HOLIDAY, NOVEMBER 2014 (34) - A TALE OF THREE AIRPORTS

NOVEMBER 14-15

Strange "dotted" windows at SFO which
really bugger up your "sunset" pictures

Obviously, because it's me, we still managed to arrive at the airport far, far earlier than was strictly necessary, although this did mean that we were able to drop off Beattie the Hire Car with little fuss and ceremony, and get the checking-in process sorted relatively easily, once the desk actually opened.

Naturally, the security is still pretty tight, but nothing like as severe as when you're trying to get into the country, we noticed.

Pretty soon we were meandering through the Departure Zone, where, after perusing the myriad food options on offer, we settled for a rather disappointing sandwich each from an outlet with spectacular views of what we hoped might be a rather beautiful sunset to send us on our way.

As we nibbled slowly at the dry sourdough, so that the excessively long time that we were spending at their table didn't seem too obvious, I noticed a couple reading at a nearby table. He was busy at his laptop whilst she was reading a copy of "How To Win As A Step-Family" which seemed to me to sum up a large part of American society in a nutshell.

The clouds were gathering, darkness was falling, and, after reflecting at length about our trip, we decided that it was time to dispose of the rest of our sandwiches, and saunter down to the waiting area for Gate A11 and listen to the never ending, steady, rhythmic drum beat of the escalator, which sounded for all the world like the sound you used to hear below decks in those Roman galleys from the movies, as the passengers for our Boeing 747 gathered to do what pre-flight passengers will do - talk about how smashed they intend to get on Tequila, or stare at screens without ever looking up, or listen to the increasingly desperate crew of the packed flight to Seattle trying to get anyone to be parted from their stuff for a couple of hours.

Eventually, our flight was called - VS020 (SFO>LHR) because night had fallen here.

At first, it all looked so very promising; For the first time ever, our seats were called in the first batch following the First Class, Premium or "People With Difficulties" groups and we sped down the ramp towards an almost empty plane, and my first ever time on a 747.

The seats that we'd been allocated, which were rather worryingly an "A" and a "C", but turned out to be just two seats together, and the "comfort packs" in the seat pockets in front of us looked suitably impressive but, unfortunately, it all rather went downhill from there for us, not least because the headphones didn't work and, despite the fact that Virgin Media in the UK seem eager to sell us more telly to watch, there was not one thing on their Entertainments choice that I considered remotely watchable.

Instead, I watched the flight data screen for ten hours, counting down the time until this torture would end, and mulling over the fact that all three of the meal options about which the menu seemed to get so very excited looked very underwhelming to me.

Meanwhile... How can a plane so huge seem so very, very small...???

I spent ten hours behind a Legroom Vampire being served depressing food by staff that seemed unduly surly for much of the time. At some point during the "fake night-time" that they were trying to create as life clawed back the eight hours we'd gained on our flight the other way and swallowed the night whole, I managed to spill a whole cup of orange squash (NOT juice!!!) all over my lap because the Legroom Vampire was so far back that my table tilted in the darkness, and when I went to soak it up and rant about Legroom Vampires to a floppy-haired fellow passenger, we had what I thought was a pretty interesting conversation about the perils of Economy Travel only for me to realise afterwards that he thought that he was chatting me up, if his farewell of "You'll be another of those married guys, huh?" was any clue.

I really do never notice this sort of thing at all, but maybe I look more impressive in the dark...

The final straw, and an abiding memory of the flight, was the unflushed turd that I came face-to-face with during one of my "comfort breaks" so that, after that, the coming of the dawn, followed immediately by the lousy breakfast, was never going to help.

I mean, I know it's Economy... but really...?

And so we arrived at Heathrow and gladly disembarked, and, because we were on a connecting flight, had to keep on following the Purple Signs, which meant that, after the Beloved delayed us with a much-needed "comfort break" of her own (during which even the last of the aircrew overtook us), we were split off from pretty much everyone else who'd been on the plane and rather confused because we seemed to be walking through corridors forever without ever reaching a passport check.

Eventually we reached some doors which, after an endless few minutes in which we heard two porters discussing the relative merits of Manchester United's something or other (Ah! We're HOME…), opened up directly onto a bus which took us across to another terminal and still nobody had asked to look at our passports, which seemed to feel decidedly odder and odder to us after the perpetual checks made to get into the States. I did wonder, briefly, whether this whole "getting on a bus" scenario offered ample opportunities for anyone entering the country illegally to chance making a run for it, but thought that it probably didn't.

Anyway, we finally arrived at a desk with a very short queue where someone did cheerily ask to look at our passports, and we were finally back on home soil without incident.

Happily, unlike our experience as transit passengers travelling into America, we didn't have to take the time to identify and re-check our baggage this time, and instead we ventured into the vast Mall that was the Departure Lounge and sought out some proper food (and a usually quite difficult to get hold of comic I suddenly remembered being after).

I know that we did eat, but I was so tired, I now have no recollection what it was, although, strangely, I do recall the Beloved's flatbread order.

