24/6/2019
In 2001, with Retirement in the serious planning stage, we decided to do a “Big One” of about ten weeks, to let my young protégé at work try out my desk and chair on his own. My boss’s only stipulation was that I take a mobile phone, which I’d strenuously avoided up till then.
We’ve always been over-planners. Obsessively so. We were famous for it. Already had five overseas forays behind us with never a hitch. Our mates couldn’t believe it. We even tended to brag a little. But….
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Belgravia Guest House, London - Tues 14th Aug 2001
6.13 am - It seems like only yesterday (which it was) we were back to remarking (still rather smugly) to each other about how we never seem to have any problems when we travel. Never a Hard Luck Story to take home and bitch about over drinks like all the other truly seasoned travellers of the world. No, definitely all under control. Good organisation. Excellent planning.
6.30 am – Light overcast and the promise of an even warmer sweatier day if that's possible, talking 28C here in the South-East which’ll feel as muggy as Darwin in the Wet. But we don't care, all focus is on packing and sorting and generally getting ready to move on to Ireland.
6.42 am - I manage to sit on the end of the curtains which are draped over the edge of the bed, and pull two-thirds off the bloody hooks! A case of lateral damage caused by cramped conditions. And stupidity. We've now lost our status as the world’s tidiest cleanest quietest tenants.
7.09 am - Traffic report shows vehicles backed up at four major sites, but hey, that's a fairly typical workday morning. We're so organised we’re covered for everything, but don't know how you'd ever get used to this sort of road crush. Curtains look like something left over from the Blitz.
7.16 am – Waiting for breakfast call, everything packed and ready to go. Herself comes up with a face-saver re the curtains. Nothing gets on top of us. Being the only moveable thing in the room over four foot high that's constructed a bit like a climbing frame, we drag the bed over to line up the iron bedhead with the window, and tear up all the carpet with the legs in the process. Okay, I can only handle one catastrophe at a time, so clamber up, hook hook hook, shove the bed back and relay the carpet as best I can with my head jammed between the wall and the mattress. There, never tell the room's been attacked by an idiot.
8.30 am - Breakfast and farewells all done, no need to book a cab, just a simple matter of flagging one down like you see in the movies as apparently only seriously delusional people talk of ringing for one at rush hour in London.
We hit the pavement with wheelie suitcases in tow and plenty of time up our sleeve, estimate a half hour cab ride to the A2 AirBus stop just down Bayswater, allow say an hour for the bus ride, leaves an hour before our 11.05 flight to Dublin. Easy peasy.
8.31 am - Hail a passing cab. He totally ignores us.
8.32 am - Hail a passing cab. He totally ignores us as well.
8.33 am - Hail a passing cab. He's obviously blind deaf and totally bloody dumb.
8.35 am - Hail a passing cab. We seem to have gone as completely invisible as Aussies at a posh restaurant. You bastards.
8.37 am - Start fast-walking in the general direction of Marble Arch, as if that helps. Hail a passing cab but he whacks it back a gear and goes for the accelerator. You prick.
8.42 am - I throw Herself off the pavement under the wheels of a passing cab and as he screams to a halt I jump in and drag two bags each the size of your average piano crate after me and push the little old lady passenger with her leg in plaster carrying a miniature poodle out the other door. They’re both run over by a passing cab. Okay, I exaggerate. She didn’t have her leg in plaster.
9.03 am - Tumble out at Marble Arch with the humidity already at 98% and tell ourselves that everything is still reasonably under control. Bus rolls up after a couple of minutes, hop on. The ‘AirBus’ (a significant misnomer in this case) is a double decker with luggage racks for the first 30 feet of the ground floor and very cosy seating for seven back by the engine. We had a bad swing-and-sway experience on the top floor once and have never been near it since. But down the back of the bus it’s hot and sweaty like you wouldn't believe and bugger me the air-conditioner isn't working.
