Whatever floats your boat

 On the asphalt of the beach road in San Sebastián there is a long diagonal scar which I try to avoid on my bike because it's deep enough for an uncomfortable jolt. It was caused by a big yellow bulldozer during a complex operation to cast and transport gigantic concrete blocks with which to lengthen the jetty on the opposite side of the bay.

They were extending the jetty in order to allow longer cruise ships to moor. Cruisers had been growing steadily longer and taller for years and this was the second extension of the jetty since we first arrived over thirty years ago.

The most astonishing aspect is that some of those longer cruise ships are short ones that have been lengthened by cutting them down the middle, heaving the two halves apart and inserting a new section. Unbelievably, the new section is constructed in advance complete with decks, cabins, windows and services, then simply slotted into place. Weld up all the joints, move in with the paint pots and in no time at all you've got a longer ship. But how can they manufacture an entirely new section of a huge ship so very precisely? How can they avoid little changes in level at the deck joints that you could trip over in your flip-flops?

By contrast, the reason it's done is very easy to understand. Longer cruise ships carry more passengers, reducing costs for the cruise company. A cruise can now be as attractively cheap as a boring old package holiday hotel in Crete, Goa or Torremolinos.

There's a downside to that, though. Some people book a cruise who really shouldn't, and it seems to be a particular hazard for the Brits. A package hotel abroad can be comfortably British in ambience, and so indeed can a cruise ship, but the snag is that the ship will dump you daily onshore where things may be disturbingly foreign. San Sebastián is as friendly a place as any you'll find but it doesn't do the Full English Breakfast or Fish 'n Chips or an Irish pub with pints of Guinness. And the bars and cafes are run not by British expats but by Spanish-speaking Gomerans or Latin Americans with minimal understanding of English. If communication hitches and cultural oddities make you nervous it might be better to stay on board the ship, sipping a rum and coke by the swimming pool.

We met a couple a few years ago who should have stayed on board. Both looked anxious and a little desperate. Recognising us as something other than Gomeran, the husband accosted us at our cafe table: 'How do you get out of this place?'

Bus, taxi, walk, hire a bike - there are lots of ways to leave San Sebastián, we told him. What exactly…

'Isn't there some nice little resort near here? Somewhere you can get a decent cup of tea?'

Santiago on the south coast you could loosely describe as a nice little resort, although with perhaps worryingly large numbers of locals wandering around, but the early bus had left long ago and the next would be an hour's wait. They could take a taxi, we told them, but that would be a half-hour trip and a fair pocketful of euros. Not sure about the cup of tea either. We watched them heading back towards the ship.

It's a sad fact that some people really shouldn't go on holiday at all. Recently another couple were safely seated at a cafe table with a colourful jug of sangría in front of the wife, hubby with a mug of beer, blue sky overhead, but both looking a little tense. I asked if they were enjoying their cruise. He wasn't, she was, apart from having a glum husband. 'I can't get him out of that chair. Won't go and look at the tower in the park, doesn't want to see the church or Columbus's house, just wants to sit here knocking back pints of lager.'

Hubby's face darkened to a deeper purple. 'I never wanted to come on a blinking cruise in the first place, it was her idea. I can't wait to get home, to be honest.'

Perhaps he'd just got traveller's tummy. Most of the cruceristas enjoy themselves in San Sebastián, it gets top marks in post-cruise surveys, and as the cruise ships grow longer and more of them arrive - several a week at peak season - the bars and cafes have learned to cope better. Nowadays any waiter or waitress will understand 'pint of lager', 'white wine', 'white coffee' or 'sangría' pronounced the English way, as well as the equivalents in German.

George from Manchester had the right attitude. He asked permission to sit at our table, as there wasn't anywhere else, and introduced himself cheerfully. 'Enjoying your cruise?' I asked him, the standard opener.

'I am, I am,' George said. 'Doing me best, anyway. I'm on me own now.' His wife had died a couple of years ago. We listened to his story, advised him where to go and what to see, treated him to his beer and eventually waved him on his way. Brave of him, I thought. But perhaps he'd meet a similarly plucky lady on board his cruise ship and start a whole new phase of life. Careful of the joints in the corridors though, we should have warned him.

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Lengthening a ship is called stretching, which makes it sound easy, and in fact it's not a new technique at all but goes back to the late 19th century. At first it was done to create space in existing ships for a new type of steam engine that was more efficient but also much larger.

I touched on the topic of cruise ships in a previous story, Judgement of nations (22 June 2017), but what triggered this fuller account was a film from Uruguay about a crew member on a cruise ship who happens upon a mysterious doorway that leads to an apartment in Montevideo. Yes, I know, but it's magic realism and supposed to be symbolic. (Window boy would also like to have a submarine, directed by Alex Piperno, 2020.)

That reminded me that we are now into October and the cruise season is almost upon us. It continues throughout the winter until around Easter.

A large proportion of the passengers who come ashore will order a jug of sangría, which is properly pronounced san-GREE-a, not SAN-greeya. It comprises red wine, chopped fruit, lemonade or sparkling water and usually a spirit such as rum or brandy. The word in Spanish also means 'bloodletting', but it's probably better not to know that.