A couple of hours later on in what was already late Saturday afternoon, our Aer Lingus flight to Manchester was called and we boarded a much roomier little aircraft and were up in the air for about 35 minutes during which we saw our second sunset in about sixteen hours and the Beloved got chatting to the young man sharing our set of three seats who was returning home from working on the very same vast cruise liner that we had both remarked upon when we spotted it at the dockside when our little tour of the Bay Area was coming to its end.

Soon we were back on the ground at Manchester, and, happily, our luggage had also made it, despite the attentions of the Transport Security Authorities at San Francisco Airport as we were later to discover from the note they left us.

Of course, we'd departed two weeks earlier on an International flight, but had returned on a Domestic one, and so, after buying some bread and milk and a convenient Mini-Market, (and not having the brain power left to work out if there was another method of getting there), we had to make the long, long - and endless seeming - walk back to Terminal 2 in order to catch a shuttle bus back to the T2 Long-Stay Parking where we'd parked the car, whilst I mentally re-jigged my mind to my more "normal" driving position, and dug out the strange orange chipped disc which - we hoped - would still allow us to get out of the car park without any further bother.

Happily, the car was exactly where we left it and, even more happily, its tyres were not flat and it started first time and, despite having a fairly sleepy head on my shoulders by this stage, I was able to safely drive us home.

IN THE AIR TONIGHT

All being well (because I'm writing this a few weeks in advance), as you read this I ought to be well on my way home, soaring through the air far above the Atlantic, and gobbling up the eight hours of time difference as if they had never really existed.

Unless of course the Ebola, or the driving, or the mechanical failures, or the earthquakes have got me.

The fates, you see, can always sniff out an evolutionary cul-de-sac.

Of course, I think that we all generally believe that such things will always happen to "someone else", we do occasionally have to accept that they can happen to people like me, too, given that, to most of the people on this sad planet, I'm "other people" too.

So, spare us a thought... (If you have one).

And sometimes I do have to admit that, having seen people struggle with decay and old age, a quick escape sometimes does look like the easier option, even though you might not think so, cometh the hour...

For me, you see, travel does bring along with it a certain amount of fear, and the pleasure of anticipating a holiday is always tempered by my nervousness about the list of things that could possibly go wrong.

It always has.

And that is a very, very long list.

Not the least of which is the tempting of fate and wondering, if things have actually gone catastrophically wrong, then this is likely to be a very ironic footnote to whatever events have befallen me.

Perhaps I should give some thoughts to epitaphs, or "famous last words"...? After all, it is entirely possible, but by no means certain, that these may very well turn out to be them.

I mean, I hope not, obviously, but, well, you just never know.

It's probably good to finish on a song ("Always leave 'em wanting more, kid..." - although in my case, singing would probably leave 'em screaming "Less!!!" but there you go). The problem with being a nervous traveller is that the lyric that is constantly popping into my head is "The Gods may throw a dice, their minds as cold as ice, and someone way down here, loses someone dear..." which really doesn't suit the mood at all.

I mean, if I had to choose a song or a tune to be seen off too, I don't think that that'd be top of my list. It used to be "In My Life" by The Beatles, or "Days" by The Kinks (because I'm nothing if not unoriginal), but nowadays I just think Beethoven's "Ode To Joy" is (perhaps ironically) the most "me" thing that I can think of...

Although, at the risk of venturing into the realms of the worryingly camp, perhaps the most poignant song and appropriate that I can think of to finish on is "Somewhere Over The Rainbow"(weigh a pie), just so long as it's one of the decent cover versions that you're hearing in your head (or, at a pinch, Jimmy Stewart's version from "The Philadelphia Story"). Somedayi'llwishuponastarandwakeupwherethecloudsarefar--- be--- hind--- meeeeeeeeee... wheretroublemeltslikelemondropsuphighabovethechimneypotsthat's---wh-e-r-e---you'll---f-i-i-i-ind---meeee....

"Birds fly over the rainbow, when then, oh why can't I...?"

Catch you later... (???)

BIG RED LINE

I don’t know whether you’ve ever been “lucky” enough to have to pass through U.S. Customs and Immigration, but it has been rather on my mind lately.

Now, before we start, I want to make it quite clear that I absolutely love visiting the United States as “A Tourist” but sometimes, actually getting into the country, especially if you are deemed to be someone not clever enough to have managed to get yourself born there (i.e. everyone else in the world), can feel like an utter chore.

Much of it starts at your departure airport where the security questions and checks are many and varied and almost bound to make even the most law-abiding traveller feel slightly guilty about something that they hadn’t even thought about before.

Now I’m perfectly in favour of having as many security checks in place as is humanly possible, given that I’ve always been something of a “nervous passenger” anyway, and, in this day and age, the more the better, but it does sometimes seem bizarre as you throw off your shoes for the fourth time, and virtually have to undress yourself, whilst proving that all of your camera and other digital equipment is fully charged, getting X-rayed, patted down, and having all of your bottles of fluid checked, whilst at the same time answering several dozen questions, the replies to all of which seem to start with a resounding “Erm…”

And then you have to do it all over again to get into the Departure Lounge, and then once more as you get onto the plane itself.