Our fellow travellers are an American couple, mid-West, early 60s, she's large-ish, he's slight, but he only knows Business-speak. We’re all cramped into the back corner together, knees in each others’ private parts, taking turns to heave on the windows which are hermetically sealed because the bus used to be fully air conditioned. The bloke’s firm is involved in the extraction process for tartaric and citric acid and soon we’re exchanging wine industry business cards, all packed in the back sweating like a racing camel's armpits.
9.16 am - Okay, we can handle a bit of clammy, but Mrs Midwest has a manic look in her eye and Mr Midwest is still talking business non-stop and we are slowing down and slowing down and Mrs Midwest struggles out and strap-hangs along to the driver and asks in that way that pushy people have of making a perfectly normal enquiry into a spine-tingling threat - ‘May we have the door open please? ’- ‘No, sorry madam, it’s against regulations while we’re moving.’ This is followed by a discussion in which neither intend to give ground in the semi-politest way possible.
9.21 am - Mrs Midwest is swinging back towards us and proclaiming - ‘Ah believe Ahm going to be sick’ - which naturally causes some sense of discomfort among we who are in the line of fire. Mr Midwest keeps talking business. Herself is starting to get that look in her eye that says I'm going to have to get out of here soon or someone is going to die! The bus slows down some more.
9.32 am - The bus goes to a dawdle and then an idle and finally comes to a complete halt. We're in wall-to-wall traffic going nowhere. Mrs Midwest goes and points her vomiting end towards the driver. By magic the door flies open and a God-sent breeze drifts in. Mr Midwest wants to know how much tartaric acid we might use in the Australian wine industry in a year. I find it hard to concentrate. I think I say 20 million tonnes. He looks extremely impressed. I think it’s probably about twenty thousand tonnes but I don't givvashit. There’s got to be something we're bigger at than the Americans.
9.46 am - The bus is still stationary. Mrs Midwest asks the driver what the holdup is. Several people come down from the top floor looking worse than we do. We notice there are no other vehicles whatsoever on the opposite side of the M-way. It’s completely empty. We sense that at this time on a Tuesday morning this is not a normal state of affairs. Mrs Midwest comes back to inform us that the driver has phoned in and has been advised that there seems to be a bomb up ahead on the other side of the Motorway. Geez, bloody brilliant!
9.50 am - We begin to inch along, for about half an hour, until we at last ease past Ground Zero, which is covered in Army and Police vehicles and sirens and uniforms milling about and all that stuff. We creep past. You sense helicopters overhead with machineguns.
The INTO LONDON traffic is backed up as far as the eye can see, three lanes of dead cars and buses and trucks and vans, drivers of every description sprawled out on the grass verge, asleep, reading newspapers, making calls on mobiles, dit dit ditting their laptops, pissing behind bushes. A tea and coffee caravan and a pork pie stand have materialised out of thin air.
The clock is still running on all of our lives. Nervous tensions ripple through the bus. Backpackers and business suits alike are making mental calculations and asking the driver dopey questions about Terminal Loop Sequences and looking at their watches and double checking their plane tickets. But we're okay Jack. We've got time. We're so organised we can accommodate the IRA's little hobbies. The bus finally finds second gear. No-one is seated except Herself and me and Mr Business. He's telling me about case-hardened rollers with neoprene seals. I have no idea why. Even I'm starting to feel tense.
10.26 am - We are just coming into Terminal 4. Next is Terminal 3 which is about like Melbourne-to-Sydney as we recall. And we want Terminal 1 after that. Several travellers make hopeless noises and wave to their planes taking off as we go past. We check our tickets. Clearly 11.05am. No sweat. Well, you know what I mean.
10.32 am - Finally roll in to Terminal 1, but hey, we’ve beaten the odds again. Time enough as usual. Grab our luggage and scamper with the rest, front Aer Lingus — ‘I'm sorry, that flight is 10.35am, your ticket has been incorrectly made out to Winter Time (or some such total shite) and the gate is closed.’
NOW it's time to panic! We who have never been late for a thing in our lives. Time to lose our cool and our smug composure and get down on our knees and beg. Please please please (just like you see on the “Airport” shows that looks so funny and attracts so much derision on our part), so she makes a phone call and says that if we hurry they’ll squeeze us on.
