When did 'aspiration' become a dirty word? When they sprayed it gold…
Two encounters on the streets of London
AL Kennedy
The Observer, Sunday 7 September 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/07/aspirational-gold-ferrari-society-wealth-ethics?CMP=fb_gu
Last week in London
While saying I have more money than you to the small assembly of gentlemen gathered around it (each of them grimacing in the manner of someone experiencing spontaneous penile reduction), the car did also seem to announce but I may be running out of ideas about how best to fritter it away.
I walked on along a thoroughfare haunted by supercars reduced to growling expensively and showing off their headlights in lieu of actually driving at their possible 200mph. And I found my head filling with the single word aspirational.
When I was a kid aspirations were ladders that indicated and accessed better things. The things tended to be abstract, such as compassion, bravery, knowledge, curiosity and faith in a variety of finer worlds. I was given exemplary books about people who invented anaesthetics or cures for diseases or handy devices such as the telephone. I was taught about people who risked torture or death for concepts such as justice. (There was no suggestion that being a torturer or executioner would be effective or acceptable.)
I was shown that education and encouragement could defeat all kinds of deprivation and unleash all kinds of potential. I learned I was lucky because I had both encouragement and education. I learned about Saint Francis of Assisi
In short, I was shown how amazing human beings could be, given half a chance. Even when the class was played a film of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn saying that communism was dreadful and that, now he was in the west, he could be definitive about the different but equal dreadfulness of capitalism, there was a sense that amazing people would come up with something better.
Then something happened to aspirations. At around the time when TV shows about healthcare and effective policing replaced actual healthcare and effective policing, aspirations began to be replaced with aspirational stuff. Aspirational magazines, displaying aspirational things and TV shows about aspirational lifestyles appeared. As proper journalism became impossibly expensive and the recycling of PR handouts and pandering to advertisers became an easy option, what had been a marginal feature in our media landscape became a central mountain of cheap coverage about aspirational stuff.
Today, we are immersed in information about aspirational objects: aspirational shoes, aspirational hats, hair, tummies, faces and relationships, all embodying perfections that are both required and unattainable. Even cautionary tales of failed marriages and unhappy skin tone are rendered distant by glamour, as are the extensive depictions of royals breathing in and out, or wearing clothes with staggeringly impressive proficiency.
The more we attempt to embrace the unattainable, the more it recedes and the further we move from the aspirations psychologists generally find make us happy – all that compassion and creation we needn't bother with any more. The unattainable doesn't often make us happy – it's unattainable. And therefore frustrating.
Meanwhile, many golden ladders have been withdrawn, sometimes by people who once climbed them. Libraries, safe schools, prison education schemes, a functional justice system, jobs with reasonable hours and rates of pay – they're gone or going. For some, reading is aspirational. For many, working and earning a living by doing so is aspirational. A privatised NHS has driven up the price of healthcare while crippling public provision and liberating private schemes from any pressure to perform. So being healthy is becoming aspirational.
If you're already ill, or poor and on benefits, ideologues at the DWP will, at vast public expense, be intent upon stopping the benefits that allow you to live and contribute to a civilised society. This, when stress-free living is already aspirational for the chronically ill and poor.
Predatory loan companies offer the unrepayable in order to bring the unsavable within sight of essentials that are now aspirational. Which, in turn, makes anything other than being in debt aspirational. And if even bloodletting loans aren't available, giving our money away to gambling businesses is presented as aspirational.
Needless to say, a great deal of this is the equivalent of banging your head against a wall every day. Which means you don't have the time in which to discover the equivalent of penicillin, inspire your kids or exceed your own and other's expectations. And the bravery required to get through your day goes unremarked. Your sufferings are as undignified and damaging as any – in some cases a kind of torture – but they're invisible. And so are all the people who are not aspirational.
Last week in London London London
Many people in many streets now ask for money and on that occasion in London
And after this small, unsurprising city event ? I told people about this encounter and they were sympathetic. To me. What a shame such a thing should have happened to me. It is no longer, apparently, aspirational to either help or understand each other. So we don't.