Maybe I just look a little bit “dodgy”, I don’t know, but they always seem to pick me, presumably so as not to appear racist and be equal-opportunity body searchers.

Still, once you get onto the plane, things do quieten down a little, apart from the occasional reminders about various aspects of “Federal Law” which seem to be designed to to keep you just a little bit on edge for the entire journey.

Once upon a time you used to have to fill in the faintly absurd green Declaration Form whilst you were still on the plane, then wave it hopefully in the direction of the Customs Officer once you had been waved solemnly across the fabled BIG RED LINE at your airport of arrival.

Okay, my memory is a little fuzzy. It might actually be a BIG YELLOW LINE, but I’m usually jet-lagged to pieces, so we’ll just say it’s RED and move along, eh…

Move along…

I call the form “faintly absurd” because you can’t imagine ANYONE wanting to tick one of the “wrong” boxes asking questions about any criminal activity that you might have planned, and yet, despite this strange feeling that EVERYONE who is not American must be up to no good, they still appear to believe in some sort of “honour system” for these forms.

In recent years this process has now had the $14.00 ESTA check added to it, so that you have to apply for permission to fly – and pay for the privilege – a minimum of three days before you board your aircraft, but it does rather negate the need for the form, even though they still get handed out.

If you have to make a connecting flight, this whole process can step in to quite ruin your day, especially if the timing turns out to be something you might consider “tight” like, say, about an hour and a half.

During our 2004 trip to California, our plane landed at Chicago at about the same time as five other wide-bodies jets, and, after dutifully retrieving and identifying our luggage and placing it in the designated “Transfer Baggage” area, we ran like hell to join the Customs and Immigration “Non-US Citizens” line and managed to get ourselves into the first 100 yards or so of it.

Other, more sluggish passengers hoping to make the same connection were several hundred people behind us in the queue and, by the time we had been allowed to cross the BIG RED LINE (with me having been shamefully sent back behind it by a scary security officer when it turned out that the Beloved and I, whilst travelling together, were not actually married), and removed and replaced our shoes several times en route, we ran to the gate and caught our flight by the skin of our teeth, which is more than several of our fellow passengers managed, swearing never again to trouble Chicago O’Hare with our presence ever again, with its many terminals and monorails which needed negotiating.

You see, for the airlines, it’s really no skin off if you miss your internal flight. There’s always several people just waiting and hoping for an available seat on a connection, so they can always fill it and, presumably, charge you again for the one you still need to get on to get where you want to be going.

Another interesting thing seems to be the “flexibility” over the rules of “carry-on” luggage for internal flights. Quite often we have made our way on board with nothing but our tiny little bags as per the International Flight Regulations only to find all of the overheads crammed full of stuff from the half dozen or so passengers already aboard who seem to be travelling with several large-sized suitcases, along with a lot of other paraphernalia that would all be taken off the likes of me in a queue in lil ol’ Eng-er-land.

Since our Chicago “experience”, more recent trips have been through Boston and Philadelphia and, perhaps luckily, have been far less overwhelmed and far, far more relaxing.

But not TOO relaxing, you understand, because there’s always that BIG RED LINE to get across…

Once you reach the BIG RED LINE, because its actually there, stuck to the floor, representing a huge barrier to entry, and not metaphorical at all, your toes dare not cross over one part of it until you are beckoned and tacitly given permission to do so by a stern looking officer who will then ask you all sorts of flummoxing questions, take a photograph, scan your fingerprints, make you feel like the lowest form of life imaginable, because, by implication, everyone in the world who is not a U.S. Citizen is obviously out to pull a fast one, stay there illegally, or generally not to be trusted.

Still, with all of that out of the way, hopefully, the officer will then stamp all of your papers and wish you a pleasant stay as if, by not tripping over one of the several potential hurdles put in your way, you have miraculously instantly been transformed into a reasonable facsimile of a human being after all.

I imagine that, with the addition of the current virus checks into the mix, that it’s likely to get even worse, because there are practical things that could be done with regard to that to save time whilst you are still in the air, but the system seems unnecessarily suspicious of anything like that done outside its own jurisdiction or control, even if it might just be slightly more practical.

Still, the last time I returned to the UK via my home airport, it had begun to feel a little like that here, too… although “our lot” seemed to have decided additionally and unilaterally to be equally suspicious of anyone holding a UK Passport, too.

“You are welcome to our country” they seem to be saying, “just not very welcome…”

A WING AND A PRAYER

We all love a mystery, don’t we...?

Ever since that ill-fated flight MH370 vanished a couple of weeks ago, just about anyone and everyone in the world who’s taken an interest seems to have come up with some crackpot theory or other, turning a tragedy into something resembling a parlour game or an intellectual exercise whilst seeming to forget the real people behind the story and what they suffered and how they are suffering still.

From a complicated terrorist plot, or black holes, to a bizarre bullion robbery ripped straight from the pages of one of those brick-sized novels that they seem to sell, rather ironically, mostly in airport bookshops, and other more mundane solutions, just about every possibility has been raked over endlessly because, quite simply, at the time of writing we simply don’t know anything yet.

