All That You Can't Leave Behind

I’m lying in the early morning dark. The glow from the street light cuts behind the ill fitting blind and casts a low glow across the bedroom. I can hear Beck in the bath, there’s the sound of water splashing like a gentle tide ebbing against a jetty wall. I try to focus on this rather than the dull thud in my head caused by a visit to the Marquis in Cannonbury and the New Rose on the Essex Road.

The room around me is a scattergun mess of clothes, electrical cables, adaptors, open cases, creased books and loose sheets of paper. Ah, yes, I remember. Beck is in the process of packing. I went out last night to keep out of her way whilst she finished working and prepared for departure. Clearly only one of those things has been achieved.

She comes back into the bedroom and I grudgingly roll onto the floor. When I finally make it to the bathroom I find that the deep soak she enjoyed has drained all the hot water. I attempt to take a cold shower, but as the heating hasn’t even kicked in yet and the air in the room is acutely chilled. It’s just too much and I resort to ineffectively splashing a little water around my crotch and arm pits exhaling with an “oh” and an “ah” as I do so. I get dressed still smelling of midnight sweat and go in search of coffee.

Two hours later and we need to be leaving, but Beck’s laptop is still running in the still disputed spare room and in the bedroom she sits atop the small, battered suitcase I acquired at some point that usually just lives in the bottom of the wardrobe storing hiking gear as I tend to prefer a rucksack. Spilling out of the sides I see what looks like a suit worn by a engineer sent to defuse a chemical bomb (it turns out to be the coat she brought in Canada for wearing in the artic next year) and a pair of maroon high heels. Presumably not to be worn together.

“Do you really need that?”
“It’ll be cold.”
“You’ll never get it shut.”
“You’re always so defeatist.”
“Couldn’t you take a smaller coat?”
“It’ll be cold.”
“Not so cold, surely? Isn’t that thing designed to keep you alive if you stumble and fall in snow and lie helpless for a few hours whilst the temperature drops to minus twenty?”

Eventually, we get the two bags zipped up and (probably) containing more or less everything she needs. I carry the suitcase down the stairs. It’s clearly well over the weight limit, but Beck insists that she’ll repack at the airport and I therefore have to find another bag which I can either use to take things back home or she can take on board as a larger carry-on bag.

I finally turn the ignition, after a quick dash back into the house to collect passport and flight details, and we pull off at 0955. Twenty-five minutes later than planned, but not too bad. The traffic through Lewisham is relatively light and we’re making reasonable time despite a minor panic crossing Blackheath.

“I’m not sure if I’ve got the adaptor that connects my computer to a projector.”
“Do you need it?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you want to go back?”
“Just stop and I’ll check… No, it’s okay. It’s here. We can go. Wait! I might have forgotten…”

We join the A102, accelerate up the hill cutting through the lanes of traffic and then are forced to brake heavily when descending the other side. And then we stop. The queue for the Blackwall tunnel is back beyond Greenwich. I consider trying to leave the bypass and head for the Rotherhithe Tunnel instead, but there’s road works between me and it and they’ll probably hold us up even worse. We sit it out.

For thirty minutes.

We inch forward sandwiched in-between a white van with faulty brake lights and a testosterone pumped idiot in a black Porsche boxer who thinks that if he nearly touches my bumper every four minutes I’ll realise what an obstruction I, personally, am causing and magically clear the road. There’s no accident, no broken down vehicle. The tunnel isn’t flooded, a hairline crack hasn’t appeared in the forty year old concrete. It’s just three lanes of traffic merging into two.

Eventually we emerge on the north side of the river, back into the sunlight and out of the electric tinted gloom. We make reasonable time up the A12 and the M11. There’s a bit of confusion at Stansted as the first car park I pull into has a minimum charge of £16. We finally get inside the terminal a little over an hour before the flight is scheduled to take off and join the queue.

The first of many.