Ramadan gold rush: It's that time of year when the Arab plutocracy descends on austerity
By TOM RAWSTORNE / Daily Mail.
PUBLISHED: 21:02 GMT, 29 June 2012 |
UPDATED: 00:12 GMT, 30 June 2012
Outside London
In terms of conspicuous consumption that
takes some beating — £1.6 million for a car that is as delicate as a tea-set.
But for the Saudi owner who has had it
flown over to London
This year the weeks leading up to the
Muslim month of fasting, which begins on July 20, have seen millionaires and
billionaires flock to London from across the Middle East .
They come to escape the oppressive heat
back home, to relax, to party and, above all, to show off their wealth.
For upmarket shops, restaurants, nightclubs
and hotels, it is bonanza time. Forget the summer sales, these visitors want
the best and are prepared to pay for it.
And
so it is that Bond Street West End designer outlets, casinos
such as Les Ambassedeurs, restaurants such as Le Caprice, and hotels such as
The Sheraton Park Tower have been instructing their (Arabic-speaking) staff to
roll out the red carpet.
The figures speak for themselves: some
five-star hotels are reporting 80 per cent Middle Eastern occupancy
As for the stores, the average British
shopper will spend £120 during a trip to the West End
and an American £550. Compare that with the average Saudi spend of £1,900.
What’s more, in the month before Ramadan, the amount spent by Middle Eastern
visitors will be double that in other months.
Of course, it is not the first time the
high-rollers have abandoned the fierce heat of a Middle Eastern summer for London
Saudi visitors are up 22 per cent
year-on-year, while visitors from the UAE have risen to almost 120,000 — up
nearly ten per cent.
With the burka banned in France , many who traditionally holidayed in Paris
As a result, while house prices in other
parts of Britain stagnate in
the recession, Middle Eastern buyers have piled in to London
‘The Ramadan Rush is a total phenomenon,’
says Jace Tyrrell of the New West End Company, the management company for
retailers in Oxford Street Bond Street Regent Street
‘It is worth millions to us — last year
there was about £120 million spent in the pre-Ramadan rush by Middle Eastern
visitors, but it grows every single year. We expect it to be up ten per cent
this year.’
In central London
‘This stunning international fashion label
is looking for an experienced Arabic-speaking sales advisor to join their
upmarket concession within Harrods,’ reads one vacancy advert.
‘Arabic-speaking, experienced, talented
makeup artists and skincare specialists needed for exciting positions in West End premier department store,’ reads another, one of
dozens posted online. And it’s not just the staff who are hand-picked.
The visitors from the Middle
East are not interested in buying run-of-the-mill designer goods
and have no interest in discounted items. Consider the fact that the value of a
single Saudi shopping transaction in London
As a result the traditional summer sales in
many upmarket London
‘They
absolutely don’t want summer sales bargains, they want new season stock,’
explains a Selfridge’s spokesperson. ‘They’re very keen on fine jewellery and
shoes, and on recognised brands like Chanel. They’re very savvy shoppers and
they want the latest, most fashionable, limited-edition products.’
One example of targeting by the brands is
to be found in the use of Oud, a distinctive fragrance, in scents and beauty
products.
‘Oud is a particularly popular scent for
Middle Eastern shoppers, so a limited edition of, say, an Oud-scented
fragrance, whether it’s by Armani, Jo Malone or Tom Ford, is very popular,’
says the spokesperson.
Unsurprisingly, one of the biggest draws
for the visitors is Harrods. Indeed, so popular is the department store with
Middle Eastern travellers that the Ramadan Rush has also been nicknamed the
Harrods Hajj — a light-hearted reference to the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca
Again, limited-edition items are popular:
Louis Vuitton handbags; diamond jewellery; watches from Cartier; leather goods;
silk scarves, and perfumes from Hermès.
Many of the purchases will be paid for in
cash. Atif Nawaz works a stone’s throw from Harrods, at the Knightsbridge
Foreign Currency Exchange.
He says it is not uncommon for Middle
Eastern families to exchange £3,000 a day during a three-day shopping trip.
