"And I sank like a concrete flamingo
In these desperate hours."
- Ed Kuepper, Horse Under Water, 1990
I have arrived in the Terrortory - woo hoooooo! and while Sister Kate does a little last-minute work I thought I'd scribble a mini-Chronicle.
The jet lag has involved only half an hour, but a whopping 24 degrees Celsius. Actually, make that 31 degrees if you count the fact that when I walked into the driving wind across the Slobart tarmac to the Shitstar plane at about 0610 it was drizzling and about 3 degrees. I have shed more layers than a cicada in summer and having got to the last one now realise that last layer is still too much clothing. Sigh.
Is there nothing like an airport (complete with air travel) to throw together unlikely and ill-suited people. I am surprised there has not been more colloquial discussion, or indeed formal study, about the opportunities for air rage.
I could regale you with a list of sad, bitter observations about the subject (in fact I started but thought better and scratched it out). The grumpy old woman in me says I will never travel again unless it's a charter flight. With Moet.
There was one moment though when the ridiculous was if not sublime then truly entertaining.
The four galahs travelling together - you know the type: middle-aged, big hair, faux heritage jewellery, best described as aspirational 'ladies who lunch' - were conspicuous as they left the Darwin terminal. The gold-tone highlights on their animal-print luggage nearly blinding in the sun, and their shrieks of "No, REEEEALLLLY??" and "Oh NOOOOWWWWWW!!!" tearing holes in the atmosphere, they dragged trolleys made slow by gargantuan suitcases towards the taxi-less taxi-rank. After some minutes standing in the sun, adjusting their enormous sunglasses with orange-polished fingers, the collective big hair was beginning to wilt. They were sinking like concrete flamingos.
Finally a taxi arrived, and the middle-aged European driver got out. He stared at the four galahs, and the galahs (like the abyss) stared back at him. They indicated their travelling gear.
"Can you take us and these?" they asked.
"Ladies," he sighed, "I am a taxi. You need a removalist."
3 comments:
Classic! More please :-)
I would nominate myself for having flown more than angone else ever in the entire world. Ever. But I have flown a lot. Airports and flying are not of this world. Security people (rubber gloves, bend over) are beyond any international conventions; organisation, reason and humanity go out the word to make way for surrealism as it enters; the idea that you HAVE to walk through a shop to get to the loung area; the lack of ability to question what occurs because of 'their' overwhelming power; and we queue unquestioning like sheep. And then there is that special circle of hell - Heathrow - not made, just grown; in the immortal words of Monty Python "I'm so worried about the baggage retrieval system they've got aty Heathrow".
Kempy, I bow to your superior experience in airport survival. (Note I said "bow", not "bend over".) May you have more pleasant airborne experiences in the future.
Ash - more, soon.
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