And so it ends. Rem and I had organized to meet after breakfast and get to Gatwick together. Always safer to travel together when you’ve got luggage and stuff. Oh my god it was horrendous. We had no idea how heavy my two suitcases were. He was good enough to drag one of them for me as I struggled with the other. And we made it to Euston Station eventually. Thanks to the fact that London’s so bloody old, they’ve always got something needing to be fixed. And of course, in our case, it was the lines. Which meant significant delays. And so we’d somehow managed to lug my ridiculously heavy cases down the five flights of stairs or something stupid, only to wait in the heat underground.
Both of us were becoming more acutely aware of the time, and eventually I said to Rem ‘Look, I’ll split the fare of a taxi with you’. So we lugged the stuff all the way back up again. All this taking heaps of time of course. Found a taxi on the road and he drove us to Victoria station. It was only a short trip, but by the end of it, we knew all about his wonderfully smart grandson who got a scholarship to New York to study fashion design; his smart grandson’s beautiful girlfriend who’s sad to see him go; his poor dead wife; and the fact that he’s now dating his sister-in-law because his brother married his wife’s sister or something like that; and the fact that he’s planning on taking her out that very day to shop for a new nightie because he’s taking her away for a holiday and so on and so forth.
Anyway. We eventually got to the station and still had to catch another train to the airport. Thankfully, you can buy your tickets on the train and the trip was relatively uneventful. Rem and I discussed the many merits and demerits of living in London. Rem’s extended family comes from Tokyo, so big cities aren’t exactly novel to him. Meanwhile, we make it to the airport in one piece. And of course, they’re doing massive renovations, so the two of us were dragging my heavy-beyond-imagination trolley bags around the detours which involved walking through one, then another car park, and probably even the runway of this airport. It’s freezing, one of the stoppers had snapped of the bottom of my trolley case, my palms were starting to blister (seriously – I’m not just writing out of my arse here), Rem was being an angel not complaining at all. Eventually we get to a fork in the road (literally) and had to go our separate ways.
I take my two cases and my lap top bag and my handbag to the counter. The lady looks at me like I’m nuts and proceeds to tell me that I’ve got the equivalent of two people’s overloaded luggage and there’s no way they’re going to let me on the plane. I’m about to start crying. It was so traumatic I think I’ve gone and pushed it right to the very back of my mind.To cut a long story short, there was a baggage shipment place at the end of the airport. I took all my stuff there, shoved a whole heap of disposables into a bin, packed the rest into a box, dumped one suitcase and went back to the counter about two hours later with less weight in my bag than a sack of potatoes. The lady was impressed. I was quite fortunate really because the baggage company was actually the same baggage company that was shipping my bike home. And they hadn’t shipped the bike yet – it was still in the dock. So they just pulled up my records and added and extra box to my shipment for a smaller cost than it would have been had I shipped them separately. Still. A lot of money had been spent unnecessarily, and I was not happy. But by this time, all I wanted to do was get home.
And I knew that with an attitude like that, there was no way that it was going to be an easy trip. And it wasn’t.The entire journey to Dubai, some baby was wailing two rows in front of me. The only time it stopped was when it got too tired to cry any more. Surely that’s not actually possible? What on earth could be wrong with the baby to make it cry like that? To make matters worse, I was sitting next to Dumb and Dumber. It was horrendous. I’d never felt like such a snob in my life, but good god they were common! I tried ignoring them but they kept trying to talk to me. I think I ignored them to the point where it was beyond rude (is it rude to put your headphones on with nothing playing when someone’s trying to talk to you?). But what the hell. I was tired, I had sore feet and sore hands, I was poor beyond measure, I wanted to go home and I was not in the mood to lament over the fact that there was no lifeguard at that particular family’s gene pool.
Clearly, I wasn’t the only person who felt that way, because I forgot all decorum and pushed and bolted my way out of that plane as soon as it landed with the one intention of getting away from the mother and daughter’s incessant and unbelievably inane prattle. As luck would have it, when I finally made it to the queue to check in at Dubai, who were right behind me? Kath and Kim. I couldn’t believe it. Talk about the gods being cruel. When we got to the waiting room, I sat down and started journaling on my laptop. An older couple sat down next to me and looked up as the mother and daughter pair walked through the clear glass door. ‘Ugh! Look!’ said the wife to the husband. My ears pricked up and I glanced up without moving my head, my fingers still moving over the keys. ‘There goes Twiddledee and Twiddledum’. The husband chuckled and I couldn’t help grinning. Looks like they’ve made a bit of a name for themselves. Thankfully, I didn’t end up sitting next to them on the next leg of the trip. I managed to sleep and got to Perth in one piece.It was all over.
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