It's British. We licked it and now it's ours.

My name is Sharon and I love the Britannia before I've even been on it. There, I outed myself.

This is not the fashionable view. The fashionable whinge, er view, is as follows:

1) It was made in Italy
2) The company that owns P & O is American
3) We hate cruise ships
4) We hate big cruise ships even more

Sadly the last two seem to come from a) those who have never been on a cruise ship of any kind, and b) those who are paid to write about cruise ships and go on them all the time. Shame on the latter. Please go and get another job. Or maybe it's the editor's decision to send someone too thick to find the hairdryer socket then generally moan about everything on the ship...

Don't like big ships? Go on the small ones. Don't like ships at all? Then why are you reading articles about them and making inane comments? Surely you have something better to do?

As to the Britishness: I live in Southampton two miles from the cruise terminals and, having missed a lot of the fun because our invitations to the gala dinners seem to get lost in the post, we went down to see the ship on Tuesday (naming day). Now obviously there are some Southampton residents who hate the ships but in our case we looked at this magnificent ship and thought "That's ours". It helped that we'd already booked a cruise on it!

It lives here and it's ours. We have licked it. We might even pee on it to make sure it's ours. We should probably wait for our own cabin on it before we do that. It doesn't do to get arrested at the docks.

What is wrong with being proud of this ship? Hello, it was built for the British cruising market. It's an ever growing market by all accounts but I'll leave that analysis to the professional bloggers. Let's be proud of our cruising industry, our ships and our Southampton heritage.

Here's a page I made of our foray down to the pier on Tuesday. It was just getting dark and the ship was lighting up.



Kits are Sahlin Studio's Project Mouse At Sea and Scrapyrus' Anchor My Love.