You see, I really, really hate flying. Actually, that’s not quite true. It’s not that I’m scared of being up in the air, or that the motion makes me feel ill or anything like that, but I hate airports. It’s probably largely to do with the fact that I’m nearly always booked onto the cheapest possible flight to anywhere in the world at that time and it’s almost invariably leaves in the middle of the night (today is the exception), which means that it’s an expensive arse to get to the airport and then there is the continuous, loathsome queuing.

You queue to check-in, a process that would be significantly sped up if the unnamed Irish based airline had more than one seventeen year old girl dealing with all passengers and having to explain to each that yes, fifteen kilos is a lot less than other airlines, but it’s made quite clear on your confirmation email.

Then you have to queue to pay for the excess baggage, particularly galling if you’ve actually come in a dead on the limit despite the fact that you’re carrying the tent and the rest of the camping kit whilst your travelling companion, who only has to pack clothes, has somehow come in nearly eight kilos over. Then you have to get back in the check-in queue to prove that you’ve paid the excess baggage extortion racket and to collect your boarding passes. Then just because the seventeen year old girl is a vindictive little shit who hates her job you’re sent off to join yet another queue, this time for oversized baggage.

The security queue seems to creep around half of the terminal and is filled with increasingly anxious clock watchers as the second tick mercilessly by. The rules constantly change. No liquids. Up to 100ml of each liquid, but only if it’s in a plastic bag. Take your shoes off before passing through the metal detector. What are you doing taking your shoes off, fool, there’s a backlog of delayed people here?

Then there’s the inevitable bag search which results in either your travelling companion trying to explain that potassium permanganate is a powder you mix with water and soak your feet in to prevent trench foot not a component for a bomb. Alternatively you can explain to the screaming Polish soldier with a machine gun that you’ve no idea how the scalpel got into your hand luggage - even though it’d be so much easier to blame the numpty who thought they might want to sharpen a pencil during the flight.

Once all that’s done there’s just time for you to join the queue for a bottle of water from Boots, but not enough time to queue for breakfast and you ask yourself how did this happen again when you’re sure you allowed an extra half an hour this time. This is followed by a sprint through the airport as they change the departure gate to one in a shed on the next runway over.

Then more bloody queuing.

Onto the plane, off the plane, onto the pointless bus at the other end, passport control, baggage collection (presupposing of course that your bags made it onto the same plane as you), customs, the bus to take you to the place you thought you were flying to but actually turns about to be forty miles East. The whole process just threatens to break my sanity. Feet shuffling, the fat guy behind me who thinks that queuing means he has to be close enough for his belt buckle to touch my arse cheek and is nearly overpowering me with the smell of his cigarette and cheap burger breath wafting across the back of my neck.

Agh!

Actually, none of that happens this time. The flight to Poznan seems quite empty and the queue to check-in is pretty short. The seventeen year old is in charge is a boy and Beck bats her eyelashes, smiles sweetly and gets away with the excess weight. I’m not flying so I don’t get to see the security queue but she made the flight so it probably wasn’t that bad. The only queue I have to endure is waiting behind someone who can’t work out how to pay for the car park.

My deep rooted unhappiness at the prospect of flying anywhere means that I really should be getting the train when I go out to join her on Friday. I could get the Eurostar form the rather lovely, restored St Pancreas to Brussels, from there I can catch a fast train to Berlin and then one that stops at every single village on the way to Warsaw via Poznan. It’d take a little longer, sure, but not that much when you factor in getting to the airport, a couple of hours standing around there and the same at the other end. With the train you just seem to walk through an orderly process, easily accommodating the volume of customers and not pressurised by lack of investment. There’s no weight limit beyond what you can carry. It’s so much smoother and efficient. On the journey you can look out the window and take in the scenery, the little trackside details in small German towns. Even when you change trains it’s far more pleasant - I love station architecture. St Pancreas is gorgeous and the new central Berlin station is fantastic. Stansted airport’s only feature of note is its dreary, pale, depressingness. At the destination you arrive, by train, slap bang in the middle of the town with a short amble to your hotel or hostel, not on an old military base somewhere in the same region.

But damn them it’s just so cheap. Looks like, in some twisted form of mental masochism, I’m flying again.