‘The family will go to Harrods or Harvey
Nichols, spend the money they have and then send their chauffeur back to me the
next day to exchange more money,’ said Mr Nawaz.
‘It is spare change for these people. But
even though they are rich, they always haggle. They’ll spend thousands in the
casino or at Harrods but come back and argue about the exchange rate.’
It’s not just shops that benefit from this
deluge of dollars and dirhams, the currency of the UAE.
Companies providing chauffeurs, private
chefs and close-protection bodyguards are all reporting a surge in business, as
are concierge companies who cater for the rich and famous.
One such outfit, Quintessentially, is
currently looking after a Saudi woman who is visiting London
For another client they arranged for a
guitar signed by Damien Hirst to be delivered to a member’s son because he
loved the artist’s exhibition at the Tate so much. The cost? £10,000.
Quintessentially also laid on a very
special tour of London for a group of male
clients from the Middle East . The brief was
that it was to involve cars and that money was to be no object. And so they
arranged for a fleet of ten deluxe supercars to pick them up from their Mayfair apartment.
They included a Bugatti Veyron, a Ferrari
Enzo, a Lamborghini Gallardo and an Aston Martin DB9.
The men then drove around the capital,
stopping at ten of London
Karen Jones, editor of Citywealth, a
publication aimed at ‘individuals of ultra-high net worth’ (the sort of people
with £100 million-plus to invest), says that for her clients London is all
about having a good time before returning home to observe Ramadan.
Arabs love London London
as a playground as we would Cannes or Monaco Saudi Arabia
told her that during a month in London
His daytimes will be spent shopping at
Hermès and dining at Scott’s, La Petite Maison, Le Caprice and Nobu, and in the
evenings he will frequent the capital’s casinos.
‘He told me that one of his Saudi friends
bought a £9 million flat opposite Harrods and then spent £1 million furnishing
it,’ said Ms Jones. ‘The trouble was that he couldn’t get any staff to work in
it or anyone to come and make him a cup of coffee, so he ended up going to stay
in a hotel. He tried bringing maids to London
Even the weather isn’t off-putting. Ms
Jones says: ‘They don’t get rain in places like Saudi, so running for a taxi in
a shower is seen as a fun and exciting thing to do.’
Of course, the real high-flyers would not
be seen dead in a taxi.
Instead they have their cars freighted over
to London
Take a trip around central London
Their drivers want to be noticed, and where
better to be seen than outside Harrods? So it was that in the space of ten
minutes on Wednesday afternoon I spotted a Saudi-registered Ferrari 438 worth
£170,000 performing three laps of Harrods, its driver revving the engine each
time he passed the famous green doors. He was followed shortly afterwards by a
Dubai-registered, £270,000 Lamborghini SV.
Given the wealth of the owners, it is
perhaps unsurprising that little notice is paid to the British rules of the
road. Each summer Westminster Council is left with tens of thousands of pounds’
worth of unpaid fines as these visitors abandon their cars on yellow lines.
A list of last year’s most prolific
offenders included the Arab owner of a £300,000 Rolls Royce who owed £2,000 for
18 tickets, and a Dubai-registered, £200,000 Lamborghini Murcielago which had
racked up 24.
Meanwhile, the owner of a Bugatti Veyron
L’Edition Centenaire — registration 444 — failed to pay £120 after he parked on
a yellow line outside Selfridges (despite having managed to find £1.2 million
to buy the car).
A mile or two from Harrods, legally parked
on the forecourt of the Sheraton Park Hotel are two Maybachs with foreign
plates and a Qatar-registered McLaren MP4.
‘The MP4 is worth about £200,000,’ one
hotel worker explained. ‘It’s been brought in on a private jet and then driven
straight off the plane to here. The amount of money these people can spend is
ferocious.
‘We had one chap here, the son of a Saudi
prince, and he and his brother each had a Bugatti Veyron, which they had had
shipped over while they stayed here. He told me he had just bought a fully
crewed yacht and anchored it in Monaco
Back at The Dorchester in Mayfair ,
the Veyron L’Or Blanc is attracting a crowd, even with its high-powered engine
switched off.
