There’s little that can prepare a first-time cruiser for the sheer weirdness of the whole experience. It is at once pure comfort and yet strangely off-putting; immensely organised and somehow profoundly chaotic; squeaky clean, and yet there’s only so much hand sanitiser that can go around; masterfully prepared and also mass-produced; crowded and lonely. It is, I learn, not a given that a human being in 2024 knows how a lift operates.

These are a few initial thoughts (of many) after a week on a top-tier mega cruise ship, the MS Rotterdam, run by Holland America, a high-end line running 11 vessels all over the world. Our itinerary departs Rotterdam, the Netherlands’ second-largest city, before stopping at four Norwegian towns – Eidfjord, Alesund, Skjolden and Kristiansand – and returning to where we started.