HOLIDAY, NOVEMBER 2014 (01)

NOVEMBER 01

So, you get up at about 5.00am, on the morning after Halloween night, and you swiftly brew up and throw a cup of tea down your throat before cramming the cases into the back of the car and driving towards the airport, trying desperately to find the instructions about how to get into the Long Stay Car Park which you downloaded and printed out from the booking confirmation in a mad panic  at some point late on during the previous evening.

After that, it’s all going to be plain sailing, isn’t it…?

Well, surprisingly, mostly yes…

The car park turns out to be exactly where it’s supposed to be and, apart from the small matter of having to remember exactly in which colour zone and row you parked, and trying to find a good place to put the vital orange token which will help you to escape from the car park in two weeks – assuming that the car starts, the tyres remain reasonably inflated, and that you can actually remember the words “brown” and “three” and that your return flight lands within the time-frame that you’ve paid for - so that you can actually find it again, you grab your suitcases and join the happy band of shivering travellers in waiting for the bus towards the unfortunately named “terminal…”

Never a word to inspire calm in potential flyers, is it..?

Then, after negotiating the various steps, kerbstones and lifts, you eventually track down the correct floor and the correct check-in desk and negotiate your way past the exasperated gentleman who seems unwilling to believe that, in this day and age, you chose not to check-in online a couple of days earlier, because you really hadn’t understood that this was the way things are done nowadays, despite the fact that it sends a “security shudder” through your system when you find out how much things have altered since you last flew anywhere.

After that, you go through several security checks, and the usual couple of dozen questions about who packed your bags and where they’ve been, none of which you resent in these troubled times and, having found out that your bags are, as you expected but still fretted about, underweight, you wave them bye-bye, knowing that you will have to stop and identify them at some still far-distant point when you will be trying very, very hard to make an almost impossible connection thanks to the glacial nature of getting through Immigration at the end of the first part of  the long journey ahead of you.

Still, that’s still a long way off, and gives you hours of anxiety to look forward to on top of the usual anxieties that flight brings along with it.

In the meanwhile, you trudge off into the Departure Lounge which is cunningly disguised as a Shopping Mall and, after passing through “scent central” and taking the first of several nervous trips to the lavatory, you finally grab an overpriced breakfast at the coffee franchise that you eventually identify amidst all of the shopping outlets, and then try not to buy any books in the bookstores given that you’ve already loaded up the Kindle.

After a wait of several hours, you eventually head towards the gate and through the first of several security checks which require you to strip yourself of most of your garments and much of your dignity, whilst several opportunities are provided for your most precious valuables, the ones which you couldn’t chance to the baggage handlers, to be whisked away in plain view.

Finally, almost five hours after arrival, you cram yourself into a tiny, tiny seat, await the arrival of the legroom vampires to pluck away those precious few inches around your knees, grip the armrest, and wait for your jet to thunder its way along the runway, up and away into the great blue yonder…