We took the celebrity cruise with Jane Seymour from New York to Southampton and continued on to Hamburg, Germany to finish the journey. Fortuitously we got cabin 4118 and that helped compensate us for all that pop entertainment crossing the Atlantic and then the North Sea.

Jane Seymour was vaguely familiar to us, but we weren't particularly fans of hers. We kept on running into her day after day everywhere on deck 3. First we had just discovered the art gallery on deck 3L. We were attending almost daily lectures about how to invest in contemporary art because there was nothing else to do. The lectures were a big exaggerated telling you that if you bought now the painting might be worth a lot more in the future. The lecturer gave us a slide show of artists painting Marylin Monroe, one artist painting his son, another painting in a way inspired by the Japanese, etc. They all just happened to be artists represented by the gallery. However despite the hoopla my husband and I and my son discovered a painter we had never heard of before named Henderson Cisz who painted city scapes of places like Amsterdam and Venice. We liked his post-impressionistic style enough to consider buying a print. But before we could complete our purchase, the print was taken down and whisked away. Instead the gallery was filled with paintings by --- you guessed it! --- Jane Seymour. Despite the fact that she was also on board promoting a James Bond film she starred in, Live and Let Die, she was also selling her paintings for hefty sums. Certainly she was charging more than Henderson Cisz, though he was the better painter. We had to content ourselves with a book full of Henderson Cisz paintings with the idea that we could cut them out and frame them before the book, too, was whisked away and the gallery filled with books by Jane Seymour.

At another point we were trying to entertain ourselves in the Royal Arcade Shopping Center on deck 3. I was looking at handbags on sale on a table outside the shop. Suddenly everything became very crowded. The shop had to move things inside. None other than Jane Seymour was at it again. Her table was bigger than anybody else's and was filled with her books. Somehow she had become a Renaissance woman. She was not only an actress but she was an author as well as a painter. And later we were to find out she was a speaker, too. Read more