And, as human beings who now like to think we can micromanage every single aspect of our lives, we simply do not like that.

So instead, in an age of “24 Hour Rolling News”, when not knowing anything has just as much currency as knowing something, expert after expert is wheeled out to underscore the latest theory, and repeat it hourly until yet another theory comes along which has just as little validity as the last one, and so it cycles endlessly until a more “interesting” or “newsworthy” story breaks.

Personally, whilst I hope that the story does find a satisfactory answer, I’m also hoping that it doesn’t, given that hope will probably have to turn to despair for the families and friends, and between the bittersweet satisfaction of finally knowing, and the heartbreak of finally knowing, we’ll have endless “I told you so” idiots claiming that they “knew it all along” in our day-to-day lives, whilst the rolling news juggernaut will have to comb over it all again in that “news porn” way they have of going about things nowadays.

Meanwhile, given where the search was finally taking place towards the end of last week, at the limit of all those huge ovals on the maps showing the flight’s maximum range and based upon those few photographic blobs which must have taken days to distinguish from all of the other blobs on those satellite images (and picking them out is a highly-skilled and laborious, time-consuming job, by the way) we cannot rule out an aircraft simply flying along on autopilot until the fuel ran out.

Mundane, I know but there you are.

The problem is, of course, that we all hate a mystery, don’t we...?

This awful realisation that we can just fall off a radar in this day and age and nobody, but nobody, would know quite what happened to us. After all, in this age where almost everyone we meet insists on being in almost constant contact with everyone else they know, and nobody wants to be anonymous, many people seem to be wondering how this is possible.

Yet we forget that people disappear every single day and, quite often, not through their own choice. Also, despite being a small world, it’s a great big world out there into which people vanish all of the time, and that’s only on the land.

Once you consider the vast, inhospitable emptiness of those huge oceans, massive unforgiving open spaces into which sailors have been able to get lost for years over the centuries, it’s suddenly far easier to understand, especially when you realise that signals and radar contacts can fade once you disappear over the horizon, and that mobile phone masts aren’t dotted around the seas like some people would have you believe.

From the Daily Mirror
(NOT to scale)

Ah yes, the sheer vastness of the oceans. To read that fount of all unknowledge, the mighty TwitWorld, you'd think that some believe the graphic of the plane and the graphic of the world behind it on all of those news items are actually to scale and that the sea is naught but a rockpool in which to look.

However, they’ve still not found Glenn Miller and he was only crossing the channel…

Meanwhile, part of the sad reality of jet travel is that the only reason we know where most of these flying aluminium tubes are most of the time is because they are able to transmit a signal and be seen by other airliners. If, for whatever reason, that signal stops and there’s nobody around to see what happens next, everything else is just extrapolation and hope.

They call it “A Wing and a Prayer” for a reason, you know…

Still, the press loves a mystery and they can fill page after page or hour after hour of conjecture and speculation and they know that we, the readers and viewers, will lap it all up as we struggle to come to terms with something unknowable, rant and rage about not being told anything by people who don’t know anything, and fill the void with ever more ridiculous conspiracy theories in lieu of anything resembling an actual fact.

Because the press hate a mystery and so, instead, they turn every plausible theory and barely tangible fact into a news story in the hope that they too, like the pub bore, can finally tell us that they “knew” all along, or that they had “heard a whisper” about something which was too dangerous to reveal before everyone else knew it anyway, which is always the “get-out clause” of the totally ignorant.

Still, it is unusual for anyone to admit in this day and age that they don't know anything, which is why every bugger's got a theory, but until the (presumably) sad conclusion of this tale is revealed, we really do need to remember that nobody knows anything, and everything else is just idle and ignorant speculation.

And the world needs to start thinking more about the people involved than the intellectual puzzle they’ve left behind them.

MH-370

As the ongoing tragedy that is the still unfolding story of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 continues to roll towards its presumably inevitable tragic outcome, alongside my sympathy for the victims and their families, I can't help but be struck by how familiar it all sounds.

I'm not just referring to my own morbid fascination with all things ghastly when it comes to air travel, either, but to something much more fundamental and, unfortunately far more terrifying.

Do you remember the so-called "Shoe Bomber"…? Although I wouldn't normally want to mention his name and give him the satisfaction of the kind of notoriety he doesn't deserve, he is an English guy called Richard Reid, who first tried to blow up American Airlines flight 63 from Paris way back in December 2001, and only really failed because of foot sweat and the intervention of his fellow passengers.

I'm sure that you do remember him, especially if you have to fly anywhere, because it's thanks to this guy that you have to take off your shoes at least a couple of times every time you try to board an aircraft these days and then do that strange hopping dance as you try and put jour jacket back on, retrieve your keys and generally get your possessions back into some kind of order as you prepare for another slightly alarming journey through the air.

Anyway, five years later, and in events which were linked to the shoe bomber story, another plot was foiled in which "up to ten" transatlantic airliners were supposed to be blown out of the sky on a single day.