Thankyou thankyou thankyou promising to name grandchildren after her and all that and we heave the suitcases on the bagweigher thing, stickers whacked on tickets and all that wonderful hi-tech barcoded stuff and we’re running with the complete and faithful certainty that our suitcases will follow us. Ah, the world is full of fools.
10.33 am - We run for our lives up gullies and alleys and advertising tunnels. My feet don't seem to work. My heart is on the wrong side of my chest.
10.44 am - Finally wheeze into Gate 88 with the last four other stragglers, plane ready to go, care not a jot for some poor cow who gets his cabin baggage disallowed, fall in, hot, bothered, but seated in the right plane, and it's still on the ground. How do we do it? Herself says she can't see our bags on the last trolley. Ah, they're there somewhere, have a little faith in bar-code technology and Heathrow baggage handlers.
11.42 am - Dublin Airport. Luggage carousel. We wait and wait and wait as everyone's cases and haversacks and skis and foldapushers go round and round, some that don't get claimed at all. Some that aren't even there to begin with. Like ours!
We’re finally all alone with a broken suitcase with its guts hanging out and a cardboard carton full of chickens doing endless laps. Accept the inevitable and the unbelievable that at last it's happened to US and hit the Aer Lingus Lost Luggage Dept which is looking worryingly busy, and the cute but totally blank-looking bird there rattles off a heap of stuff for the seventy-third time this morning that sounds like artillery coordinates and she makes out our forms and the game is afoot.
Nothing to do but pick up our haversacks and keep moving, trust them when they promise to send our cases on to wherever we are by late afternoon. Okay, we can handle that. Not the end of the world. Next plane is three hours, no point waiting for it. But, while I book a night down in the Glendalough Hotel in the Wicklows, at the Tourist Info desk Herself decides like the good little obsessive optimist that she is, to give the Aer Lingus girl another try, who suggests she could check the Lost Luggage Dept just in case it’s already in there.
Okay, worth a shot, and the security guard even lets her through the STAFF ONLY door, to be confronted by a veritable mountain of luggage. None of it ours. But then when she goes to return back to the real world, through the same door, the same security guard gets all fractious because he has short term memory loss AND because she looks like a desperate drug smuggler, so he makes her go all the way round through Customs again! She is steaming!! This just gets better and better.
1.04 pm - Okay, we’re outa here. With tails a-twitch we grab the Hertz shuttle over to their depot, do the paperwork, get an upgrade to a 1.4L Seat (that’s a make of car, not where you put your bum) Cordoba, which is nice, but not sure how that’s an upgrade, although it has got a monster boot that makes the Ford’s at home look like a glovebox. Except that we now have bugger-all to put in the bloody thing.
1.43 pm - Hit the M1/M50 ring road south around Dublin, which — like all M-ways — is a great road for high speed getaways, except that this one is only about 25 kms long in its entirety. And they have a toll barrier in the middle.
1.51 pm - All of M-way life grinds to a bottom gear stroll for about 4 kms, queuing up for the money takers. It would've been quicker to cut down through the guts of O'Connell St and the CBD, over the Liffey, and south through thirteen badly-waymarked suburbs.
2.55 pm - At last! Can't believe we're finally winding our way up into the wilds of the Wicklows Mountains. Things have got to be on the improve. Up on the moor-tops we find ourselves in a small chain behind a young couple, who are driving ever so carefully in their hire car, probably because they've been saving up for this honeymoon for years and couldn't afford to splurge on the Tourist Premium to the Comprehensive Insurance that covers you for the Excess Portion of the Collision Damage Waiver which between them represent about 65% of a whole new car.
Like considerate social citizens they decide to oh so politely pull over and let us all go by, misjudge the little layby they’ve wisely selected, and Ka-RUNCH it goes belly-down straight into a large drainage ditch cleverly disguised as a shallow grassy gutter!! We wait as a passing local in a 4WD backs in and sets to haul them out as the rest of us squeeze by and leave them to it. I know we are truly terrible people but we get some kind of perverse pleasure in knowing that it's not us because we are already having a TRULY shitty day.