The onlookers are discussing its vital
statistics — kiln-fired porcelain inlay, eight-litre engine and acceleration of
zero to 60mph in a touch over two-and-a-half seconds. As for fuel economy?
That’s seven miles per gallon in town. With petrol prices what they are, that’s
enough to send a shudder through the wallet of even a very well-off Briton.
But for the car’s owner, an unknown Saudi
said to be in his 30s, the cost of a tank of petrol wouldn’t even count as
small change.
 |
|
Shore leave: boats are readied in Antibes. Photograph: Ed
Cumming/Observer
|
Sun, sea and silver service:
what’s it like crewing on a superyacht?
Working on a superyacht is
the dream job for many young Britons. Their life below deck is surreal, funny
and sometimes downright disturbing. Ed Cumming reports from Antibes
Ed Cumming
The Observer,
Sunday 7 September 2014/ http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2014/sep/07/crewing-on-superyachts-wealth-careers?CMP=fb_gu
“Accés Interdit,” says the sign on the Quai des
Milliardaires in Antibes. Behind a barrier the superyachts rise like a skyline
in white and royal blue. This is the smartest address in a smart town.
Riff-raff are discouraged.
Still, nobody pays much attention as I wander up to the
first of these beasts, the motor yacht Katara. Owned by the Emir of Qatar, it
is thought to have cost around $300m. You don’t spend that much on a boat not
to have anyone notice. Crew in white shirts and khaki shorts swarm over its
decks, making final preparations to the scene. Everything is immaculate.
Glasses and cutlery are laid on tables. Sun-loungers are set out on the teak
transom, towels rolled in tight cylinders. On the top deck a helicopter waits.
It all gleams in the sunshine.
At the end of the gangplank a steward stands with his hands
behind his back. The boat is 124m long, he explains. He doesn’t own it himself.
They are waiting for someone. He won’t tell me who. No, I can’t have a look
around. That’s enough, thanks. His tone makes it clear that he does not want
scruffy tourists loitering and that he has ways of enforcing this wish. As I
leave I take a final wistful look up at the decking. It does look rather nice,
I think, but then again that’s the whole point. More than any other status
symbol, these boats are the ultimate projections of global hyper-wealth:
floating embassies of a world that is highly visible but impossible to touch.
Unless you get a job on one, that is. The promise of a peek
into this rarefied kingdom is the reason thousands of young British people head
to the Mediterranean each spring. They are motivated by the same reasons people
have always gone to sea: money, adventure and escape. Depending on where you
draw the line (“super” is generally thought to start at around 30m long), there
are more than 5,000 superyachts in the world. Most of them will pass through
Antibes at some point. The biggest need up to 70 crew.
“After school I worked as an estate agent and then in
recruitment,” says James, 21. “But I’d had enough of sitting behind a desk.
Family members had boats and I’d always loved the sea. I wanted to follow my
dream.” He has been in Antibes since May, living off a mixture of savings and
day-work while he looks for a more solid position. He is staying at the
Grapevine, a crew house which sleeps up to 36 potential “yachties”. As ever in
this business, money flows like water. He pays €1,000 a month for his room, but
can make that back easily if he finds the right work. “And if it doesn’t work
out, there’s time enough to work in an office again down the line.”
“I’d had enough of cutting hair,” says Alex, 23. Growing up
in Sandbanks, Dorset, she also found out about the yachting world through a
family connection. “My step-brother came out here and paid off all his
university debt,” she explains. “He practically begged me to come out.” She left
her job in a salon and flew out in April, and has just finished her first
proper job – a two-and-a-half month charter.
The work, for the vast majority of men and women, mostly
consists of cleaning. Men are usually deckhands, or “deckies”. They clean the
outside of the boat. Women are stewardesses, or “stews”. They clean the inside
of the boat. “It’s basically a car wash on a massive scale and things have to
be immaculate,” says James. A big yacht can easily take two days to clean, and
in the season it needs cleaning constantly. The decks are made from untreated
teak, a legacy from the days of sail and as labour-intensive as floors come. It
would be easy to have a protective coating on the teak or simply to use a
different material, but the global elite value its pinkish hue. Toilets are
cleaned with toothbrushes and cotton buds.
