Head in the Clouds...
Five hours to go before I fly to Hamburg and my checklist is looking rather optimistic, with only two items devoid of a triumphant strike through them. Of course, I’d be feeling rather smug instead of stressed if those two things weren’t ‘Check and print Hamburg and Hamburg to Timmdorf Journey Details’ and ‘Purchase Euros’.
Too late to order Euros from the bank, so I shall have to buy them at an exorbitant rate at the Airport. I’d take a minute out for a face-palm moment and a musing sigh, but time is not on my side, as you are already aware, so I move on to the final task. Journey details and itinerary printed after a ricocheting exercise of skimming through important emails and reading through the ‘Monica and Rainer are getting married’ website, selecting the salient points in my attempt to save ink and paper.
Finally I’m on the move, riding the westbound Piccadilly line Tube, resting my out of breath self on the thread bare crumb-crusted seat. This is a rare privilege I tell you. Usually on the Piccadilly line, I barely get to glance at a seat, before being jammed against a snivelling suit or a perspiring putrid armpit.
At South Kensington, a mature East Asian couple take the seats opposite me. Together their attire is a juxtaposition of the other; the man is dressed in camel slacks, a crisp cotton cornflower blue shirt (probably Oxford) and white, laced shoes. His hair is parted severely at his left brow and swept neatly behind his ears. His female companion has taken a not so conservative approach in her attire (unless you count the fox tail, but we shall come to that yet). She wears a very orange mac over a floral dress, dark leggings and sanguine star scattered white socks that peer out of her pink and white lace-up trainers. Her limp hair rests unceremoniously on her shoulders, her brows replaced by two sharp crescents far above her eyes and filling in the space between is a heavy smattering of glaring yellow eye-shadow. Her lips are poised in a Katie Price-esque pout and painted lavishly in a retro red. But it’s the very alive looking fox’s tail that intrigued me. Why have a fox-tail wagging between one’s human legs? Had she had it surgically attached?
...Yes, that really is a Fox's tail.
At Earl’s Court, a cello case enters the carriage, followed by it’s bulbous balding owner. He’s out of breath but grins and nods as he takes a seat after securing his classical instrument. The middle-aged Indian man sitting further down is woken up by the ringing of his iPhone – a dozen hands reach for their phone, but only he answers. His speech is hurried – he is obviously feeling annoyed about being woken up. He takes a grocery order from his wife (or at least I assume she’s his wife), repeating her requests in an attempt to memorise the shopping list. She wants three bunches of spinach, a carton of yoghurt, a watermelon and a marrow or was it radish? I’m not sure as Hindi is not one of my first languages. (You can put a stop to that eye-rolling now!)
A frazzled flight attendant boards the carriage at Osterley. She battles with her bags before falling into the seat next to me. The cellist, grins at her “Don’t tell me, you’re a flight attendant,” he remarks, then laughs jovially. The flight attendant is deep inside her handbag, furiously searching for… She triumphantly emerges with her iPod Nano and plugs her ears with her liberating earphones. The cellist is still awaiting her acknowledgment, but must endure her rejection.
At Heathrow Terminal 1, the luggage check-in process is painless and free of my hefty suitcase. I am impelled towards the smell of coffee. I desperately need caffeine. Have I mentioned yet that I haven’t slept in nearly 72 hours? And I’ve just remembered my freshly brewed coffee, still in the Moka pot, sitting beside my empty mug, in the kitchen, at home. I’m going to have to make do with a Caffe Nero coffee. It’s not as bad as the last Starbucks coffee I had years ago, but I do have to all but drown it in brown sugar. I haven’t taken sugar in my coffee since… well for a very long time. I wonder if the coffee on the plane will be any better.
I like variety, so I choose tea as my beverage of choice on the plane journey. I wish I hadn’t as it’s just awful. You know when a teabag has been seeping for ages to the point of being stewed? Yes, that. The snack that accompanies our hot beverages is a slab of cake. It looks like Madeira cake with a raspberry filling injected into the middle. My teeth can’t take any more sugar at this point (I have also consumed a quarter of a tub of soft mints whilst we have been in the air), so I stuff it into my hand luggage. I have no idea at this point of how grateful I shall be for that piece of Kuchen.
As a flight attendant announces that we are due to land in fifteen minutes, first in German than in English, I decide it might be time to make use of my German for Dummies app. Just as I have successfully memorised ‘Sprechen Sie Englisch?’, ‘konnen Sie mir helfen?’ and ‘wie viel?’, it is time to exit the plane. I hope I know enough German to get me to The George hotel.
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