Hilary likes to – or liked to, she is finding it more difficult now – participate in the decision about our route. In this way she can, or could, try and assure herself that days would not be too long or too indirect and overnight stops not too hard to locate – we book in advance but would rather not get lost in a city at the end of a day trying to find our hotel.
On the map, south from Zeebrugge looks shorter than south from Rotterdam. In fact there’s not a lot in it, and Hull-Rotterdam has advantages over Hull-Zeebrugge because the ferry is bigger, newer, and does not have to spend what seems like an age negotiating a sea lock in order to get in and out of the harbour.
But Hull-Zeebrugge it was, overnight on Monday 7th April 2014.
We are kept waiting for over an hour in the queue to board. In the pouring rain. Annoying, for it seemed that the dock staff were putting their own convenience in front of that of the waiting passengers. But we are philosophical, they’ll be fired soon.
Arrogance disappears, however, the moment you have left your car and walked up the stairs to the decks, for there all the staff are smiling, helpful, and keen to sell you things. These staff are all Filipinos in yellow shirts and blue ties.
A choice of three bars to go to for a drink, we chose the bar with no music, with armchairs, and light and bright as opposed to dark and moody, and ordered a beer each, which in this bar was served at your table.
Does Alzheimer’s dull the curiosity? We don’t know, but it hasn’t yet to a degree for Hilary like me wants to know why all the staff are Filipinos. We ask the barman.
Today the boat is relatively quiet, just 300 people of a capacity of 800, so the barman is happy to talk. All the crew, he said, are from the Philippines, by which he meant all the customer-facing crew apart from the information desk and the croupiers at the gaming table. They live on the boat, and work for six months, after which they return home and are replaced with a different set of crew. They then have to apply again. Their base while they are working, officially, is Rotterdam.
I don’t know the total number of crew, but clearly quite a lot, perhaps fifty. Evidently all men. Presumably this arrangement means that P&O get willing and helpful staff at low cost, possibly verging on the cheap labour. These jobs are thus denied to British or Belgian people, which perhaps might be seen by some in those countries as an outrage, though equally many others will understand that it may not be so easy for P&O to actually find enough people in Hull who have the right approach to customer service and are prepared to work permanent nights.
I also wondered whether P&O were treating this from a staffing perspective bundled in with their cruise ships. They obviously like to sell it as a kind of mini-cruise, at the same time as it being a ferry. We have never been on a cruise but are of the impression that many of the customer-facing staff are from countries where the sending home of remittances by people spending long periods from home is pretty widespread. Though we don't know. It all guesswork, keeps the brain cells moving though.
In the bar we get talking to an Irishman and his wife, they are travelling to Belgium to visit their son. The man talks about himself, doesn’t leave room for much curiosity.
In the self-service restaurant we could have made choices through from hamburger and baked beans to slices of roast beef with something vaguely resembling roast potatoes. We chose curry, we thought the Filipino cooks might possibly have some feeling for curry, and so it proved to be, the curry was quite good.
At the adjoining table to us was a man with a P&O name lanyard, and we chatted to him a little, but he said that though he did indeed work for P&O, it was on the ‘freight side’, he knew nothing about passenger ferries, so I judged that there was no point asking him about the economics of immigrant staffing.
After dinner we wandered through the bars, to see what the world was doing with itself on this overnight ferry ploughing through the waves in the dark. The bar of our our Filipino friend from earlier was completely empty, he gave us a cheery wave, standing there with nothing to do; the other two bars had a fair number in, especially the bar with the stage and &lqsuo;entertainment’. We had heard about this entertainment from an announcement while we were having our pre-dinner drinks. At some point in the evening D&J (or was it J&D?) would be on stage to entertain us with songs old and modern, until about 2am.
When after dinner we walked through the bar where D and J were on stage in front of the tinselled backdrop. D, or J, was dressed in black tights and high heels with a flouncy well-above-the-knee skirt. Her legs were apart to steady her voice and the black furry microphone held phallicly in her hand, she was singing Cry Me A River; meanwhile J, or D, was making a chunk-ding, chunk-ding noise on his electric guitar. Cry Me a River is not a chunk-ding song, it should be a moody song.
From the accent of J, or D, as she sang we guessed she was Flemish or Dutch.
The roulette table at one edge of the chunk-ding bar had people chancing their fortunes.
The third bar, where a pianist entertains or so we were told, though he was not on duty at that moment, was quieter, and somehow grubbier, still with a fair number of people sitting round drinking and a group of Filipinos in yellow shirts at the bar to serve them their pints – for this is a British ship where the beer is served in pints – and there was a cinema in a room at one end, showing three films that evening; one of the films was due to start but the Filipino man in charge of the door seemed to be having no success in attracting any customers for it.
We went for a walk on deck. An advantage of the older boats is that it is straightforward to get out on deck, newer boats tend to make this more of a challenge. We looked at the lights of the Lincolnshire coast to our right, and the numerous lights on the North Sea that we assumed must be ships and rigs to our left, but the problem with the deck was the air – the North Sea breezes were fighting a losing battle with the cigarette smoke wafting around, so we went back to our cabin for our night’s sleep.
So far so good. Hilary just got a little lost when she went back to the cabin from the pre-dinner bar to get something, not so much in finding the cabin, as finding her way out of the maze and back to the bar afterwards. But she managed it, with only a minor moment of worry.