I remember that one particularly well as I had transatlantic flights booked for only one month after that and the notion of terrorism - i.e. to strike terror into the hearts of the general population - was certainly working on me that summer.

So, why am I thinking about all of these historic events today?

Well, one of the things that comes to mind, especially in the light of the "Air Indonesia" flight that "vanished" in January 2007, is that the thinking behind at least one of these plots - and there was at least one "trial run" done in the Far East for a much bigger plot - was the shattering effect of an aircraft disappearing with no explanation.

You see, if the aircraft were to explode over the middle of the ocean, the chances of finding significant amounts of wreckage are fairly slim, and so the reason behind the incident is likely to remain unexplained, and, if several of these incidents were to happen in quick succession, the "terror" aspect is likely to be turned right up to eleven and these bastards will have won.

It's about fear of the unknown and spreading confusion.

How can an aircraft completely disappear and, at the time of writing, simply vanish without a trace?

You'll already have seen from the many news reports how much we still fear uncertainty and the unknown in this age of rapid communications when we feel that we can know pretty much everything at the posh of a button or two, but this, this not knowing, even if it turns out to be because of a tragic accident and not other, more malicious means, is simply excruciating and far too difficult to bear.

And that's just for those of us who are just armchair observers. What it must be like for the authorities looking for the thing, or those hollow-eyed relatives who can do nothing but wait in both hope and despair… Well, I can't even begin to imagine what that feels like.

You see, for some of us, air travel is quite frightening enough when we just think about the science of the thing, or the engineering involved, or the computers built inside the beasts, or just the people being paid to fly the wretched vehicles. Add to the mix a little bit of dodgy weather, or geography, or the possibilities of human error when it comes to maintenance or manufacturing or just closing all of the right doors properly, and I'm surprised that we're not all gibbering away in our seats and gnawing away at our foldaway tables in blind panic anyway.

So if some bastard comes along and decides to take out the flight by other, more explosive means, the quaking fear soars up the scale into total terror and, unfortunately, the "terrorists" will have won.

THREE WELSH CHOPPERS

I'm not often "ready" when it comes to the unexpected photo opportunity. Because I'm not a professional, but merely an "enthusiastic snapper" and I have virtually no knowledge of the technical aspects of taking photographs, I seldom walk around with a camera dangling from my neck (despite the many photographs - usually taken when I'm on holiday - taken of me which seem to prove the opposite) and so, when the moment comes I'm either fumbling around in my pocket looking for a telephone to take a disappointing snapshot with or, even if I am "properly equipped" I either haven't got the right lens on or I'm holding the wrong camera and I get the automatic focus confused or I've got the dial set to a ridiculously inappropriate setting.

So, when I was on holiday recently, it was something of a miracle that on each of the three occasions when the distinctive mechanical sound of an approaching helicopter could be heard, I actually managed to fumble around and point my lens in vaguely the right direction and get a half-decent snapshot of all three.

The first was at South Stack lighthouse where I was busily taking what I imagine will be my only chance of photographing the heck out of the old place having bitten the bullet and trudged the 400 plus steps down to the old place for the first and, presumably, given the way my knees were protesting on the way back up, only time.

From somewhere over the mainland there came that distinctive mechanical rattle and, because I was already busily using the telephoto to grab a few close-ups of the herring gulls, I thought to myself that it would be very nice if the helicopter flew into a position where it might be in the same frame as the lighthouse itself and, as you can see, such a happy event did indeed come to pass.

Later on that same afternoon, on the opposite side of the island, we were photographing the living daylights out of the Penmon Lighthouse for yet another year, presumably so I could store them away with the almost identical set I took the previous year, and the year before that and so on.

Lighthouses are not, actually, an obsession of mine, although I do quite like them, but they do add a lot of "foreground interest" to landscape shots, so it's quite nice to make the most of one if you've got one.

Anyway, the familiar sound of a helicopter engine came spluttering around the headland and, well, once again I found myself thinking that very same thought from the morning, "Wouldn't it be nice if..." and happily, it was obviously my lucky day.

At least as far as helicopters putting themselves into reasonably photogenic proximity to a lighthouse anyway.

The third happened a couple of days later as we were walking through the woods at Newborough. this time we heard the helicopter long before we saw it and I was busily taking far too many of the kind of pictures of trees which always seem like a good idea when I'm taking them, but which can seem utterly pointless a couple of months down the line.

Anyway, I could hear the helicopter and, more in hope rather than expectation, I quietly but swiftly swapped the lenses over on my camera and hoped for the best, raising the viewfinder to my eye just as the helicopter appeared between the treetops and there you go...

Three Welsh Choppers...

PLANE SPEAKING

For various reasons – some of them even work-related – the topic of aircraft seems to have been flying around (Ho, ho!) the office recently. It may be because one of m’colls went off to an airshow and got all “enthusiastic” about the subject, or it may be because they’ve become very interested in the gentle art of model-kit building, or it may even be because some research had to be done into vintage aircraft in relation to a possible theme for a project, but, for whatever reason it might have been, we’ve been talking a lot about aircraft, and most specifically vintage aircraft seems to be the bit that we’re currently finding most exciting to discuss.

