Ever since he was four years old, all Ian McNaught wanted to do was go to sea, and now he's in charge of the most famous ship in the world. Nick Morrison meets the man who calls the QE2 his second home.

WHAT do you say to the man who can boast his job sees him drinking tea in the shadow of the mountains which provided the backdrop to Juanita Hall singing Bali Ha'i in South Pacific? That he's been watching too many musicals? Or that he must have one of the best jobs in the world?

Ian McNaught isn't in any doubt. He's the captain of the QE2, and he reckons it doesn't get much better than that.

"It's a real treat for me to get out of bed in the morning and go to work. Somebody said to me, 'Do you know how lucky you are?', and when I look out of the window I do appreciate it," he says. "You sit there on the bridge of your ship with the mountains behind you and you think 'Bloody hell, this isn't half bad'."

He's just got off the plane from Singapore, starting a two month break after the first three months of the Queen Elizabeth 2's world cruise. He spends more time on board than on land, but the ship is still just his second home. The first one is Washington, Tyne and Wear.

He was appointed captain two years ago, at the age of 48, the youngest ever to take charge of the QE2, although his early career was spent not on passenger ships but on freight tankers. Growing up in Sunderland, he first went to sea at four with his father, a ship's engineer, and from that moment on it was all he ever wanted to do.

"It was just in the blood, and I used to go away with my father as much as I could. I just loved being there, being on ships," he says. "There is just something about them, and I never, ever wanted to do anything else, right through my whole time at school. I never had any doubt about it at all."

It was in 1987 while doing his Master's certificate at college that he decided to switch to passenger ships, hearing tales from one of the other students, who worked for P&O. Ian wrote to P&O and Cunard, and Cunard offered him a job.

"It is another world altogether. I had never seen a carpet in a cabin before. When I was on the tankers you were cooking for yourself, and it is a work, sleep and eat existence, whereas a passenger ship is all designed to give people a good time and let them enjoy the experience," he says.

He moved between the QE2 and three other Cunard ships before he was appointed captain in 2003. The announcement came at the traditional dinner in the middle of the world cruise, and was unexpected.

"For me to be picked at such a young age was very surprising. I knew there was going to be an announcement but there was no way I thought it was going to be me," he says.

But as well as the "sheer pleasure", there was also the realisation of the enormous responsibility, not just to the ship itself, but to what it stands for.

"It is a very famous ship and if you do anything wrong, people are waiting, but it also means an awful lot to a lot of people," he says.

He cites a couple of stories to illustrate how QE2 stands apart from other ships.

Standing on the quay to welcome her in to Freemantle, Australia, were two Scotsmen, who had worked on the ship almost 40 years ago. They showed Ian the box of press cuttings about QE2 they had brought with them, but for one of them, a tough Glaswegian shipbuilder, standing next to the ship he helped build proved too much and he began to cry.

A couple of weeks ago, as the ship sailed into the Philippines at 3.30 in the morning, Ian thought he could hear music. Then he saw the band on the quayside. They had come to welcome the ship and played on until the passengers had disembarked, sometime after 9am.

"I don't know what it is. It is the last great liner that will ever be built in the UK. Even today, if you say to people who win the Lottery what are they going to do, they say take a cruise on the QE2. You can't buy that, it is just something that has happened," he says.

His job is split three ways: captaining the ship in the traditional sense; acting as general manager to its 1,000 crew, and performing the social duties which are an important part of what the QE2 is all about.

Passengers run the entire social spectrum: from royals and the rich and famous, to those who save up for their once-in-a-lifetime trip. He says everyone gets treated just the same, which is part of the attraction for some of its famous passengers, although he admits to being a little starstruck when he saw Richard Widmark - "Jim Bowie out of The Alamo!" - walking up the gangway.

The social side may not have been what he went to sea for, but he seems to have taken to it like, well, like the QE2 to water.

"People are amazing and you never know who you are talking to. You go down to dinner at night and people are fantastic because there are so many different backgrounds," he says. By way of example, he recently found himself talking to a man who built intercontinental ballistic missiles and the landlord of a pub in No Place, near Chester-le-Street.

Off the ship, there are the semi-official functions - just back from Singapore and he's opening a new outlet of cruise specialist Only Cruising at Brompton-on-Swale, near Catterick, the week after is at St Oswald's Hospice in Newcastle, one of the ship's charities this year - but otherwise, perhaps surprisingly, he tends to keep quiet about his job when he's on shore leave. A picture of him on deck, with the Queen Mary 2 in the background, is the solitary evidence of his career at the house in Washington, which he shares with his wife and 17-year-old son.

"People react very strangely sometimes, I think because they don't understand what we do," he says. "At the end of the day we're not the rich and famous. It is a job of work, a very nice job, but a job."

He'll stay on QE2 for the next three years, then is due to move on to either Queen Mary 2 or Queen Victoria, which will be launched in 2007. He'll be sad to leave of course, but says he has to recognise he can't stay for ever.

In the meantime, he's just going to enjoy it, which seems only reasonable in the circumstances.

"We were on the way down to Singapore from Thailand and I went to the bridge with a cup of tea and it was just one of those perfect world cruise days," he says. "It was just a blue sky, one of those balmy, sunny equatorial days and you think: 'This isn't bad'."