Many yachts are chartered out to offset the outrageous cost
of maintaining them, usually considered to be about 10% of the build price per
year. The rule of thumb is that they cost $1m per metre to build or buy, and
more at the top end: by this logic a 50m boat, far from unusual these days,
will have cost $50m to build and $5m per year to run. At 180m, Azzam, launched
last year and commissioned by Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the president of the
UAE, is currently the largest privately owned vessel in the world. Built by the
German yard Lürssen, it is estimated to have cost $605m.
The charter costs reflect these figures. Roman Abramovich’s
boat, Eclipse, is thought to be the priciest available to rent, at $2m per
week, or $11,900 per hour. That’s before fuel, water, food and tips for the
crew, who will cater to the guests’ every whim as the yacht hops from Sardinia
to Monaco to Greece or, during the winter, the Caribbean. They are the perfect
tonic for the people prepared to blow millions on a holiday: think Jay-Z,
Leonardo DiCaprio, Simon Cowell, and untold numbers of hedge-funders and
investment bankers.
For yachties, these charters are the goal. They range from a
couple of days to six weeks in length, and pay starts at €2,000 a month.
British law has a loophole exempting maritime employees, but few of the people
I talk to seem overly preoccupied by tax. Most are paid directly into offshore
accounts. Crew live onboard and all food is provided. With no expenses, savings
can quickly add up, especially when they are supplemented by tips. The rule of
thumb is €1,000 per crew member per week, but these can go up to €5,000 or even
higher.
“You earn every cent,” says Lizzie Irving. “I found it
unbelievably tough. You work hard and play hard.” Originally from Scotland,
Lizzie moved to France after leaving university to start a concierge service,
but she was washed out by the recession. She worked on the boats for a year
before moving on to land, where she is now sales manager for Bluewater, one of
the biggest crew-services providers. They have more than 52,000 people on their
books, including 11,000 Britons, for every position from captains to engineers
and chefs.
“We do our best to help people get work, but ultimately it’s
down to them,” she says. “And each boat is different. Some captains want
career-minded grafters, others want a more relaxed vibe. It’s difficult to
generalise.” She adds that although billionaires might seem recession-proof,
the industry is not immune to the natural shocks of the world economy.
“In 2008, after the financial crisis, we had a huge number
of people from the City coming down to be crew. Economics and maths graduates
who had lost their jobs and wanted to try something new. But it was a tough
market anyway, because those who had money couldn’t be seen to be using it, and
those who had jobs didn’t want to leave them. Now the market is back to normal,
and crew are more willing to move around.
“People get shiny-eyed about the boats. It’s a beautiful
industry that’s seen to be prestigious. Outsiders don’t really appreciate the
hard work that goes into it. If you are a steward you have to know how to serve
every different nationality and religion. You could have Russian or Arab
guests, Jewish or Muslim or Christian. I had to serve royalty. You might have
three lactose-intolerant guests, two gluten-free and three children. They might
want fillet steak when you are 300 miles from shore. You have to be ready for
everything and it’s not acceptable not to know what to do.”
Culinary choices are only the start of the potential
tensions on board. Compared with the five-star hotel standard of the guest
state-rooms, the crew accommodation is usually cramped and shared. Crew will
wake up to serve breakfast and then stay until the last guest has gone to bed,
meaning days can be up to 20 hours. There are no weekends at sea. On
superyachts the owner is God, followed quickly by the captain and the guests. A
verbal tic of the industry is to refer to “my owner”. They range from the
friendly to the downright tyrannical.
“On my first job the owner arrived in the night,” says
Sarah, a woman in her 30s with more than a decade’s experience in the industry.
“We were all lined up on the deck ready to greet him and his wife. The wife
went down the line shaking everyone’s hands. When she got to me she said, ‘Oh,
another new one.’ She lifted her shoes up to my face. ‘Clean my shoes,’ she
said. I was ready to quit there and then.
