The wardrobe & the cheese.

(The life of a stewardess on a yacht)

This page is Sponsored by Quiller Publishing

I have an interesting life. This morning one of my charter guests asked me to microwave her breakfast, honeydew melon because it was too cold but, she said sternly, I wasn’t to cook it or make it too hot.

Then the other day, when I was in the galley helping Jess, the chef do the hors d’oeuvres for sun downers when one of the guests popped down to be social. It was obvious that this was something she felt obliged to do rather than actively wanted to be doing because in very short order the stilted conversation had ground to a standstill and we all stood in slightly uncomfortable silence.
Searching for something to say she ran her eyes around the room with mild desperation then spotted the kettle with evident relief. Was this, she wanted to know, a food mixer?
Feebly I looked at the chef, knowing that if I answered I’d start to laugh. With a sidelong glare at me the chef muttered in a strangled voice, ‘No, it’s a er, kettle, a thingy… for boiling, um, water.’
With a look at Jess that said she thought Jess was taking the mick, the woman left the galley.
Guess that’s what life is like for the very very rich. You don’t need to know what a kettle is. You just have staff who do.

Language is another interesting issue we have to deal with as crew. Couple of mornings ago the owners wife, as she was passing the galley, asked me to see that the wardrobe in the master cabin was thrown away.
Thank goodness the other crew were around and heard her say it too as they were equally baffled. It took the bosun to go and ask her directly is she really wanted the built in wardrobes dismantled and removed?
She looked at him blankly, 'The towel wardrobes,' she said. Duh, bathrobes. Who would have thought?

Same woman asked Jess to iron the cheese. If she’d asked me, being the stew, maybe I might have been able to decipher what she meant but as it was the chef we were utterly baffled. Eventually we had to ask what she meant. She was very patient. The blue denim cheeses please, that she’d left of the bed. Oh.

But it works both ways. Jess told this French woman that she was a cooker, cuisinière, when she meant to say chef and I called this policeman a jambon (ham) when he was actually a gendarme. Very embarrassing. Particularly as he was very cute.

No when it comes down to it, yachting can be many things, quite apart from the normal, including baffling, hilarious and downright embarrassing.