Who's The Daddy: Daughters’ world tour seems to be progressing well
The two very distinct legs of our grown-and-flown daughters’ world tour are progressing pretty well. The Caribbean and Bali are on opposite sides of the planet but the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Daughter #2 is almost six weeks into a six-month contract with a US cruise ship company and sees sights every day that most of us can only dream of, while on the clock, between long shifts spent entertaining young American kids all day and also well into the night.
She FaceTimed us while on deck earlier this week and said that after disembarking thousands of passengers after their nine-day holiday around heaven and back, and then checking in thousands more to start theirs, she spent the long working day smiling so hard her face hurt.
After 32 years in local and national journalism, that’s an industrial injury that’s completely alien to those in our profession. Smiling? At work? Last time I smiled on the job was around 1998 when someone nicked the little rubber ball out of a fellow sub-editor’s mouse.
Daughter #2’s hours are long but the pay is OK and the tips (shared out equally between the whole team) are pretty generous. The tipping culture in the US, much like their spirit measures, is outlandish and makes Brits look like the penny-pinching, joyless fun-extractors that we are.
They say your pay reflects the difficulty of the problems that you can fix. Well after six months on board a massive cruise ship filled with rich American holidaymakers, Daughter #2 will be able to solve a Rubik’s Cube just by dropping it.
Last week Daughter #2 spend a golden morning and afternoon off floating in the clear blue sea at CocoCay in the Bahamas and next time the ship docks she’s got the afternoon off in Orlando. All on someone else’s dime. I couldn’t be more proud.
By the time you’re reading this Daughter #1’s fortnight in Bali, the exotic photos from which on Instagram look like something from a Duran Duran video in 1982, will be coming to an end.
There was mild panic earlier in the week when Daughter #1 WhatsApped to remind me how I helped Daughter #2 out of a tight spot last month and that she’d nearly spent all of her holiday money.
If she’d been at home in Manchester I’d have told her to eat beans on toast for a week and be more diligent with her budgeting in future.
However, Bali’s a long way from Manchester so the Bank Of Dad stumped up, like every branch always does.
Now online banking is so normalised the high street banks can’t close branches quickly enough, we can ping emergency holiday money to the other side of the world with a few tappitty-tap-taps on our phones.
What did people do in the old timey days in times of crisis, post traveller’s cheques via air mail?
I’d say answers on a postcard to the usual address, but I haven’t sent one of those since an ill-fated, end-of-season holiday to Corfu in October 1993. Chilly. And more or less shut. And we came home five days early.
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