Back at the office. My first sushi for five weeks, yum!
The journey back from England to Australia illustrates the high points and low points of international travelling. I leave Higham Ferrers in Northamptonshire with plenty of time for the 80-minute trip to Heathrow. I reach the M1 motorway to find all the traffic at a standstill. We eventually move at a crawl, then a stroll, then a brisk walk. Dick Whittington would have overtaken us. The only upside to all this is watching the guy in the next lane who has a very flash Aston Martin which probably cost 10 times more than my little VW Golf and goes twice as fast – but now is crawling at the same snail’s pace as us poor people in our peasant cars. Marx would be smiling – thus do road works bring about the equality that socialism has failed to deliver! The whole of the poxy motorway is being “improved” and there is a 50mph limit with average speed cameras to enforce it. I reach the M25, sigh! Slow again. Eventually I reach the car hire return with no wrong turns, thankfully, as the trip has taken 20 minutes more than expected. All is smooth at the car hire place and there is a short wait for the bus to Terminal Four. I wander around searching Terminal Four for a while until I realise that there is no Qantas check-in there. Hmm, there has been one there for the past 25 years of my travelling to Britain and back. I check my ticket – Terminal Three! I exclaim loudly, saying words similar to “Oh, bother, what a shame.” I sprint to the link train and get the next one to Terminal Three, getting hot and bothered by the rapid pace of change and my own stupidity in not double-checking everything.
At Terminal Three I join the check-in queue but am brought up short by a person with a clipboard who asks brusquely: “Have you checked in on-line?” No, I haven’t, I never have before. Can I just go to the nice lady behind the desk? No, you must check in at one of those terminals there.
I roll my eyes expressively and make a noisy sigh. The terminal machine is infernal, I have to type in all my details and then it asks for my frequent flyer card. I insert that but it cannot read it. It tells me to insert my passport for scanning, but does not see to have a suitable orifice for such an action. My eye-rolling and sighing is now so loud that a helpful young official chap comes over and tells me where to shove my passport. Success! I get a printout that I take to the baggage drop and the process then seems to be just the same as it always used to be. An extra 15 minutes of my life has just been wasted.
After the usual torrid time getting through the security check I find that Terminal Three is an overcrowded dump. I queue for five minutes for a coffee. I reach the counter and ask for a double-shot latte, only to be told: “Sorry sir, the machine is switched off, we are not making any more coffee because we are closing soon.” Aaaarrrghhh!
I say words similar to: “Oh dear, that is most inconvenient” before stalking off in stratospherically high dudgeon. I have rolled my eyes so much they are getting sore. The upside is that I find a shorter queue elsewhere and have a beer instead, a much better idea.
On the plane I sit right up the back next to two Belgian lads in their late teens who proceed to open a bottle of duty-free vodka and take swigs from it. By the time we reach cruising altitude they are well away and making lots of noise. A hostie asks me if they are ok and I dob them in. By this time one of the guys is almost unconscious and the cabin crew freak out and talk about giving him oxygen. The crew chief says he’ll find me another seat. He leads me forward and forward to business class. I fall to my knees and sob in gratitude. Oh thank you, thank you, oh Qantas God! I promise to worship at your church for the rest of my life! I step over the sleeping form of one privileged passenger and settle down into my private pod. With a touch of a button I go to full horizontal bed mode and sleep for a few hours. On waking, I get a real proper business class cooked breakfast complete with tablecloth and a big smile from the hostie. We stop at Bangkok, where the fun ends. On the next leg to Sydney it is back to reality and back to the back of the plane with the rest of the cattle. It’s not too bad, but after you’ve tasted the sweet fruits of business heaven, the thin gruel of economy hell is bitter to the tongue (and hard on the bottom).
In my albums
