, as our Jessica Rabbit-ish cruise director never fails to refer to it, I take myself out for an evening of fun. I dine alone in one of the full-service restaurants, and my shrimp and scallops curry is utterly delicious. I take myself up to the bar on Deck 8, imagining either that a lonely woman with very poor eyesight will try to hit on me, or that I will discuss the NBA finals, or lower back pain, or something comparably masculine with another old fellow. I wind up imbibing a vodka martini and then a Negroni on my lonesome, and then, after imbibing a Moscow Mule, head without upending a fellow voyager to Karaoke Madness, where I perform the Hollies’ “The Air That I Breathe” and the Temptations “My Girl” for a sparse audience that doesn’t deserve me. I have never drunk three cocktails in a single evening, but am remarkably clear-headed.

Mrs. Mendelsohn is a snorer, but a very iffy sleeper, as i mentioned 78 degrees above. I usually welcome the sound of her snoring because it means she’s actually asleep, and appreciate its symphonic tonalities. Sometimes she seems to be channeling French horns and trombones, and sometimes cellos and basses. On this occasion, back from her exhausting excursion into the wild, she channels the entire Berlin Symphonia, and keeps me awake. “Please shut up, hon,” I suggest several times, with accelerating vehemence, ever more loudly, during one long sleepless stretch, but she is not dissuaded.

Having left Svalbard, we will be at sea for two days. The Beautiful Norwegian Star is full of mirrors, and what a woeful tale they tell. I am accustomed to seeing myself in the mirror of the bathroom in our tiny lovenest in Ham-on-Thames, and am unprepared for the realization that I have come to have huge bags under my eyes, and that the right one seems to have spawned a baby bag. I look around 114. Last night at karaoke, I successfully beseeched Mrs. Mendelsohn to shoot a video of me brutalizing “My Way” yet again, but am afraid to watch it. I am Quasimodo, whose name it took me around nautical miles to remember, for as I am become ever less pretty, I seem to be losing my marbles. Have I ever confided how little I’m enjoying becoming a senile old eyesore?

I have come to a fascinating realization. When people speak of the old and gray, the grayness isn’t only in hair. One’s whole self seems to become ever more colorless. I used to have what my mama once told me were Expressive Eyebrows. I now seem to have no eyebrows at all.

I had believed the crew of The Beautiful Norwegian Starto be unanimously sweet and solicitous, but find out otherwise at breakfast when I ask our female server if the kitchen can make me a smoked salmon omelet. She sighs in exasperation and demands, “What sort of omelet?” The question befuddles me. I ask what she means, and she snarls, “We have ham and cheese omelets, and spinach, mushroom, and cheese, and [other variations on the theme].” Now there’s a bold new culinary idea: a ham, cheese, and smoked salmon omelet. I explain that all i want in the omelet is smoked salmon, and she rolls her eyes in disgust as she writes my request on her little pad.

Mrs. Mendelsohn makes herself ravishing for the evening. We have mojitos at the deluxe mojitos bar on Deck 13, which Mrs. Mendelsohn doesn’t like because it’s in the midst of a steakhouse, and she finds the smell of meat repellent. We repair to another bar on Deck 6 for a while, and then see the big musical production in the theater. It’s very good for what it is — well sung, well danced, and imaginative, but I find it exhausting. There’s no respite between songs, and I suffer viewer fatigue. Sort of like drowning in delicious hot fudge, perhaps. ine in our favored full-service restaurant, where our server is as sweet as her counterpart at breakfast was brusque and censorious.

And then the evening’s highlight — the unprecedentedly well attended Karaoke Madness in the Whisky Proof bar. I once again desecrate “My Way”, which I have come to detest more and more (so smug, and “mention” and “exemption” don’t rhyme), and the large audience seems amused by my histrionics. A succession of Chinese fellow voyagers perform songs in their native tongue, and you should see the expressions of delight on their non-signing compatriots’ faces!

*

Another day at sea. Another served breakfast in the enormous Versailles restaurant whose interior decoration might have been overseen by Donald Trump. Mrs. Mendelsohn scampers off to a Q&A session with the captain, and a couple of his senior officers, and returns to me with a crush on the captain. I ascertain that World War III hasn’t started yet, in spite of Donald Trump being an impulsive moron who has decided it’s a terrific idea to admit that he know all about Israel’s plan to bomb Iran.

Remarkably, no one is trampled to death as white T-shirts and fluorescent markers are distributed after the Q&A. Those lucky enough to snag a T can decorate it, and then wear it to the evening’s big black lite Glow Party. Mrs. Mendelsohn persuades me not to write Fuck Trump on mine. I settle for No Kings.