“A few weeks into the trip I saw one of the Filipino
personal servants running out of a cabin with blood coming from her nose. The
wife had thrown a shoe at her head when she found a dress had fallen off its
hanger in her closet. I asked the chief stewardess why the maid didn’t quit.
‘She can’t quit,’ she explained. ‘Madame went to the Philippines with a
briefcase of cash and bought her. The owner’s wife threatened to throw her
passport overboard so she’d never see her family again.’ The next morning I saw
her with her hands around the same girl’s throat. I resigned in response, but
on my last night I was carrying a tray of drinks and tripped on a Picasso that
was lying in a corridor, fell down the stairs and broke my foot. It was quite
an eye-opening first yacht job.”
And despite seeing this, Sarah says she still feels bound by
a peculiar omerta which surrounds the industry. Nobody I spoke to would name
owners or guests on the record. Many are bound by formal non-disclosure
agreements, and few are keen to risk a lawsuit from some of the world’s most
powerful men. “These guys make their own rules. They have private security all
over the boat. You don’t fuck with them.”
Stories as extreme as this are unusual. “That’s the worst
story I’ve heard,” says Jo Morgan, who used to work on boats and writes for a
yachting magazine, Online Onboard. “It’s certainly not representative. Also,
yachts are like a private house. Most crew don’t think it’s right to gossip
about someone’s family life. And they’d never get hired again. Discretion is
everything.”
Nevertheless, employment rights are nonexistent at many
levels. In theory, many of the superyachts’ flag states are signatories to the
Maritime Labour Convention, which guarantees certain rights to employees. But
they were principally designed for container ships, so unsuited to the yachting
world, and many yachts either ignore them or take liberties.
There is rarely maternity leave, and you can’t take a child
onboard, so women’s careers in yachting end abruptly when they become mothers.
You can be hired or fired on a whim. “I was told I was let go from my last job
because I didn’t smile at the captain enough,” says one woman I speak to. “The
real reason was that the captain was French and wanted a French crew. You can
be fired for being too old or too young, or not having the “right look”
(typical translation: not good-looking enough).” It is not uncommon for an
owner to wake up one morning and fire the entire crew without notice.
I struggle sometimes because I have tattoos,” says Alex.
“Some people don’t want to be served by someone with a tat. If I had known I
would be doing this work when I got them, I might have thought twice.” Alex is
lucky that her old job, hairdressing, is coming in useful out here, too. “One
of the crews needed haircuts so I went on to cut all their hair,” she says.
“The captain invited me for dinner as a reward.” Food is one of the great perks
onboard, with chefs catering for the crew almost to the same standard as for
the guests and the owners – spreads for lunch and dinner.
Although abuse is unusual, the work can still be unpleasant,
particularly for women. While there are female deckhands and male stewards,
they are the exceptions. “My feeling is that it’s often a better job for men
than for women,” says Jo Morgan. “Men get to drive the tenders and show the
guests how to use the jet skis. Often these are skills the billionaires don’t
have – most of them wouldn’t even know how to turn their yacht on – so there’s
an element of respect there. But they’re used to being waited on, so they’re
not impressed by having someone serve them a drink, or having their bed made
with hospital corners. Which is a shame, because the level of service is high
and requires real skill.”
Alex agrees that the job is not always how it appears to the
outside. “My boat went to the Monaco Grand Prix, which sounds amazing,” she
says. “But during the race I watched the cars going by on the boat’s CCTV while
I was cleaning loos below deck.” Other tales are simply of excess. Everyone has
at least one ridiculous story and it is impossible to tell which are true and
which apocryphal. The pig flown in from Denmark because someone wanted a hog
roast. The owner who hires dwarfs to waterski around the boat for his
amusement. The dry cleaning sent to Paris by Learjet. The artificial beach
assembled on the back of one boat each day. The deckhands sent into the ocean
to manually clear the area of jellyfish before a guest went swimming. Anything
and everything procured on demand.
