At least seeing in the New Year was one festivity which did not see me in bed before the end of the celebrations.
I have decided that my repeated illness on Christmas Day (now in its second great year) must be some sort of psychosomatic psychiatric rejection of festivity. Perhaps my ‘Inner Scrooge’, so long suppressed by my grasshopper-like joie de vivre, is manifesting itself in gastric prostration. I’m sure that there is a PhD thesis waiting on the development of my dyspepsia!
The claustrophobic family gathering started with sedate restraint but, egged on by an uninhibited two year old, it soon degenerated into a most satisfactory, what shall I say? Saturnalia? It does alliterate nicely, but given the Catalan refusal to overindulge in alcohol and the British Behaviour (that alliterated and is accurate) which would come with deep drafts; it had an innocence which seemed sadly out of keeping with the occasion!
The meal was, as usual, excellent and there was plenty of drink – though it was there more for decoration than for use. As I was picking up the Pauls on New Year’s Day there was little opportunity for me to do more than open the bottles of Cava rather than sup my way steadily though them! If Spanish police, I reasoned, were anything like their British counterparts, they would be lurking on motorways ready to breathalyse any stupid motorists who had convinced themselves that liquid indulgence until the early hours would be magically resolved by a few hours sleep, during which time all the alcohol in their bloodstreams would softly and silently vanish away!
So it was an unnaturally frisky and alert driver who eventually tore himself away from a rapidly developing fideuá in Carmen’s kitchen and set out to pick up the Pauls.
The baggage handlers of Barcelona airport ensured that the good time made during the flight was dissipated in the unworldly stasis which is the luggage reclaim area.
Of all the inhuman arenas of human conflict, many of the most perniciously soul destroying are found in airports. Luggage reclaim is a particularly ‘trying’ dimension of other worldly existential angst.
In theory baggage reclaim is designed to allow and encourage passenger ease. The conveyor belt system is sinuous and allows maximum passenger access on both sides; the speed of the system allows easy ‘sight and take’; television screen inform passengers of the location of their belt; buzzers warn passengers of the start of the process; the areas are large and light and airy.
So why are they always places of frustrated misery?
Well, let’s start with the television screens which so often misdirect. And lie. You see your flight number and the moving graphic of little cases indicating that everything is working. Yet the belt on which the real cases are apparently moving is stationary, inert and has the sort of final lifelessness of a blank screen computer. I am not working, it seems to say, I have not worked and I will never work. Especially not for you. And not now.
And when, unbelievably, the noise of the buzzer scythes though weak hearts by its sheer unexpectedness, the belt does not move. When it does move it is only for a few moments and then it stops. When it finally starts again, rather like an Escher drawing it gives the impression of multi dimensional endlessness and futility. No bags appear. Then bags do appear and nobody, absolutely nobody claims them. Hordes of people look at these ur-bags and nobody takes them. They circle endlessly, a domestic refutation of hopes and desires, a Sartre-like joke, a little hell on earth.
At the point just before mob hysteria threatens, real bags appear. The first bag is always taken by someone you have not noticed before; a person unrecognised from the check in, the departure lounge, the aircraft, the disembarkation and the eternal wait for the baggage to appear. I have always assumed that this person is a plant, a stooge of the baggage handlers, a sort of joke that they never cease to find funny. Let’s face it, have you ever known anyone say, “Ah yes, I remember that flight, my case was the first on the belt!” I don’t think so. They like their fun do baggage handlers!
And how we laugh in retrospect! It’s all part of the delight of modern transport: quick, easy and stress free.
And 2008 will be a year in which peace will blossom and flourish.
And talking of peace and blossoming: today is the day I go to my new school to get the information I need for the coming term.
It will, as they say, be revealing
I have decided that my repeated illness on Christmas Day (now in its second great year) must be some sort of psychosomatic psychiatric rejection of festivity. Perhaps my ‘Inner Scrooge’, so long suppressed by my grasshopper-like joie de vivre, is manifesting itself in gastric prostration. I’m sure that there is a PhD thesis waiting on the development of my dyspepsia!
The claustrophobic family gathering started with sedate restraint but, egged on by an uninhibited two year old, it soon degenerated into a most satisfactory, what shall I say? Saturnalia? It does alliterate nicely, but given the Catalan refusal to overindulge in alcohol and the British Behaviour (that alliterated and is accurate) which would come with deep drafts; it had an innocence which seemed sadly out of keeping with the occasion!
The meal was, as usual, excellent and there was plenty of drink – though it was there more for decoration than for use. As I was picking up the Pauls on New Year’s Day there was little opportunity for me to do more than open the bottles of Cava rather than sup my way steadily though them! If Spanish police, I reasoned, were anything like their British counterparts, they would be lurking on motorways ready to breathalyse any stupid motorists who had convinced themselves that liquid indulgence until the early hours would be magically resolved by a few hours sleep, during which time all the alcohol in their bloodstreams would softly and silently vanish away!
So it was an unnaturally frisky and alert driver who eventually tore himself away from a rapidly developing fideuá in Carmen’s kitchen and set out to pick up the Pauls.
The baggage handlers of Barcelona airport ensured that the good time made during the flight was dissipated in the unworldly stasis which is the luggage reclaim area.
Of all the inhuman arenas of human conflict, many of the most perniciously soul destroying are found in airports. Luggage reclaim is a particularly ‘trying’ dimension of other worldly existential angst.
In theory baggage reclaim is designed to allow and encourage passenger ease. The conveyor belt system is sinuous and allows maximum passenger access on both sides; the speed of the system allows easy ‘sight and take’; television screen inform passengers of the location of their belt; buzzers warn passengers of the start of the process; the areas are large and light and airy.
So why are they always places of frustrated misery?
Well, let’s start with the television screens which so often misdirect. And lie. You see your flight number and the moving graphic of little cases indicating that everything is working. Yet the belt on which the real cases are apparently moving is stationary, inert and has the sort of final lifelessness of a blank screen computer. I am not working, it seems to say, I have not worked and I will never work. Especially not for you. And not now.
And when, unbelievably, the noise of the buzzer scythes though weak hearts by its sheer unexpectedness, the belt does not move. When it does move it is only for a few moments and then it stops. When it finally starts again, rather like an Escher drawing it gives the impression of multi dimensional endlessness and futility. No bags appear. Then bags do appear and nobody, absolutely nobody claims them. Hordes of people look at these ur-bags and nobody takes them. They circle endlessly, a domestic refutation of hopes and desires, a Sartre-like joke, a little hell on earth.
At the point just before mob hysteria threatens, real bags appear. The first bag is always taken by someone you have not noticed before; a person unrecognised from the check in, the departure lounge, the aircraft, the disembarkation and the eternal wait for the baggage to appear. I have always assumed that this person is a plant, a stooge of the baggage handlers, a sort of joke that they never cease to find funny. Let’s face it, have you ever known anyone say, “Ah yes, I remember that flight, my case was the first on the belt!” I don’t think so. They like their fun do baggage handlers!
And how we laugh in retrospect! It’s all part of the delight of modern transport: quick, easy and stress free.
And 2008 will be a year in which peace will blossom and flourish.
And talking of peace and blossoming: today is the day I go to my new school to get the information I need for the coming term.
It will, as they say, be revealing
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