As seen in the Times

I’m fiddling with my phone when a news notification pops up. Another independent school has closed, the latest atrocity in Labour’s unrelenting Khmer Rouge-style anti-middle-class genocide. Seething, I knew it was high time for me to spend a few weeks away from Britain, Andy Burnham and mad, bad Ed Miliband.

But where to go? Husband Simon’s place in the south of France? No, much too hot. Sardinia? No, can’t risk running into Georgie, not after what happened in Sexy Fish on New Year’s Eve in 2012. Then I remember. Emilia Cash-Barings has been raving about this saucy sex cruise she’s just been on. A week of pure hedonism that made Tiberius’s palace on Capri look like the Women’s Institute AGM.

A week of hedonism that made Tiberius’s palace look like the AGM of the Women’s Institute 

And so, about a week later, I find myself aboard a ship bound for Genoa with 650 other sex-crazed passengers. Wandering down from my room, my racy Boden set drawing eyes, I come to a series of doors, each promising different attractions. ‘Leather dungeon’, reads the legend above one. ‘Sultan’s Harem’, promises another. Then there is ‘Bum-slap salon’, ‘Nero’s pleasure garden’, ‘Toyboy spanking chamber’. I decide to start with something vanilla: Nero’s pleasure garden it is.

Entering the room, I’m confronted with a grisly tableau. In the middle of an unfurnished space that looks like a school gym, I see a former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer lying prone and greased. An unshapely looking man, naked but for a Venetian mask, smacks him on the hindquarters with a cricket bat.

A gaggle of straw-haired women dressed as flamingos, a hen-do of the Blackpool variety, are taking turns putting condoms on bananas to hoots of merriment, punctuated by amiable chatter about house prices in Letchworth Garden City. Lady Gaga’s ‘Poker Face’ is playing through a tinny speaker. No actual sex seems to be going on.

I gaze on in dismay. Suddenly there is a tap on my shoulder. I whirl around to see a man of middle years dressed in motley, who introduces himself as ‘The Demon Jester’. The Jester turns out to be Neil, 54, a tax adviser from Taunton. ‘It’s fantastic to be here,’ he says. ‘I got on board and was immediately, like, “Let’s get this party started!”’ Good grief.

He asks what my ‘kinks and boundaries’ are, and would I mind if he kissed me. I shrink from him, making for the door.

Twenty minutes later I am picking aimlessly at an immense plate of mac ’n’ cheese from the buffet. This isn’t Atkins, but I’m past the point of caring. I start thinking wistfully about my latest conquest back home: that awfully sweet young man who kept banging on about how none of us reads books any more and how monkeys are about to start using iPhones. I’d then taken him back to the mews flat in South Ken and shown him the birds and the sodding bees. Can’t learn that from a book or a screen.

A young gent sits at my table and asks what I do for a living; when I say ‘journalist’, he calls me ‘low-agency’ and asks why I’m not ‘London-maxxing’ as his hand works its way up my thigh. I throw my glass of 7Up in his face but then the mothering instinct kicks in. ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to #MeToo you – women of my vintage just give chaps like you a slap and tell them to sod off.’

Sunset finds me removing the tarp from one of the lifeboats. As I lower the craft into the water, the Demon Jester appears. ‘Listen, you just need to get into the spirit of things. Let’s face it, none of us is getting any younger.’ I glare at him, but he moves off after the intercom announces that ‘Naked Quidditch’ is about to start.

Soon I am rowing hard for Antibes as the ship disappears behind me. It’s brilliant that we’re all terribly French about bonking these days, but perhaps this goes hand-in-hand with the chic style, and the slimness that comes from diets of cigarettes and black coffee. Britain, I fear, is just too pale. Just too wobbly.