Three days on an ocean liner (yes, there's an ocean)

There is an ocean. Of course there's an ocean — it's a world — but knowing that and standing at a railing watching a flat sea run to the edge of sight are very different things. I booked passage on an ocean liner, a proper grand old one, brass and timber and deck chairs, because when a civilisation offers you a three-day crossing you say yes.

The sailing itself is pure holiday. Slow mornings, enormous breakfasts I didn't pay for, long afternoons watching the wake. The sea is alive with things I won't pretend to have identified — something broached off the bow on the second evening, vast and unbothered, and the crew waved at it like an old neighbour. The water just keeps going; with no curve to the world, the horizon sits dead flat and impossibly far, and at night the sea and the dark sky above blur into one continuous patient nothing.

Then, on the third day, the destination: a harbour city stacked up its hillsides in tiers of warm light, the kind of skyline that makes you gasp out loud on a public deck and not care. Because the world's flat, you don't get the slow Earth-style reveal of a coastline rising bit by bit — the whole city is simply there, all at once, the moment it's close enough to see. Disembarking into it, jet-lagged and salt-stiff and grinning, was one of the best half-hours of my life. Would I cross again? In a heartbeat. Bring a book you won't finish.