The glory that was P & O

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And at least half-a-dozen officers and sailors, all painfully smart. It's lovely that they're ready to talk - they might have been completely snooty, mightn't they? - and it turns out that it's real cruise ship, the smallest and oldest of the four which P & O have these days, with 700 passengers and 400 crew, it carries its own launches - at least three of them - on davits at the stern. It goes in the Mediterranean in the summer, the Bahamas in the winter: this was the last of the 'summer' cruises, it had started in Venice where the passengers flew to, from there to St. Nicolas here on Crete for the afternoon, next stop Malta, then Malaga; not sure where they were to drop this lot of passengers off, but after that they're bound for Barbados. March will see them in Southampton. The crew are all olive-skinned, when I ask where they came from I get the the ambiguous reply 'Asia' ... The one lady officer says to the man I'm talking to, in a Peter Sellers voice, "Oh, you've given him a postcard, then ..."

For some reason I'm surprised to discover that the passengers are a very everyday lot of middle-class English housewives and their hubbies, mostly of retirement age, I'm sure my mother would have called them 'trippers' in disparaging tones ... Somehow one never loses one's prejudices, and my vision of P & O liners in the Med. was, I'm sure, strongly influenced by the film 'Triangle at Rhodes', with Hercule Poirot's old-world dignity and politeness expressed by David Suchet and his set in exclusive upper-class accents.