A Cruise: The Holiday You Take When Suicide is too Quick and Painless

As I left my place of employment (I'm a little too honest to call it "work") the other day and strode vigorously (yet with a certain understated style) towards the railway station my attention was captured by what appeared to be an office block floating in the harbour.  I say my attention was captured, really it was beaten across the back of the head, stuffed into a sack and dragged off to parts unknown.  A second incredulous glance reassured me that building codes in Sydney haven't been thrown completely out the window.  What I thought was an office block on its side was in fact a cruise ship the right way up which had been cunningly designed to resemble an office block.

Apparently there is a certain type of person whose idea of a good time is to slowly wander the damper parts of the earth's surface in something so outrageously ugly that it probably gives the fish a heart attack.  From time to time these modern leviathans surface in the port cities of the world where they promptly make even the most ugly and ill designed city look understated and quietly elegant by comparison.  They are the floating equivalent of a Kardashian wedding.

Cruises are, I have heard, a relaxing and peaceful holiday.  These ships therefore must be ideal for the sort of person who likes to take a relaxing and peaceful holiday while surrounded by a hundred thousand tonnes of steel, heavy duty machinery and a few thousand other people who couldn't leave if they wanted to.  It must be rather akin to holidaying in a steelworks that has been cut loose to drift on the ocean currents.

Still live on the ocean wave must have some benefits; several thousand Somali pirates can't be wrong.  Which brings to mind one definite advantage these cruise liners possess; any pirate wanting to attack them will have to provide several hundred feet of scaling ladder just to get on board.  If you spent your entire life outside territorial waters you could probably also qualify for some kind of tax exemption.  There are island nations in the Caribbean smaller than the average cruise ship and probably with a lower permanent population as well.  It can't be too long before you will be able to register a ship as your company's official headquarters for tax purposes.

Finally I think these self propelled apartment blocks are good news for people worried about rising sea levels.  As Archimedes could have told you if you place an object into water it will displace the water around it.  In other words take all of the ocean liners out of the water and sea levels will probably drop by about half a metre.  That's got to be good news for the population of Kiribati at any rate.  Unless their economy depends on tourists from cruise ships of course.