Portsmouth - Bilbao ferry

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After settling into our ferry life, after Hannah had done 15 laps of every deck we retired to the bar to check out the free entertainment. 'Free entertainment,' even it isn't particularly entertaining, is still free - plus we were on a cruise ship, would it not be downright rude not to partake in some cruise ship entertainment? Thanks to shows such as X-Factor, 'Cruise ship singer' has become an insult, but to their credit the P&O performers performed like, well, cruise ship performers. In the most complimentary possible way of course.

We had heard that there was going to be cabaret in the bar, and as there are limited options for nightime fun when you're stuck in the middle of the Channel. Yes, we would drink and spend money, but we would also have a better time than we would staying in our cabin. You can eek £5000 out into a two year trip if you have the penitence of a saint, but how much fun is that? Blaze of glory, brightly burning spark, all that stuff.

Magic of the Musicals was the theme and the first thing we saw when we walked in was six grown men dressed in head-to-toe lycra pretending to be cats. Magic and musical. It takes a special kind of person to show a packed audience of middle aged drunkards the definite outline of their testicles. For minimum wage. To be fair, the cat impressions were worth the non-existent admission fee alone. But the following montage of all the Broadway classics that you never wanted to hear, sang by people you really don't want to hear, more than justified it. The highlight for us was a rendition of 'Big Spender'. Scantily clad and high kicking young women is a simple formula. I managed to miss the most gratuitous flash but it's ok because Han didn't miss a thing and reliably informed me that, "she had a lovely bum".

The performers put everything into the song, after all it was the finale, of one night out of a thousand that they would go through the same routine.

I almost felt guilty sat with Han staring at women wearing little more than their underwear until she asked me, "don't you think that she has big calves for a woman?" She had a point, big calves, shoulders, biceps, a really big adam's apple and worst of all a big bulge where there really shouldn't have been one. I think I was perving on a man. Maybe I'm a gay? I stand by my initial statement to Han, when they originally came on, that s/he did have "hot legs".

After the cabaret, the night disintergrated a little. A DJ replaced the cabaret and pint replaced pint. My memories are sketchy but I definitely remember a middle aged woman pulling me to the floor and slitting my throat with a plastic cutlass. She told us she wasn't even going anywhere. Her and her best mate were simply taking the ferry to Bilbao and back as a mini-cruise. I remember watching teenage-try-hard dancing, the Pussycat Doll without the bandmates. She thought she was the coolest thing in the room. She probably was but it was a P&O ferry bar - not a great accolade. I remember watching the 14 year-olds dancing (not in a sex offender's register way.) I remember thinking how painfully young and naive the boys looked dancing awkwardly and laughing childishly next to girls their own age who were practically women, and thinking how little time it seemed since Han and I were that age. I remember dancing to Ricky Martin, swinging Han around like a ragdoll, alone on the dancefloor, with everyone watching.

I don't remember going to bed.

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