RETIREMENT ON THE QE2

Bea Muller, the passenger with the most time on QE2, speaks with Captain McNaught while Captain Christopher Wells looks on.

A reader of USA TOday wrote las year:

I recall reading about an elderly English woman who was spending her retirement on the QE2; apparently her pension/retirement benefits were enough each month for her to literally live the rest of her life on board.

With the QE2 having been slated for this new entertainment complex in Dubai in 2009, have you heard anything about what might happen to her?

And the London Times Vill Pavia tells here the whole story of QE2's longest-serving passenger Bea Muller:

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....

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.”

Every 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...

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.