Once the epitome of moneyed gaucheness, the super-yacht is now a law unto itself, taking luxury to absurd new heights.
There are many bizarre sensations available to the connoisseur of contextual and tactile oddity. Flinging yourself down a spiral staircase bandaged in bubble-wrap. Running through wet sand in cashmere socks. Eviscerating a chicken blindfolded, using just your feet (only attempt this with a previously dead chicken). I’m having a sensation experience as we speak. I’m writing this in a bath at sea. Well, I’m composing this in a bath at sea. Actually I’m writing this on a plane 3000 feet above Turin. (You, I picture reading this lying in bed eating biscuits.)
The contextual tactile conundrum that always strikes me as odd is the bath-at-sea bit. It’s watching the waves out of the porthole whilst inside I make ripples. The two expanses of water, separated by one thin hull: one warm, one cold; one salt, one soap. The sea is elemental, a metaphor for all emotion, sensuality and power and women. The bath is benign, thoughtless, bubbly and a bit of a soak. No one else I’ve ever mentioned this to finds the bath-at-sea contradiction weird or noteworthy.
In fact, they think I’m a bit weird for mentioning it at all, or for even noticing. The truth is I find almost everything about boats weird. I’ve never felt at home with boats, even though I come from an island and seawater is supposed to flow in our veins. I feel as homely on a boat as a haddock does in a cinema. But boats have grown to become a larger and larger part of travel. Ocean-going, opulently appointed boats are the divide between the them, which for the moment includes me, and the you, which includes you.
Forty years ago, pleasure boats were sporty and adventurous and a touch nerdy. They were owned by ex-naval men, men who wore nautical work clothes and were paint speckled and mildly whiffy. Boats were the aquatic version of caravans. Occasional Greeks had large pleasure ones dismissed as gin palaces, but altogether, boats were for fun, the damp equivalent of camping. Now boats are country houses, they’re mansions, they’re four-star hotels.
A contemporary of mine pointed out that when he was a lad he bought sweaty soft-porn mags. When he got his first job, he swapped them for car mags, and when he got to be more successful, aviation magazines. Now that he runs an international company he devours super-yacht periodicals. We always lust after the thing we just can’t afford, and now super-yachts are the pinnacle of consumer aspiration.
The biggest private pleasure boat 10 years ago wouldn’t be in the top 200 today. The Russian conspicuous-consumption fleet is almost as large as the military one. And the new super-yachts built for Californian internet cash and Russian utility bribes are so big that many of them can’t get into holiday ports.
Boats have gone from being the means of exploring places to the places in their own right. They’re not for holidays, they’re floating memorials to your acumen. And what you sail to see is not interesting little islands or remarkable reefs or unspoilt, inaccessible beaches – what you go to see are other boats. The point of having that much money-haemorrhaging aspiration under your feet is to show it off to other billionaires who have opened up the money vein.
Super-boats have helicopters and their own motorcars, and now they’re coming with submarines. I’ve been on one that had its own boardroom and office suite. Why would you want to have a perfectly drab, perfectly functional office with whiteboard and overhead-projectors on your dream yacht? Well, if you were part of the geeky pizza-and-brainstorms-in-the-shed internet plutocracy, then work was fun. In fact, work was probably the only fun you ever had.
The decorating of yachts is a small mystery. Why do they all have pictures of other boats in them, and then photographs of boats from the outside? And bars. A bar at home is the first word in grating naff hideousity. But on a boat, it’s desperately chic, and Onassis had barstools covered in whale foreskins. That really impressed Jackie. On land she’d have made a face like a salted lime and remembered she’d left the gas on.
And then there’s the staff. Obviously all billionaires have staff. You couldn’t be a billionaire and do your own hoovering. But what is it about ozone that makes relatively rational landlubber plutocrats who are happy to hang out with yes-men in regular suits on land feel the need for a squad of gay sauna attendants and the cast of The Pirates of Penzance at sea?
You eat things on boats you’d never do on land, play games and wear clothes you’d never usually wear. Little things with shells and fish and nautical motifs, and men wear hello-sailor hats which they wouldn’t put on for a bet on the pavement. Seawater does odd things when added to money. Boat owners outdo each other in all the childishly excessive ways that the rich have for outdoing each other. Better-looking staff, fancier cooks, more toys; bigger, faster, rarer. Last week I spoke to a breathless awestruck interior designer who’d been employed to do just the soft furnishings on a super-yacht. They were insisting on 1000 thread-count cotton sheets. If that means nothing to you, let me tell you it makes crêpe de chine feel like George Michael’s chin, and one bed’s worth will cost more than you spent on decorating your whole house. Of course, this isn’t the point. If you’ve got a couple of billion, then the difference between goose and duck down doesn’t really register. You could see boats as being a symptom and a palliative of an uncomfortable neurosis, of course. You could see it like that if it makes you feel better.
Boats are not about seeing the world anymore, not about adventure or being sporty and wearing an oily jersey. They’re about control. The one thing all the rich men I’ve ever met have had in common was a pathological desire to organise the chaos of the world. A boat is a complete world on its own; you can micro-manage everything. A plutocrat can be Gulliver on his own Lilliput. In fact, if I ever get a yacht, I’m going to call it Lilliput. (By the way, boats’ names are the novels that the super-rich and unimaginative have inside them.)
The one thing no one can command is the weather. Unless you have a boat. And then if the sun won’t come to Ivan, Ivan can go to the sun. A yacht doesn’t actually have to go anywhere, because it has already arrived.