3.21 pm - Hey, it’s great to be up in these hills again, so we stop to put our Aussie flag decal on the windscreen, breathe in the crisp Wicklow air, and let Herself release some pent up emotion on video concerning the [bleep bleep] injustices of just about everything, but especially about being on holiday without any [bleep bleep] clothes.
4.12 pm - Feeling a smidge better for it, it's on up over the wild wild moors of Sally Gap and wind on down through Laragh to Glendalough, taking our time, and — you never know — maybe our cases will even beat us there. Maybe. (Maybe not).
5.28 pm - No cases waiting of course, so book in, and too late by now to do much. Besides, we don’t have our jumpers. And no decent shoes for Herself. And she's got no socks. And our shirts are full of dried London sweat. Other than that we don't look too bad, so we settle for showers and a lot of talc and thank God we didn't have room in our lost suitcases for the laundry bag which got stuffed into my always-carried haversack at the last minute.
6.05 pm - Into the lounge bar (ominously now called ‘The Tavern’) at least looking forward to the small pleasures of a cappuccino, a pint, and a decent dinner of fish and chips and mushy peas like we enjoyed in here a year or two ago. Cappuccino machine is broke and Herself's percolator coffee is strong enough to etch titanium. And ‘The Tavern’ (which used to be a modest little all-day bistro) is now self-consciously upmarket with a dinner menu that starts at eight quid for entrees and escalates in large increments. My pint though is wonderful (Guinness, natch), but we're not that hungry any more. Pub Grub here has gone seriously nouvea riches and we've suddenly lost our cavalier attitude to spending, settle for toasted sandwiches off the Cheapskate Bar list.
6.21 pm - Back at Reception it's sorry, there's still no bags yet. But at least she looks genuinely sympathetic, says that it happens quite often. Which oddly doesn’t help.
7.02 pm - Up to our room and like an optimistic fool I ring the Aer Lingus Lost Luggage freebie Help Line and get the synthesised — ‘Thank you for calling blah blah blah, there are ... [Fie-uv] ... callers ahead of you blah blah blah’ crap, which is then repeated six times over the next fifteen minutes, then it changes to — ‘blah blah blah there are ... [four-uh] ... callers ahead of you ...’ which I get another six times over another 15 minutes, at which point a further dismembered voice tells me — ‘I am sorry, you have run out of time’ — and effenwell hangs up on me!!! You bitch!!!
7.32 pm - Taking another tack we go down to our friendly lass on the hotel’s Reception Desk, who already knows our whole sorry story, and she takes pity on us and offers to track down ‘a real Aer Lingus person’ for us while we retire to our room. Which somehow for our 120 quid doesn't stretch to tea and coffee and two milk arrowroot biscuits anymore.
7.38 pm - In desperation Herself decides to get some of her money's worth out of this debacle by reconditioning her hair lavishly under the shower, using the little rack of fancy bits that they DO provide because they know we don't normally use them. She shampoos up, ahhh — lovely, life is not all doom and gloom and stuffups and frustrations, so she decides to go for broke and do the conditioner as well.
As the kid's eyes aren't what they used to be and she doesn't tend to wear her glasses in the shower and the freebies don't tend to have labels with six inch print, she lashes the conditioner on and it lathers, and lathers, and lathers, and then goes frothy and then goes fluffy and then bits of foam begin to break away and float about the bathroom like so much storm fleck on the beach, until she begins to wonder if life hasn't gone seriously amok once more, and yes — it's FOAMING BATH GEL! Great for a modest movie star's bathroom scene but not entirely recommended for sticking on your head when you are already totally pissed off with the whole shitty disorganised world.
She stands motionless for a few poignant moments, frothing head hanging low, trying to decide whether to cry, scream, laugh like a lunatic, or thump large holes into the hotel walls. It's not easy being an Herself.
