Today I came back from dinner at about twenty past eight to find my cabin steward in the corridor, who informed me that the toilets on my corridor were out of order and I shouldn’t flush my toilet til it was fixed. Bowl full of water. Clean water but very full. Fine. I went out to check my emails – I was worried that the Massachusetts tornado may have affected April. At about 10.15pm, I went back to my cabin. Bowl still full of water.

So I went to Reception to ask why, after over two hours, it hadn’t been dealt with and they told me they had no record of a problem. Seriously, it’s not difficult to start ranting on this ship. I know you think I overreact sometimes, but really. Two hours and they had no idea what I was talking about. The night supervisor came to my cabin and we established that it had been reported to a team that were about to go off duty and that the message had not been given to the night people. I kid you not. Why worry? It’s not like toilets are important or anything.

After banging the appropriate heads together, I went to The Globe to watch the ballroom dancing and have a moan at Merle, who is always receptive to a good whinge, and is always at the ballroom dancing, twirling her stuff, and there are also loos near The Globe. After the dancing finished, we went for a hot chocolate/decaff tea up in the Belvedere and then found ourselves at the tail end of a deck party at the back of deck 9. We had a drink and a bit of a boogie and then turned in at about 1.30am. At which point I returned to my cabin. Was my loo fixed? Go on, guess. I bet you’ll never guess.

Reception promptly felt my wrath – good thing it’s manned 24 hours a day on this ship otherwise things could have got REALLY ugly (I told Merle if I couldn’t pee in my own bathroom, I’d go to Reception and do it there!) – the night supervisor came, yet again, and I bent his ear, yet again, and within 15 minutes an engineer had turned up, fixed it and left. I am typing this at 1.47am, while I’m still angry, so that I can get it out of my system before I go to bed. Otherwise, I’ll be lying awake drafting it in my head all night and that is not conducive to a good night’s sleep, no matter how strong that last cocktail I drank may have been.

As the current situation is that, to my knowledge, at least two people threw up during dinner and the singer of one of the bands is confined to her cabin with a fever, I’d say the norovirus may well have reboarded at LA. Marvellous. If so, the one thing we need more than anything else is FUNCTIONING BLOODY TOILETS!