Have I mentioned that nearly everywhere we’ve visited, even tiny, desolae Longyearbyen in Svalvard, we’ve been pleased to see Pride flags, and not the ghastly over-woke, hyper-inclusive official version, but the gorgeous old one?

Heading for Iceland, we visit Akureyri, whose name cannot be pronounced by human beings, but which has a notably beautiful church into which we’re not admitted for a look-see because there’s a funeral being conducted. Isafjordur, the following day, has Norway’s most disappointing Mexican food section and no fridge magnets that say Isafjordur.

*

Disembarkation Day is never fun, and this one is among our most maddening ever. I wake up feeling horrible. When Mrs. Mendelsohn awakes, after I return from trying to walk around long enough for my back to cease killing me, I tell her I don’t feel up to having breakfast in the full-service restaurant, and ask if she can bring a muffin or something back for. me. The honest truth is that I’m in no mood to try to keep the conversational ball in the air between our ordering and our food being delivered. I’d be happy to teach her one of my napkin folds, but she’s had quite enough of them, and demands, “What am I going to carry [the baked goods for my breakfast] in?”

“How about your [fucking] hand?” I snarl.

Suburban Longyearbyen.

We don’t often stay furious at each for long, and join the endless queue to get off the ship, and then another endless queue to get out to the taxis. I have suggested that we take a short taxi ride to one of Rejkavik’s main bus terminals, and there, after an hour or two of sightseeing, the [relatively! (this is Iceland, don’t forget) inexpensive] 55 bus to Keflavik Airport.

Instead, we go directly the airport. I don’t use the calculator app on my Google Pixel 6a to ascertain how much the ride thereto is going to cost Mrs. Mendelsohn in British pounds, but I’m pretty sure it could keep the NHS running for a day or two. We spend five numbingly bored hours waiting for our gate to be announced. They are not joyful hours, as I have an upper respiratory infection, and we are surrounded by Americans.

(I am myself as American as apple pie, and know that tens of millions of my countrymen are better educated, better read, and just generally smarter than I, but I have come to find Americans…well, really stupid-sounding, and Kevlavik Airport is swarming with, well, us.)

Maybe you’ll see what I mean. Do a Google search for the word of your choice. You’re apt to be offered both American and British pronunciations. Even in the case of words that are pronounced pretty much identically, the Brit somehow sounds more genteel and thoughtful.

At long, long last, our gate is announced. We stand queuing in an overheated corridor for around six months before the first people-mover finally turns up to transport half of us (of which Mrs. Mendelsohn and I are not) to the plane. I thought I was bored standing in the corridor, but realize now I didn’t know what boredom was at the time. Two of our fellow passengers have vanished, and those who did not have the pleasure of waiting and waiting and waiting for the vanished’s luggage to be found and removed from the hold.

Once airborne, I discover that even with my Google Pixel 6a cranked to the max, my little Bluetooth earbuds are inaudible over the roar of the Boeing 757\s might engines. The pressure in my left ear as we finally descend toward Heathrow is the worst pain I’ve experienced since the NHS injected a steroid in my kneecap in hope of not having operate on it.

Mrs. Mendelsohn and I are four rows from the rear of the plane, so I am delighted to see mobile stairs being wheeled to it rear door. The problem being that they’re never declared operational, and we have to wait forever to get off the plane. No words can describe how much I loathe waiting to get off a plane, which I think may be the most boring human experience. As at Gatwick, the walk from one’s departure gate to Passport Control and then Baggage Reclaim is approximately the distance from London to Birmingham.

As is her custom, Mrs. Mendelsohn has arranged for a SW London-based taxi company to collect us at the airport, rather than use public transport. She phones them as we drag our weary bones through Customs, carrying our heaviest suitable-for-the-Arctic-Circle coats in spite of London suffering a lethal heat wave. Invariably, the driver has an East Asian accent that I can’t begin to understand, but which Mrs. Mendelsohn can because she grew up in a city with a huge East Asian population. The driver predictably tells her he’ll meet us somewhere we can’t find.

He has apparently used that app that warns motorists of traffic snarls to plot our route home from Heathrow. If there’s a traffic snarl between the airport and our little lovenest, by God he’s going to find it, and get us immobilized at its tail end.

I amuse myself by trying to imagine why Bruce Springsteen, recently declared a billionaire, had been sitting three rows behind me on Icelandair Flight F1454. I wanted desperately to take.a photo of him, but he kept noticing me, increasingly quizzically. That definitely wasn’t Patti Scialfa in the middle seat, just to his left, and I have to consider the possibility that it wasn’t really Bruce. But I can assure you that no one is human history has ever more closely resembled a celebrity than this guy resembled Bruce — not even that guy in the mid-‘70s who everyone thought was John Deacon, Queen’s bass player, and who commonly tried to seduce the very nymphets who were making me feel very heterosexual at the Starwood in Hollywood.