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However, there was an awkward situation near the end of the cruise which, I think, underlines one of the big differences between ourselves and most of our relatives, and that was when we JCs were going to use up the last of our free "on-board credit", i.e. money given to us by P&O that needed to be spent on the cruise and could not be taken with us when we left. We decided to have a few drinks with that, but there was not enough to treat our families to drinks at the same time. We did not want to appear to be snubbing our relatives either, so we mentioned that we would be gathering on the sundeck for a drink to celebrate the end of the cruise, kind of assuming that everyone would be buying their own. Because we live on such a tight budget ourselves (and the cruise was great because it was possible for us to pay a one-off price and then return to living simply by not getting extras, apart from the snorkeling trip) we were NOT planning to buy drinks for everyone. We just did not have enough money for that.

On the other hand, we did not want to make our relatives feel uncomfortable, and so when we all got together, and we JCs started sharing drinks around amongst ourselves, it seemed more awkward than we had imagined previously. There was a lot of disunity amongst ourselves in working out what to do. Some of us felt uncomfortable not at least offering to share what we had with those others who were present, and so they did. That meant that we ran short ourselves, and there was no way to communicate that quietly to everyone. (Jesus, where were you when we needed some more wine?) Anyway, there was a lot of fairly obvious whispering going on which would have, at worst, been limited to a few elbow jabs between a husband and wife in a normal systemy situation on the same par.

It was very embarrassing, though it is something we will certainly survive. But it did highlight for me at least, how we could only keep up the spendthrift image for a limited period of time before it would be back to our penny-pinching ways. I think there is some relief in terms of not having to keep up the double image now.

Perhaps a word of further explanation should be that we are able to splurge on occasions like this (with definite set limits) precisely BECAUSE we are very careful with our spending outside of the splurges. I have a feeling that an awful lot of passengers overspent, but because they have credit cards with them, they are able to keep on booking stuff up until the cards have maxed out, in order to save them the embarrassment of saying, "Sorry, I can't afford that."