Do you remember when airports were like Aladdin’s caves? Exciting, glamorous, filled with tempting treasure and with the promise of a magic carpet ride to exotic lands?
Now passing through an airport is as much fun as an extended visit to the dentist for root canal treatment.
The fast track, check yourself in (if you can find your glasses, passport and that piece of paper the internet promised would be all you needed), machine, screams out its challenged printing status in silent neon, forcing you to reconsider your position on cruelty to electronic devices.
The Queue Police, a single humanoid (I say that loosely) advises you to join the ‘baggage drop’ line, 150 deep and tutting in a harmony worthy of a well rehearsed Last Night of the Proms.
The solitary ‘baggage dropper’ is, understandably, a tad underwhelmed with her starring role, and has no intention of anyone setting a lap record on her watch. She is joined by two Fuhrers in waiting as the Queue Police attempts to put the queue into a ‘who’s going to miss their flight first’, line.
The delight of seeing your suitcase finally embarking on its ‘lost luggage’ journey is all too soon replaced by the seedy misery of the strip club audition and ‘let’s cop a feel’ member’s club.
As a seasoned traveler, you will have put all your haemorrhoid creams, denture fresheners and polyfiller foundation into a clear toiletry bag – you’re no fool. Pile sufferer possibly, proud owner of polyfiller for a complexion that never left puberty perhaps, but no fool.
Shit! The belt. The bloody belt! It has to come off, there’s no way round that. Will the extra loose ‘I know what it’s like travelling in tight clothes’ trousers stay up without it?
And the sandals? You thought you only had to take off boots. Sorry, those blingy sandals will set off the alarm just as surely as a broken down Luger pistol. Can you break down a Luger pistol?
Violated and more than a little vexed, you head to Aladdin’s cave to punish the credit card but, as you have now used up an hour and a half of the ‘arrive two hours before departure’ time, and you dread the thought of airline food, decisions and the need to empty your bladder dictate.
The bladder wins. The queues for food, unless you want to risk the overpriced and usually dodgy seafood bar, mean you will be eating the food on the plane and, bugger me , they’ve just opened the gate – a twenty minute walk – who knew?
On a good trip, once on the plane, the airport experience dulls, however never assume it’s over.
Ice on the wings, computers not registering the smoke detector, a wing falling off, little things can all delay take off for at least an hour and a half.
Today it was the smoke detector’s computer. The captain reassures us by saying that as a last resort they will turn off the engines and then power up again, as “this sometimes solves the problem.” How comforting… don’t know what’s wrong so let’s reboot the plane.
Apparently it did, solve the problem, though, as we taxied for an hour and a half late to our new place in the take off slots, the rebooted plane made noises that, had they been emanating from my car on the M25, I would be on that hard shoulder and dialling the AA faster than you can say ‘ready for take off’.