Interestingly, as these things always seem to you’ll no doubt have realised if you’ve been here before, this has stirred up many memories from my own childhood as I was once, in a very understated way, a bit of a plane spotter myself. I don’t mean that I stood outside with my binoculars and my notebooks and took down numbers or anything like that (although if I’d had any like-minded chums, I’m sure that would have only been a heartbeat away from happening), but I was an “enthusiast” of the type that liked to read about the things and draw them and look up at the sky and identify them, as well as contributing (briefly) to “SQUAWK”, the magazine produced by the school aircraft spotters club, (and I’m not generally as a rule someone who joins anything…).

Since our little chats have been filling the gaps between the work at the office, I’ve been trawling the dusty shelves and digging out my old aircraft identification books as well as the exercise book containing the school project I did when I was about nine and which, almost unbelievably, I still had sitting upon one of the bookshelves.

You can tell how old I am, by the way, when I can recall regular Vickers Viscount and Vanguard turboprop services approaching Ringway, and I’m happy to tell people about the colourful delights of the various “Court Line” jets flying in with their two-tone groovy coloured fleet and its shiny silver letters.

Despite all the talk of Spitfires, Seafires, Hurricanes, Lancasters and Wellingtons which we are currently bandying about in reference to the kit-building world (where the attention to detail really is truly astonishing and which takes far, far more effort than I would ever have been prepared to put in), my own first aeronautical loves were the passenger planes which I used to build quite poorly from kits when I was a ham-fisted bungler of a model-maker as a boy. I am reminded of friends’ bedrooms with fleets of aircraft hanging on strings from the ceilings, which also reminds me of the Aerospace museum in Seattle where full-sized aircraft were hanging from their ceiling in a very similar way...

I mean I used to build the warplanes too, of course. Interestingly enough, although I can’t quite track it down at the moment, I have a photo of a Hawker Hurricane somewhere (although I don’t have a clue exactly where) that was amongst my grandfather’s papers when he died. Despite not being available for active duty due to his appalling eyesight, his plumbing skills were apparently requisitioned to help build Hurricanes I was once told, which might explain the petrol-driven “control line” one I got for my birthday when I was about eight. It flew for one glorious afternoon, I seem to remember, before nose-diving into a field and snapping off its machine guns, before being parked in its box on a shelf in my bedroom and making the place faintly whiff of fuel for a number of years before doing one of those mysterious “vanishing tricks” that many of our childhood toys seem to.

Perhaps those are both subjects that we’ll be returning to on another day…?

Anyway, when it came to model-making, you went with whatever kits took your fancy at the newsagents in those days, but it was the 737s and the Tridents that I most liked building, but my real favourites, the aircraft I consider to be true works of art and things of beauty were those passenger planes from between the two World Wars, those silver bi-planes seemingly held together with string and canvas which used to take a leisurely week or so to travel to South Africa, India and even Australia as the British Empire  began to fade, in which, for about a year or more’s salary for the ordinary worker, you could be served Silver Service dinners as your plane flew over the pyramids.

Aircraft like the Handley Page 42 and, to a lesser extent, the Armstrong Whitworth Argosy truly are things of beauty to me, perhaps because they just look like train carriages with wings and perhaps prove that if you just put the right kind of wings on something, pretty much anything can fly. Even so, I’d still have been far, far too terrified to ever get inside one of the things, but they speak so clearly to me of that long-lost era of the dawn of passenger air travel… I had to look the names of the actual aircraft up, of course, because such specific details had long been buried in my brain by the mundanity of grown-upedness. I remembered the type of aircraft from my own “Brooke Bond” tea card collection, something silver with a load of propellors attached to a huge wing above the passenger cabin, but the name of the thing had escaped me. However, finally dredging the name “Imperial Airways” from the slurry at the back of my mind soon put me back on track, and I was able to find these fabulous pictures to back up my childhood memories.

Of course the technological miracle of the fact that human beings went from not being able to achieve powered flight at alt to supersonic jet travel and being able to put a man on the moon within the span of one human lifetime is a topic I’ve touched upon before, but it doesn’t do any harm to remind ourselves of it again every once in a while.

JET LAGGED

Ah, my sleep patterns have been all over the place over recent weeks. Granted, this came out of being fortunate enough to have been on holiday in a place in a significantly different time zone, so it’s hardly something to complain about, but nevertheless it’s been playing some pretty sneaky tricks on this old body and its strange little habits, I can tell you.

It began, as these things do, with my general insomnia managing to transport itself across the sea and find me still waking up at generally the same wee small hour as I do at home, albeit “time-shifted” by eight hours. This continued throughout the holiday with a gradual shift towards what you might call “normalcy” if you really wanted to, although I don’t really hold with such verbal shenanigans.

Then the flight home threw me a curve ball. I watched a couple of movies whilst the rest of the cabin was put into darkness, and as “J. Edgar” finished, I decided that I would have a nap myself only for the cabin lights to be immediately turned on and a light breakfast to be served and for us to be hurtling homewards on final approach without me having had so much as a blink of sleep and facing the prospect of having to turn around my driving technique back to what I would call “normality” after two weeks of doing the opposite Stateside.

