By Will Pavia
Beatrice Muller is looking for a new home. Ideally, it should be within easy reach of shops, a ballroom and a community of committed duplicate bridge players. She does not need much space, nor is she fixed on any particular location. Indeed, her chief wish is that her new home be perpetually floating over the ocean between one location and the next.
In other words, she is looking for a new home that is almost exactly like her present one: a cabin on board the Queen Elizabeth 2, in which she has lived for the past nine years.
In November the ship will make its final voyage to Dubai to be moored beside a man-made island in the shape of a palm tree, and recast as a floating hotel. Even at the age of 89, Mrs Muller refuses to contemplate such a stationary life.
“What would I want to do that for?” she said this week, while her home was moored at Southampton. “I was married to a wonderful man for 57 years. I have done my penal servitude – I want to travel.”
Cruise holidays had never appealed to her until 1995, when she stepped on board the QE2 with her husband, Bob. Both were smitten, and returned year after year. In 1999 her husband died on board. Mrs Muller, from New Jersey, had no grandchildren and most of her friends had died or moved to France. She had far more friends on the QE2 and her two sons suggested that she live there.
She sold almost all of her landlocked possessions and moved into a small, windowless cabin permanently. “My sons are delighted I’m here and safe and out of their hair,” she said. The rates – about £3,500 a month – compared favourably with a Florida retirement home. “It’s far more pleasant,” she said. “They don’t organise you like senior citizens’ homes must do, and I’m hard to organise.”
The Grande Dame of QE2. Photo courtesy: www.roblightbody.comEvery morning she reads a printout of The New York Times, works on her memoirs and calls on friends. In the afternoon she plays duplicate bridge until tea time: then there are cocktails and dancing.
The ship has a number of “hosts”, dapper gentlemen on hand to cut a rug with single ladies of a certain age.
“All the ladies fight over them,” a member of the crew told The Times before introducing Stephen Machutta, 67, an impeccably groomed man from Nevada. “Wow! A writer!” he said. “What a fascinating life you must lead,” he said before gliding away to deploy his charms on the poor, defenceless Baroness Thatcher, who was on board for a ceremony to say farewell to the ship.
Between the cocktails and the dancing and midnight buffets – “and sometimes I find time to sleep” - Mrs Muller writes e-mails to sad landlocked souls who have heard of her extraordinary life and wonder how they too might find a home on a cruise ship.
She now finds herself in a similar position. “I’m looking for a new home at sea,” she said. It is a tight market. “The only liner left in the world is the Queen Mary 2. The Victoria is lovely but she’s not built to go as far as these ocean liners – she’s not as strong.”
Mrs Muller is hoping to persuade Micky Arison, the owner of Carnival Corporation, Cunard’s parent company, to take the QE2’s officers and put them on theQM2.
“That would be the place to turn,” she said.
WHEN A HOUSE IS NOT A HOME
— A couple who lived in Travelodges for a total of 22 years have finally checked out. David Davidson, 79, and Jean, 70, made national headlines last September after it was revealed that they lived in hotels in Nottinghamshire for ten years, then moved to a new Travelodge on the outskirts of Grantham, Lincolnshire, in 1997. Theyare now believed to be visiting family
— Hugh Sawyer, the self-styled “Original Ditch Monkey”, spent a year between 2005 and 2006 living in a wood near Oxford and sleeping in a ditch. He commuted into London daily to work in Sotheby's
— Italian sociologist Maurizio Montalbini had already broken world records for living in a cave before beginning his current three-year stint in 2006. He plans to investigate the effect of isolation on the human body's cycles. “When I remained 366 days underground, I had the impression of only spending 219 days,” he said
—Tom Leppard lives in a hand-made hut on the Isle of Skye. The retired soldier, who until recently was recognised as the world's most tattooed man by the Guinness World Records, often bathes in the river and travels by canoe to collect his pension
— Kapila Pradhan of Orissa, in India, lived in a tree for 15 years after having a domestic spat with his wife in the early 1980s. He even stayed put during a 1999 cyclone that killed thousands and felled many neighbouring trees
— Simeon Stylites, the Saint of the Pillar, lived for many years in the 5th century in solitude and prayer at the top of huge pillars. He attracted a huge following among people who came to him for advice
Sources: agencies, Times archive, arthurmag.com
© Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd.
