Alan Cumming on How a Transatlantic Crossing Can Change Your Life

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Let me be clear: Both middle age and cruises were once topics I rarely thought of—and when I did it was with utter disdain. Not for any logical reasons, of course, as I had absolutely no experience of either. The former, although inexorable, I decided I’d get around to when I was less busy. And the latter was just too old-fashioned: Seven days stuck onboard with white-haired wrinklies? Fuddy-duddy dress codes, like formal attire for dinners or costumes for themed parties and balls? And what would I do with all that time?

But life has a funny way of confounding expectations. Although I’m still enjoying the same sparkly social life I have reveled in since I moved to New York in my early thirties (I even opened my own club, Club Cumming, to ensure both a venue and a constant stream of new friends to party with), I will very shortly be hitting 60. And on a chilly morning last December at the Brooklyn shipyard I began my third—yes, third—Cunard transatlantic crossing, on the Queen Mary 2. I have become a middle-aged man who cruises!

This transmogrification originated with my attempts to be a good son. Fifteen years ago my mum was bereaved and also, for reasons I wrote a book about (Not My Father’s Son: A Memoir), our family went through a traumatic time. I knew my mother had enjoyed Cunard sailings in the past, so I bit the bullet and took her aboard the QM2.

What I had initially balked at turned out to be the things I enjoyed the most. Yes, the passengers definitely skew a bit older and whiter in both skin and hair (though look who’s talking). But dressing for dinner and the costume evenings (a 1920s party, a red-and-gold ball) were a fun portal through which I was able to sense what cruising used to be—and should still be. Stepping back in time sartorially reminded me that people used to travel this way not for leisure but out of necessity, and in so doing, like Shakespeare’s wise old Jaques in As You Like It, gained their experience. There is a beauty to travel that we have lost. Why should we always crisscross the planet in a matter of hours, or sandwich our vacations with airport frenzy? Sailing the Atlantic for a week, I felt I had not just rediscovered but personally learned for the first time that the journey can indeed be more important than the destination.

As for my worries about time? I didn’t have enough of it. My schedule was packed. I would cheerfully have turned around at Southampton and stayed onboard for another week. The ship has a great gym and spa (where my physical needs were sorted) and a nightclub where many a night I whiled away some wee hours on the dance floor (usually with the children or even grandchildren of my passenger peers). I visited the planetarium, popped into watercolor classes and piano recitals. There were staples like film screenings and Broadway-style entertainment in the evenings. Even a nightly LGBT mixer in the Commodore bar (so any withdrawal from communing with my queer tribe was easily sated). And the lectures! On this latest sailing there was a series on the history of theater (so right up my street), one about the 17th-century female playwright Aphra Behn (I mean, come on!), and one dedicated to a hero of mine, Noël Coward, himself an avid cruiser. As he sang, and now so do I, “When storm clouds are riding through a winter’s sky, sail away, sail away.”

This story appears in the March 2024 issue of Town & Country. SUBSCRIBE NOW

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