Once safely home (phew!), the beloved dozed off pretty immediately and slept for 24 hours. I, rather (un)naturally, stayed awake, mostly doing some photo-wrangling until about 2pm where I sloped off up that wooden hill and actually managed about 2 hours sleep before waking up again. Happily, I staggered off to Bedfordshire once again a couple of hours after that and slept more-or-less through for sixteen hours, which is, as some of you may know from my previous musings on insomnia, rather unprecedented.

I now thought that happily I was back on schedule, but no. Sunday night brought little sleep, and Monday night, despite almost crippling (and frankly quite dangerous) fatigue that had overtaken me after being at work all day following that, was still very poor in the acquisition of the required quantities of winks.

Tuesday night was far more successful. In fact it was so good that I had to be woken by the alarm for the first time in years, which came as something of a shock to the system (and the morning routine), I can assure you. Nevertheless, ever since then, which, I’ll grant you isn’t really all that many days, I’ve been sleeping right through until about 5.30AM which might still sound like a kind of insomnia to many of you, but is actually rather unheard of at Blogfordshire H.Q. and might, at the very least, be symptomatic of proving that the holiday did indeed manage to relax me in some small way.

I’m sure that it won’t last...

What has really suffered, of course, is being able to find those little moments that I used to use to write my nonsense in. Those “wee small hours” which I used to spend concocting nonsense like this are suddenly spent slumbering away like some sort of “normal” human being, whatever that might turn out to be, and my tiny sparks of “creativity” seems to have been largely snuffed out. I also find that the “post-holiday malaise” has rather made me less inclined towards the process of writing anyway. Somehow, “broadening the mind” has made it feel a less “vital” pastime than once it was.

However, I do sometimes find myself still thinking about things, albeit in a slightly less “thorough” way than I might once have done. For example, I always find it very strange when I think about things like time zones anyway, so there is nothing really unusual in that, I just might not have thought it worthy of much comment in the past, that’s all. All that life going on just as it does every day whilst the likes of us sleep or have already finished our working day. Just as the day was getting started “over there” I had to make a strange mental adjustment to accept that m’colleagues would be packing up to go home over here. Then, when you start to think about our Antipodean friends, the whole mind-bending process goes into another loop-the-loop. Their day is done before ours has even begun and the Americans are so far behind them that they almost meet them getting up the next morning.

That’s just the kind of thinking that’s likely to keep me awake at nights...

FLYING TONIGHT

I’ve never been the biggest fan of flying. To be honest it drives me to levels of trepidation that can be difficult to explain to people in these days when the process seems to be so utterly ubiquitous. I suppose that it all comes from a strange “first flight” taken when I was eight. A family holiday to Yugoslavia (yes, I am that old) which involved a lot of “circling” as we approached our home airport which made my mother rather tense (although ever since she’s rather loved to travel...) which obviously transmitted itself to me in some small way because, after that holiday, whenever the next one was booked I would spend all the intervening time worrying about the flight out, and the fortnight of the holiday itself worrying about the flight home.

Strangely enough, the most terrifying flight my parents ever experienced, with all its aborted landings, steam coming from the vents and old ladies knocking back the brandies came on the first holiday where I didn’t go with them, so what do I know...?

My own worst landing came many years later on the way home from a tetchy week spent with friends on Kos. As we boarded the plane we were all barely talking, but our own aborted landing in horrendous crosswinds soon got the chat flowing again after the pilot’s rather breathless “Well, I think we’d better have another go at that” came over the loudspeakers. In the end it was the third go that was the charm, but we made it and lived to be friends again another day.

In later years I became rather morbidly aware of air “incidents” (as they euphemistically came to be known) as this was the 1970s when DC10s just couldn't keep themselves in the sky and some of the worst passenger “incidents” happened to occur and got themselves plastered all over the news just after “The Magic Roundabout” had been on. Later still this became a rather bleak “interest” for a while as I would watch all of the documentaries that were shown on the topic and buy quite a few books about it, too, becoming far too knowledgeable about things like “windshear” and “metal fatigue” for my own good.

However, as I’ve got older, I seem to have relaxed a little more about such things because, in order to be able to see anything of the world on my timescale and budget, I have had to “grasp the nettle” somewhat in order to do go to such places, and, by and large, the “fear” is largely kept at bay these days. That and the fact that, in some ways, and on some level, it feels like it might be a kindlier option when compared to the ravages of old age.

But that’s a thought for another day, and I really shouldn’t tempt fate with such thoughts.

As you can see, I still have my superstitious little rituals with regards to any flight that I may have to take of course. All my “I’ll be backs” and mysterious little ticks and walks and phrases that I pull out of my mental carpet bag when the prospect of launching myself up into the wild blue yonder in a silver bird becomes ever more imminent. I used to insist on “viewing” the plane as best I could, although the black residue around the engines that I spotted just before one flight to Barcelona terrified me so much I almost went home. Wasn’t it the actress Lindsay Wagner who once declined to board one plane that subsequently got itself involved in an “incident”, or am I remembering that wrongly? Anyway, giving the plane a good old once over has become less possible in recent times when you spend the entire boarding procedure in air-conditioned tubes. I do miss that short walk across the tarmac with the scent of  jet fuel floating on the breeze...

