So I am home at last. Hopefully I will try and tell you a bit about my latest unforgettable journey without becoming too much of a bore. For now at least I must just tell you about the beginning and the end of the trip. You see, I had forgotten just how tedious, how bone-wearingly difficult travelling anywhere has now become. It’s not the twelve hour flight that does you in – it’s the four hours in the airport, the forty minutes in this queue followed immediately by forty more minutes in another queue, and yet another request to present all the documents that have just been examined and passed by at least two other officials.
It is enough to drive you to tears, and frequently does. It is the senseless, needless repetition of it all that grinds you down. Why for instances, after going through numerous checks, searches, prods, scans and interviews, do I have to show my passport immediately before I get on the plane? Where on earth do they think I might have materialised from at that point?
The Thais have a saying. It goes something like – hang on, I’ll just run it through an online translator….
Oh. Apparently it comes out as: Oh happy day! You have just proffered a ridiculously large denomination banknote for this cheap wooden trinket I am attempting to sell. I shall now smile reassuringly as I pluck it deftly from your hand. Be pleasantly surprised with the three or four small coins I offer as change. And call again, sucker.
Well, it must be a different saying I’m thinking of. In any case, travel is vast becoming an obstacle to actually getting anywhere. Even when you do get moving, your fellow travellers rarely add to the pleasure. If I had my way a number of cretinous individuals would never be allowed to travel with the rest of us, chief amongst them the utterly selfish, oafish morons who fling back their chairs to the maximum reclining position moments after first sitting in them. I seem to spend every flight with my head wedged in the narrow gap between the seat in front and the one behind.
Speaking of the one behind, the next person who uses the headrest of my seat to lever his bulk out of his own is in serious danger. On the flight to Thailand I was just about to take a nice sip of refreshing orange juice when I suddenly felt my head being drawn slowly back and away from the plastic beaker. There was an ominous creaking sound as the seat reached its elastic limits, and I just had time to think, ‘if he lets go of my headrest now I will -’ when he let go. There was a sound like bedoiiiing, and my head flew forward like a stone flung from a catapult, bouncing off the seat in front and back again several times.
So that was going out. Coming home was even worse.
Someone tugged rudely on my forearm just as I was about to hoist my rucksack into the overhead compartment of the first train to leave Manchester for Leeds in almost three hours. Consider the time I had just spent shuffling my way through customs, then standing confusedly on a windswept platform at the airport station (where we were informed, but given no reason for, the cancellation of all direct trains to Leeds. We would instead have to board a train for Manchester Piccadilly, where another station official would glance disdainfully at me, as if I had a piss stain on my pants, and shrug wordlessly when asked about the possibility of getting home to Leeds), meant that it would have taken me longer to go the sixty or so miles from Manchester Airport to the centre of Leeds than it did to fly from Istanbul, a distance of about two thousand miles but who’s counting? I love Britain, you know, but sometimes I just fucking hate Britain.
I glanced irritably at the person tugging on my arm. It was a pleasant-looking woman about my age. She was beaming a disarming smile, but as I had just spent the best part of twenty-four hours on various planes, buses and finally a very late train which even now showed little inclination to move, this did not rule out having half a Millie’s chocolate muffin screwed into her face.
“Joanne Pickles!” she said, in a tone that suggested an obvious oversight on my part.
In fact she did seem vaguely familiar to me, though in my fogged and addled jet-lagged state, vague was all it was. Instead I went off into a little routine with myself based around her name.
Say, do you know Joanne Pickles?
She does?
Why yes, but only when there is a surplus of preservable vegetables around!
It was good but the last line needed to be more concise, more pithy and –
“Gary!”
“Yes, sorry,” I said, shaking myself awake. The use of my name registered only dimly. I shoved my bag into the overhead rack and sat down heavily at a table seat. The young woman slid into the seat opposite. “You were talking about vegetables.”
Her smile faded for the first time. “No I wasn’t.”
“Really? Well…” Then all at once it came to me. Joanne Pickles, friend of an Ex, minor background character in my life, like one of those extras chatting mutely in the Rover’s Return. I apologised for my behaviour and explained that I had just returned from Thailand, where the homeward leg of the flight mysteriously took some three hours more than the outward journey. I’m sure the captain did try to explain but only in Turkish, so I can’t tell you if it was down to the curvature of the earth or whether we had to go round a few times while the captain and first officer bickered in the cockpit.
“There! A space!”
“Oh right, tell me as I’m flying past it, why don’t you!”
“Well, can’t you put it in backwardsy?”
“Backwardsy? Do you know the stopping distance of this thing?”
“Oh here we go, Mr Show-off, knows how to land a plane but does he know where the ironing board is? Does he-”
“You had that bag the last time I saw you, remember?” Joanna Pickles was now saying. “That was on a train, too.”
All of a sudden I did remember. I smiled distantly and nodded. I had seen Joanna Pickles on a train the day after my relationship finally buckled under the weight of all that resentment and unhappiness and stuff. I did what I always do at times like that, the thing that will save me and curse me as long as I live: I went off on my own.
That time I went walking. It is usually walking, largely because the motion is agreeably constant and takes no thought at all, but I might occasionally drive or simply go to a solitary place.
It struck me as something as a poignant irony that I should bump into Joanne Pickles on this of all days. The last time I saw her it is fair to say that I was in something of a reflective mood (like this occasion, I was also a bit vague, I think. In fact I’m sure I was eating a Kit Kat with the wrapper on). A significant part of my life had just come to an end and the future was vast and featureless and hopelessly uncharted. I felt like I had fallen asleep in a rowing boat, and when I woke up again I was all alone and miles from anywhere.
And here I was again, another rucksack and another train, feeling a not dissimilar sensation of being adrift. Only now I didn’t feel like part of my life was coming to an end. For the first time in my life I had ended a long journey without that warm, gladdening feeling of relief at being home again.
Right then I was certain of two things:
I will be back in Thailand just as soon as circumstances allow. And secondly, this time I will wear a helmet on the plane.
