Cooking, cleaning, purchasing, creating beds. All of it goes out the window, leaving globe cruisers free of charge to do as significantly or as tiny as they want. They fall into a rhythm of waking, consuming, dozing and consuming once again, interrupted now and then by port calls, line-dancing classes, choir practice or a higher-brow lecture or two by historians, art and architecture professionals, geopolitical commentators and some renowned faces: Lord Digby Jones, Lord Jeffrey Archer, Steve Wozniak and former Royal butler Grant Harrold on Seabourn and, in the previous, the late Archbishop Desmond Tutu on Holland America Line and, on Cunard’s QE2, the late Alan Whicker who described the ship as “a space capsule drifting about the globe in a delightful way”.

Fred Olsen Cruise Lines’ globe cruises and lengthy voyages also have a chaplain on board, ministering to these who want to be ministered to (bear in mind the 2013 Television series The Cruise: A Life at Sea, which followed the Rev Colin Nevertheless on a 112-evening worldwide odyssey with the line?). “There are extra applications from chaplains than we have cruises,” says Tim Spicer, a former Fred Olsen cruise director who now has a land-primarily based part with the business. Caring for a floating flock although seeing the globe? What’s not to like?

I added washing and ironing to my list of issues you do not have to do on a globe cruise, but other passengers had been laundry-space regulars since it was the greatest location to catch up with the “village” gossip. It felt like St Mary Mead meets Midsomer Murders with no the physique count – but we had been fortunate. Globe cruisers are a mature lot – an age group with the time and dollars for a lengthy trip – so losing a single now and then is not unheard of. Cruise lines do not speak about it, but it occupied the thoughts of various of these cruising with Rev Nevertheless.

Mine was a Phileas Fogg-style whizz about the globe in 80 days, which is a drop in the ocean compared with most circumnavigations. Silversea’s 2025 controtempo globe cruise (so-referred to as since it begins in Tokyo) lasts 136 days. Pah! That is nothing at all. Regent Seven Seas Cruises’ 2025 circumnavigators will be at sea for 150 nights, for the duration of which time they will imbibe about 11,000 bottles of champagne and consume some 200,000 eggs. 

Not to be beaten (pun unintended), Oceania Cruises and Viking supply 180-day globe cruises, although Royal Caribbean International has an epic 274-evening voyage. It was 70 per cent sold a week soon after going on sale, with half of these who booked undertaking the complete issue (globe cruises are also offered in sections). All that, and you only unpack as soon as.

It is time adequate for friendships to kind (a group on my cruise told me they met up each and every year on a round-the-globe sailing) and romances and eccentricities to blossom. One particular instance is the Fred Olsen passenger who believed it would be a superior wheeze to come to an Indian-themed celebration dressed as the elephant god Ganesha. “We had to clarify that it wasn’t suitable, specifically as a lot of our crew are Indian,” Spicer says. Cunard had a retired surgeon who wanted to play golf in each and every port. The crew pulled it off, even if a single time it was just a hole in a field.

Viking has initiation ceremonies that involve ice-filled pools and glugs of the Norwegian firewater aquavit. On its 2019 globe cruise, a bunch of knitters got with each other and produced extra than one hundred hats for babies in Madagascar, which a month prior to the ship’s get in touch with had been devastated by Cyclone Idai.

QE2’s very first globe cruise, in 1975, price from $four,800 per particular person for an inside cabin (equivalent to £3,994 at existing exchange prices), which was highly-priced back then but a snip compared with nowadays. Not that a globe cruise has to break the bank. Settle for an inside cabin and you can have 120 nights on Ambassador Cruise Line’s 2024 globe cruise from £7,999 per particular person, or 99 nights on P&ampO Cruises from £9,629.