Chart Room Blues: A black-and-white gala dinner, offset by moody blues

This is the most art deco space on board Cunard’s Queen Anne, now sailing towards Cape Town having departed Durban on Monday evening. The mood is blue, offset by red (this is Cunard), and the eye is captured by the art deco touches, in geometric shapes and elsewhere in dangling bevelled glass. A chair of great beauty arrests my eye and my imagination. It is a regal chair in the most royal blue possible; one fit for a queen.

The windows between the lounges and the passageway towards the Clarendon Art Gallery are rectangular but with rounded corners, a lovely art deco touch. The black pillars in the lobby adjacent to the bar at one end of the Chart Room were inspired by similar pillars on Queen Mary. The recessed lighting wherever you encounter it on board is inspired by Queen Elizabeth 2, known and loved by all Cunard passengers for decades as QE2.

Black pillars, three storeys high, are inspired by those on the original Queen Mary, now a hotel moored in Long Beach, California. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

Bob Dixon — for us, the face of Cunard while on board — tells me that the designers of this newest ship in its fleet trawled through the original designs for other Cunard greats, including QE2 and Queen Mary (the original now moored as a hotel in Long Beach, California).

The result is a Cunard passenger liner for a new age — it has the grace and many aspects of the design quality of earlier incarnations, along with a modern mood for this generation and others to come. But are you sailing Cunard? You certainly are. Having wanted to “sail Cunard” since I was a teenager, I am getting everything I hoped for from the experience.

Today is Tuesday, which means it’s Gala Dinner day. The theme is black and white, and come 6pm the passengers, who earlier were dressed casually and some with not much at all — those lounging around the ship’s two pools, if you’re wondering — are now togged up in hundreds of variations on a monochrome theme. The dress code is strictly formal, as I found out when we entered the Britannia restaurant for dinner last night. Some of us had interpreted the theme more liberally, presuming that black and white was the inspiration to use your imagination to meet the challenge creatively. Not quite.

One member of our trio wore smart black trousers, a zooty white shirt, a sharp bowtie, and red braces. Fabulous. But no jacket. Not so for the watchful Maître d’Hôtel who ordered a black tuxedo to be brought to put behind his chair. But I got away with my interpretation: black chinos, a crisp white shirt and slim black tie and then Versace satin black shirt I bought at a bargain price years ago, only worn on rare occasions; so I wore it as a sort of smock, feeling a bit like an artist at sea.

My Versace-artist look, sort of. (Selfie by Tony Jackman)

Cunard crew, on the restaurant side of things, have perfect manners and are steeped in proper old hotel service traditions. It’s a bit like going back in time, so much having changed in South African hotels and restaurants since the 1960s. We’re a pretty informal lot, and we dress according to our personalities.

Dinner was exceptionally good, so much better than dinner the night before. I chose well, clearly — the duck pâté en croute was utterly delicious; the venison (two ways) was top-drawer, and the vanilla lemon soufflé with Limoncello sauce — wow! How do they make such perfect soufflés for hundreds of guests? They couldn’t have been more perfect. Just incredible, I couldn’t believe it was possible.

The vanilla lemon soufflé with Limoncello sauce. (Photos: Tony Jackman)

And a soufflé ranks among the toughest challenges for any chef, at any level. Add this level of pressure and, well, I was more impressed than you might think.

The celeriac rémoulade with the duck pâté en croûte was a perfect little side aspect, along with a ‘hedgerow conserve’, suitably berrylike. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

The sauce for the venison was glorious, very cheffy, very deep and rich and proper.

Not any old venison: roast loin and daube of Highland venison. The loin was as perfect as you’d hope a sliced of medium rare roast venison would be: textbook perfection, so light, so soft, its flavour just right. And then the daube, which means it was stewed with vegetables and stock, perhaps duck fat or other larding agent, and chosen spices and herbs. A lesson in how to cook venison. I asked for more sauce, which I believe is the best compliment you can send a chef.

My photo shows that plenty of sauce was served with the venison, but it was so good that I asked for more. There were kromeski potatoes with it, and brussels sprouts and carrots. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

En route back to our cabin, I pop into the Golden Lion pub where nearly every table is occupied because karaoke is happening, and some of these suited-up veterans of Cunard are not shy behind the microphone. 

Somebody called Dora is doing Gwen Stefani’s woo-hoo song (it’s called The Sweet Escape but I think of it as the woo-hoo song). An elderly American man called Levi and his son or perhaps grandson (“He’s Don”) are doing an Everly Brothers duet, Wake up Little Susie et al.

Then a happy chappy who I suspect is a crew member does Under the Sea from The Little Mermaid, and I’m thinking it might not be the ideal karaoke choice for a ship full of people who’d rather be afloat than down there.

But much of my mind has been elsewhere. Because for hours there has been something darker, something very blue in a different sense, on my mind and in my heart — the blue of the sore heart, the blue of loss and of grief.

During the afternoon, my very dear friend Sandra Antrobus died after a long illness that she fought so, so hard, but in the end she was not able to defeat it. Nobody ever fought cancer with more courage and fierceness.

Sandra stood in front of me outside her hotel in Cradock’s Market Street in late April a year ago and said: “Tony, I am going to fight this!’

Sandra Antrobus — ‘Makhulu’ to her staff — in her kitchen domain at the Victoria Manor, Cradock, Eastern Cape. (Photo: Tony Jackman)

And she did, but now we have lost her despite her determination, and my heart is broken today. We became so close that she saw me as a son. And today I have the heartbreak of a son.

Sandra knew a fine chair when she saw one. She bought hundreds over the years for her Victoria Manor and adjacent Tuishuise. She had them reupholstered in quality fabric, and she was fussy about the chairs she chose to sit in.

The chair that had arrested me earlier in the Chart Room on board Queen Anne strikes me as a fine one for Sandra. But it can only be empty today, symbolising the gap there is now in the lives of all who loved her.

Forgive me for sharing this private loss during these daily Shipboard Diaries but it is a part of what has happened yesterday and today. Now to sail on, and somehow find a way to port without Sandra Antrobus. Right now, that is impossible to imagine. DM