Prostitutes are often brought onboard on some yachts. “You
couldn’t work on a busy charter boat if you weren’t happy coming into contact
with hookers,” says Sarah. “Sometimes they are underage. You do wonder what
you’re doing with your life when you find yourself being bossed around by a
prostitute, but then you think that her first day at work was probably worse.
What I find harder is when you have an owner on board with his mistress and
then a day turnaround before his wife arrives – particularly if you like the
wife. If you are a student of politics, it can also be difficult to wait on
someone you find morally abhorrent. Islam Gaddafi was on one of my boats just
before I joined it, which I would have found difficult. But you have to learn
not to take rudeness personally.”
“The other thing you see is the alienating effect of great
wealth,” Sarah adds. “I’ve had owners who have just recently come into their
money. They buy a yacht and at the start of the season they are very friendly.
They let the crew address them by their first names and crack jokes. Then they
look at all the other boats and realise how things are done. They close up and
become much more formal. By the end of the season they are eating hamburgers
alone from a white tablecloth with candelabra, while everyone calls them ‘sir’.
They get delusions of grandeur and I think it can be very lonely. You’ll
sometimes be cruising along and the guests will be drinking champagne awkwardly
on deck. On the shore you’ll see a few people drinking tinnies and fishing with
their mates, and you think ‘who’s happier here?’”
Perhaps because of this, relations between crew and guests
are unusual, if not unheard of. “That’s what skorts are for,” laughs Alex,
referring to the harassment preventative qualities of the short/skirt hybrid
favoured by female crew. “I heard of one stewardess who married their owner,
but those kinds of relationships are rare.”
Drugs are less ubiquitous than you might think. “If drugs
are found on board a captain can lose his licence and they don’t want to risk
their whole careers,” says Sarah. “I’ve heard of captains kicking guests off
for drug use. But equally there are some who turn a blind eye. Each boat is a
unique little society. You can’t generalise.” For the crew it is a high-risk game
as well, with random drug tests increasingly common. There are plenty of “dry
boats”, where the crew can’t have alcohol onboard. “Don’t screw the crew” is
another common policy, but apparently often ignored..
There is plenty of mischief ashore between gigs, as you
would expect from good-looking 18- to 30-year-olds who find themselves in a
port town with thousands of euros and only a short time to spend them. “Boats
are a nightmare for relationships,” says Jo. “There’s so much pressure, and
you’re always working in close quarters with other attractive young people. And
boats are often reluctant to take couples on board because if you split up it’s
a political and emotional mess for the whole crew.”
Yet for all of these difficulties, the allure of the job
persists. Good charters are a well-paid way to see some of the most beautiful
places on earth, from the comfort of the most luxurious vessels ever made. “If
you’re not sociable you don’t last long,” says Alex, “but if you can get along
with people you make friends for life almost immediately, from all over the
world.” She isn’t alone. Everywhere you go you hear the same story: of people
who have tried to leave the industry, but keep finding themselves drawn
inexorably back to the south of France.
“When it’s good, it’s amazing,” agrees Tom, 27, who worked
in yachts for two years in the Mediterranean and Miami. “We had a charter with
a British musician – a household name – and I realised that the key was to make
sure his kids had a good time. I concentrated on that: playing games with them,
taking them swimming, going on the jet skis. They had a great time, and at the
end we got a tip of €6,000. You realised that for all of their wealth, these
people struggle so hard to find peace. That’s what they pay for, and why
privacy is so highly valued. You’re in the middle of the ocean. Nobody can
bother you.”
For the crew, as well, life on board can be as enlightening
as it is horrific at times. Somewhere between cutting cigars, pouring champagne
and unblocking toilets, this is a job like few others.
“I am so pleased to have worked in yachting,” says Jo. “I
have stories for the rest of my life. Every time you join a yacht and meet your
new crew, or look out of the porthole when you arrive in the Maldives, or the
Seychelles, you get a kick. It’s an adventure. It gave me an education, about
myself and the people who rule the world. You cannot come out the same you went
in.”
Some names have been changed. None of the events reported in
this article took place on the yachts pictured
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