Great Western Coffee Shop

Peter is a hard working wage earner who speaks 5 languages and is actively learning a sixth.  Luis is a bright gentleman who lost his job when his industry shrank, and he took the difficult decision to work away from home for months on end to support his wife and family, to whom he sends money he's earned; he speaks with them as and when he can, and looks forward to visits home.  My goodness me – I feel so luck in the job and roles I've in that I've been able to be home and family based, and to enjoy what I have done; it certainty is possible to get an element of enjoyment out of performing / completing any task to a high standard, but I question whether it's really fulfilling in the medium or long term.

Peter comes from Kerala in southern India, and Louis from Goa. Peter works clearing and wiping down tables in the buffet seating on board this boat – the "Aurora" - which has been home to Lisa and me for the past four weeks.  Luis is our cabin steward - "room service" and more - of the very things we would do for ourselves at home. The theory goes that we ask him or Peter to jump and they do, or if unclear on what we're looking for, they ask "how high".  But Peter and Luis are in that position / role accident of birth and not for any other reason - first and foremost they're people just like you and I.

Comment was made in following up an earlier writing in this series on the contrast between the metrics of the staff and the passengers. Yes - looking around in the "Crow's Nest" from which I am writing, the passengers are pretty well exclusively retired British couples and (further) of Great Britain ethnic origin. On a 30 day cruise, the difference in age profile is only to be expected; getting a month off is pretty darned difficult anywhere in the world during your working life, and if you can at a time you still have plenty of energy, would you choose to spend a succession of days that long being "busy doing nothing?".  The ethnic mix is, frankly, a bit of an embarrassment.   I have nothing against people going away for a holiday and others waiting on them to do what they would normally do for themselves when at home - heck, we ran a hotel, with staff, changing and making beds and preparing and providing breakfast which the guests would normally have done for themselves at home.

Hope your hotel was run better than a certain one in Torquay, even then they had a spanish waiter. so the idea of using cheap imported labour was not new.

I would clearly be biased in our own favour as to how we ran it!