9.30 pm - After several mind-numbing hours of a whole two TV channels of total crap or continuously repeated Sky News, Aer Lingus finally comes through to tell us they have found our bags, that they are actually in the country, and they will try to get them to us tonight (in a lovely velvety Irish PR tone of voice that is wonderful to listen to but both she and I know that we've got BUCKLEYS), but failing that, early tomorrow morning.
10.04 pm - Give up on the lot of it and Jan goes to bed in the buff with ruined hair and I settle for secondhand undies and secondhand teeshirt. None of this is exactly what we had planned for our wonderfully languid luxury stopoff at Glendalough.
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Wed 15th Aug 2001
This day has got to be better, surely.
Eternally the optimists, we go down to breakfast at eight, foolishly betting our bags will be here, and once more the girl at the desk (Swedish product of the new EU and a wonderfully obliging honey) offers to get stuck into it all again to see just where they might be, and after some restrained persistence with Aer Lingus, finally advises us that the bags left Dublin at 7.30am, presumably along with a truckload of other misplaced luggage now tearing around the country, hopefully in a clockwise direction, looking for creased and crabby owners.
But, at least our breakfast spot in the hotel's dining room, looking out over the hills and the romantic ruins of Glendalough, with the Glendasan River rattling gently by, is still one of the best eating experiences in all of Ireland. Except we have a waitress on her first day of work experience who hasn't yet done the course on making coffee. The spoon dissolves in the cup along with the first two layers of china followed by most of our throat skin. Presume she’s got the coffee-to-water ratio back to front — one scoop of water and fill the perc up with coffee. She smiles apologetically as our eyeballs pop out onto our plates and we clutch at our necks and make gurgling noises. She brings us a fresh pot.
Breakfast done and still no bags so nothing for it but to wait some more. To hell with it, not to be done out of the lovely afternoon walk we'd planned for yesterday, we put showerproofs on against the slight patchy spit and head out through the old cemetery, over the river and into the woods to the Upper Lake. It's mild, it's peaceful, and it's heavenly quiet, and for a short while our jaded spirits can commune with nature and we can forget about delinquent luggage.
We get back about eleven and buggerme but there's STILL no bags. And we have to be in Clonakilty tonight. This is getting really annoying. I'm fuming but patient, but Herself is all out shitty, dumps our whole sorry story on the young kid in charge of the Tourist Info office over the road, who gets straight onto the phone and absolutely stuck into Aer Lingus like a terrier — looks like a sweet little cream puff too — and I'm just about to tear back and get her all of the claim details because she seems to have seriously useful connections, and damn me the cases and me arrive in the hotel foyer together. Never been so glad to see two oversized overweight bags in my life. We turn the terrier off with profuse thanks, thank everyone else in a ninety foot radius as well, pay the bill, and hit the bloody road about 12.30 with the boot at last full to overflowing.
I go back out to drag in the bags and bugger me the boot won't unlock! I can't believe this! I have no less than fourteen tries for the correct key movement combination of left-right-in-out-up-down, none of which work even though I’m using my full Billy Connolly vocabulary. But then it finally pops open for no discernible reason. No idea how that works.
So, like a total mug I shut it again because I reckon I’ve sussed the combination for Italian (Spanish? French? Bulgarian?) bootlocks and I want to test this while it’s fresh in my tiny mind, and the bastard of a thing refuses to open again like I’ve failed the Idiot Test and now it’s looking like it’s time to get a crowbar or climb in through the back seat. Geez I dunno how I manage it sometimes.
I hump and heave through all fourteen variations all over again and bugger me again it just pops open for no reason once more. I think I've had enough for one day so I hump the bags up, hit the showers, wash about two ute-loads of shirts and socks and undies, sit back and catch up on a few notes.
The truly sad bit is that the first time I really needed my shiny new free virginal mobile phone that I went to so much trouble to have set up, was when the bags went west, with the bloody thing inside one of them! It's definitely been a l-o-o-o-o-ng two days.
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Extract from “Toad In The Hole”
© T. R. Edmonds 2001
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