It also meant that I had to later rig-up an external radio aerial for the all important Classic FM accompaniment without which I find it is quite impossible to produce a decent print.

Despite multi-million pound marketing campaigns portraying cruising as something for everyone, a quick visual check in Venice, St Vincent or Vanuatu will confirm that most passengers conform to the grey-haired, buffet-savaging stereotype.

And on every ship, there will a large proportion of cruise bores. They are the people who have no conversation other than listing the cruises they’ve been on, and the places they have been to as a result. They can offer no insight into those places beyond saying what a lovely time they had.

We lower the light, and it’s chocolate, wine and couples holding hands,” says Masoud’s brother Bahman. “What’s the guy with the laptop doing here?

I mean, I get it, sometimes it’s raining and you’re making banana pancakes and you want to sing a song to a girl you just met who’s in your bed. I get it. But that’s not enough to make me want to use Spotify.

In addition, these toilet seats can come with a lot of bells and whistles: heated seats and spray, pressure sensors to only activate when someone is sitting on it, dryers, motion sensors to open the lid when someone walks in the room, the ability to speak, and brushed steel luxury remote controls - almost any feature you can imagine actually.

The Quiet Car is the Thermopylae, the Masada, the Fort McHenry of quiet — which is why the regulars are so quick with prepared reproaches, more than ready to make a Whole Big Thing out of it, and why, when the outsiders invariably sit down and start in with their autonomic blather, they often find themselves surrounded by a shockingly hostile mob of professors, old ladies and four-eyes who look ready to take it outside.

The hipster haunts every city street and university town. Manifesting a nostalgia for times he never lived himself, this contemporary urban harlequin appropriates outmoded fashions (the mustache, the tiny shorts), mechanisms (fixed-gear bicycles, portable record players) and hobbies (home brewing, playing trombone). He harvests awkwardness and self-consciousness. Before he makes any choice, he has proceeded through several stages of self-scrutiny. The hipster is a scholar of social forms, a student of cool.

A journey or destination takes on life-changing status when you suddenly feel that inexplicable frisson that stirs your soul. It can be something as simple as a smile, the quality of light, or a hand carved wooden bowl, that can make you see life from a new perspective.

The country that affects me that way above all others is Japan; a hypnotic mix of rigid convention and outlandish weirdness, and the home of Zen.

Japan showed me how to appreciate beauty in a single moment or a simple object - the sweet hay smell of a tatami floor; a screen door sliding open to reveal the colours of the autumn trees; the sound of tea pouring.
The Japanese understand how beauty is most clearly seen in imperfection, and more importantly they understand the transience of nature - which is why cherry blossom is the perfect symbol of the Japanese soul.