lazy Spanish cleaners finally woke up from their afternoon siesta and decided that the floor needed a damn good polish, using a squadron of machines that were designed by the Russians in the 1950s and had been in service with the Angolan air force ever since.
By 1.30 a.m. I was reduced to reading the instructions on the fire extinguishers and contemplating starting a food fight. I decided against it because the bread in thefree sandwiches was hard enough to kill and the filling was too light to fly properly. It would just sort of float.
At 1.45 a.m. we were asked by the king again to board buses which would take us to the plane. Yippee. At long last, Captain James T. Berk had arrived. We were on our way.
Oh no we weren’t. After fifteen minutes of standing on the stationary bus, we were forced to endure 50 minutes of sitting on the stationary plane where there was no air conditioning and, worse still, no explanation or apology from the flight deck.
Only after we had become airborne and fallen asleep did Captain Fool come on the PA system to explain what had gone wrong. It had been too hot, he said, for the plane to take off and, as a result, some of the bags had been removed from the hold.
Oh, that’s marvellous. So you get us home four hours late, you separate us from our luggage, you never say sorry and then you come up with the worst excuse I have ever heard. How can it have been too hot, you imbecile? Because of your shoddy timekeeping, it was three o’clock in the bloody morning.
The thing is, though, that I (mostly) kept my temper because I knew I could come home, write this and therefore make his life as miserable as he had made mine.
What staggered me was the patience of my fellow passengers. They never complained. They quietly sat at the airport eating their meat veneer. They quietly stood on the bus, sweating. They didn’t even squeal when the stewardesses poured boiling water into their laps,told barefaced lies about the luggage being on board and generally treated us as if we were a nuisance in the smooth running of their aeroplane.
The problem is that we are used to all this, and more. We expect the tiny bit of road that isn’t jammed solid to be festooned with speed cameras. We expect the train to be late and the Tube to explode. We know that the plane will make an unscheduled stop in Bogotá and that if we complain we’ll be taken off by the police, arrested and shot.
Naturally, we expect a charter flight to get us back to Stansted four hours after everyone else because, of course, this particular airline is the sponsor of the spectacularly hopeless Minardi Formula One team which, last time I looked, was just finishing the 1983 French Grand Prix.
Sunday 12 August 2001
What I Missed on My Hols: Everyday Madness
And so, after two months on the Continent, I’m back in Britain trying to decide if I have missed anything. What I normally miss is the British weather. A dose of hot sunshine may be pleasant for a week or two, but soon you begin to tire of sunscreen and having a red nose. You find yourself hunting down bits of shade and not wanting to do any work because it’s far too sweaty.
After four weeks I found myself lying awake at night dreaming of being cold. We have no idea how lucky we are in this country having weather that we don’t notice; weather that doesn’t slap us in the face every time we set foot outside the door.
But what concerns me more than the weather is what I’ve missed in the news. We all assume when we come back from a spell abroad that the country will have changed out of all recognition. There will have been fourteen days of developments about which we will have no knowledge.
New fashions will have come and gone. New political parties will have formed, new bands will have been created and we won’t be able to talk about any of it at dinner parties. So what exactly have I missed in the past nine weeks?
I missed Bill Clinton standing in for Cliff Richardat
By 1.30 a.m. I was reduced to reading the instructions on the fire extinguishers and contemplating starting a food fight. I decided against it because the bread in thefree sandwiches was hard enough to kill and the filling was too light to fly properly. It would just sort of float.
At 1.45 a.m. we were asked by the king again to board buses which would take us to the plane. Yippee. At long last, Captain James T. Berk had arrived. We were on our way.
Oh no we weren’t. After fifteen minutes of standing on the stationary bus, we were forced to endure 50 minutes of sitting on the stationary plane where there was no air conditioning and, worse still, no explanation or apology from the flight deck.
Only after we had become airborne and fallen asleep did Captain Fool come on the PA system to explain what had gone wrong. It had been too hot, he said, for the plane to take off and, as a result, some of the bags had been removed from the hold.
Oh, that’s marvellous. So you get us home four hours late, you separate us from our luggage, you never say sorry and then you come up with the worst excuse I have ever heard. How can it have been too hot, you imbecile? Because of your shoddy timekeeping, it was three o’clock in the bloody morning.
The thing is, though, that I (mostly) kept my temper because I knew I could come home, write this and therefore make his life as miserable as he had made mine.
What staggered me was the patience of my fellow passengers. They never complained. They quietly sat at the airport eating their meat veneer. They quietly stood on the bus, sweating. They didn’t even squeal when the stewardesses poured boiling water into their laps,told barefaced lies about the luggage being on board and generally treated us as if we were a nuisance in the smooth running of their aeroplane.
The problem is that we are used to all this, and more. We expect the tiny bit of road that isn’t jammed solid to be festooned with speed cameras. We expect the train to be late and the Tube to explode. We know that the plane will make an unscheduled stop in Bogotá and that if we complain we’ll be taken off by the police, arrested and shot.
Naturally, we expect a charter flight to get us back to Stansted four hours after everyone else because, of course, this particular airline is the sponsor of the spectacularly hopeless Minardi Formula One team which, last time I looked, was just finishing the 1983 French Grand Prix.
Sunday 12 August 2001
What I Missed on My Hols: Everyday Madness
And so, after two months on the Continent, I’m back in Britain trying to decide if I have missed anything. What I normally miss is the British weather. A dose of hot sunshine may be pleasant for a week or two, but soon you begin to tire of sunscreen and having a red nose. You find yourself hunting down bits of shade and not wanting to do any work because it’s far too sweaty.
After four weeks I found myself lying awake at night dreaming of being cold. We have no idea how lucky we are in this country having weather that we don’t notice; weather that doesn’t slap us in the face every time we set foot outside the door.
But what concerns me more than the weather is what I’ve missed in the news. We all assume when we come back from a spell abroad that the country will have changed out of all recognition. There will have been fourteen days of developments about which we will have no knowledge.
New fashions will have come and gone. New political parties will have formed, new bands will have been created and we won’t be able to talk about any of it at dinner parties. So what exactly have I missed in the past nine weeks?
I missed Bill Clinton standing in for Cliff Richardat
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