That said, flying nowadays seems to have generally become a much more mundane pastime than it once was. Checking-in now seems to involve a certain amount of being treated a bit like a convicted criminal arriving at a maximum security institution (which I will accept is wholly necessary and can be tolerable if approached with a certain amount of irony on the part of both parties), and then requires a certain amount of computer literacy to acquire your many boarding passes. After that its mostly a couple of hours of boredom (and, if you’re me, wondering whether this is how you are destined to spend your last few hours on Earth...) mooching around what is basically a shopping mall and trying not to buy so much coffee that your bladder might risk bursting in those inevitable gaps when access to toilet facilities may be denied you.

Zonal boarding and the amount of overhead storage becomes a slight source of angst when you realise that everyone that they’ve already let on has now filled up the storage spaces and you might be left without your tiny little bag of goodies because everyone else has been allowed to flout the regulations and bring along everything they own including the kitchen sink.

In America the sheer size of the country and the scattering of families means than “domestic” flights are so much a part of the ritual of everyday life for a large part of the population that the going to the airport seems rather akin to going to the bus station, and many people seem to load themselves up with a similar amount of bags and carry-ons as if they were getting on a bus, and treat the airliner in much the same way too.

Flying “Economy” does tend to mean “no-frills” too. Whilst there still seems to be an obligation to provide drinks, airline food on these trips which either means risking the snack boxes or salads they sell at inflated rates (and risking that they’ll run out of them before they bring the cart far enough back to get to the actual seat you are in), or else buying the, admittedly rather good, food that can be purchased on the concourse, whilst hoping against all hope that there’s not suddenly some new policy that means you have to stuff it all down your gullet whilst simultaneously stripping off your coat, belt and shoes for another security inspection, and hopping from foot to foot wondering just how soon the pilot is likely to switch off the seatbelt sign and allow you to move about in the cabin.

So I suppose that I must be thankful for the “Transatlantic” phases of my journeys where, despite still being an “Economy” option, there is a relatively high level of pampering that is possibly inversely proportional to the available legroom. Still, if you choose the right airline you will get those fancy little screens on the back of the seat in front of you to watch a few films on (assuming that you don’t happen to sit behind a habitual “recliner”) and so the time will pass.

I still pay very careful attention to the safety procedures even if both those doing the demonstration and those supposed to be watching it seem endlessly bored by the procedure. Oddly enough I’m pretty convinced that I’ve never yet found my life-vest so I do wonder whether, should I ever be unfortunate enough to find myself plummeting towards a mountain, that my last thoughts will be about wondering where it was they actually put it and what it was they said about the straps again...?

Meanwhile, there are, of course, all those other tiny troublesome things to worry about, like the tricky little matter of “viable connections” that the airline assure you mean that you have ample time to get to your next plane, but somehow the combined time-munching of security, immigration control, travelling between terminals and identifying your transfer luggage seem to chew up just enough of that time to find you dashing at full tilt along another concourse hoping that someone else hasn’t been allocated your seat to sit in.

One of the airports I was recently in added a new worry, the tiny issue of “Restroom refurbishment angst” (I’ll gloss over - for the moment - the issue of that euphemistic language option) whereby my all-too-frequent pre-flight bathroom trips were complicated by the nearby one being renovated, and the amount of sinister workmen strolling around carrying lengths of pipe just looked like a Bruce Willis movie backstory in the making. My mind was racing, wondering how many times they are security checked as they go back and forth to their little plumber’s van, and how long it is before complacency sets in and just how much like a bazooka that lengthy section of three inch copper pipe actually looked...

Nowadays when you are finally aboard the aircraft, and have left the gate, the planes themselves seem to make some rather alarming noises (a bit like a dog barking in the basement if you ask me) as the various checks are gone through whilst you are still on the tarmac. Those never sound all that healthy to me. I also had my own little “moment” when I saw someone slip into the toilets before seatbelt buckling time and I really wondered whether the cabin crew had spotted him as they didn’t seem to actually check the “restrooms” much at all on the assumption that they would be empty. Naturally, it turns out that it was one of the crew I actually spotted slipping in there, but you never know. On another flight, once upon a long time ago, we left the gate only for the entire cabin to be plunged into darkness after we were disconnected from the ground electricity supply, which made me immediately wonder what would happen if that occurred at 30,000 feet, so that didn’t turn out to be the calmest of flights either. These are the moments when you really wonder whether to risk being labelled a “troublesome passenger” and start asking those awkward questions so unbeloved of the cabin crew, but I’m so terribly “British” that I’m unlikely to ever do that, so, for as long as I continue to make any successful flights, I suspect that these little moments of mental gymnastics are always likely to mean that it remains something of an ordeal for me.

If it doesn’t kill me, that is...