*****
Facing the helpless misery of chemotherapy Christopher Hitchens wrote in Vanity Fair that he felt “swamped with passivity and impotence: dissolving in powerlessness like a sugar lump in water.” Although I’m saved the grave and the profound, clear as I remain from the threat of Cancer, I’m writing this from my room of the hotel in which I’ve been holed for the last two nights thanks to the weather in the British South-East, so, without being overly self-reverential, I think I’m beginning to appreciate what he means.
As I lie in my latest set of lodgings in Houston, Texas, courtesy of the Hilton family, I unconsciously adopt the mode of the reflective. “Never cry over spilt milk, as it may have been poisoned” were the immortal words of Ross Tremain. I’m afraid I can’t share in his appreciation of the ironic in this instance. Now that I’ve become an active victim of travel chaos, a humorous metaphor about milk smacks of the delusional rather than the hopeful.
On Saturday I was due to fly from here to London Heathrow, arriving back in Blighty on Sunday morning at 7am. Needless to say, that did not transpire quite as my family, friends and I had hoped.
The Independent carried the severity of the incoming snow, and the ensuing and inevitable travel chaos on its front page on Saturday. Little did I think it may actually affect the plans of your humble blost. As happens under these kinds of circumstances, one’s desire to read the published news shifts from the informative to the curious. However, it has since become habit to check the lobby computers for weather and travel updates every hour or so, such are the limits of the stranded traveler’s capabilities.
After over three years of trans-Atlantic travel I’m well-versed in the rituals of the efficient and diligent flier. As usual I checked-in to my flights precisely 24 hours in advance, selecting carefully chosen seats on both flights: near the front to ensure a quick exit, always on the aisle, away from any lavatories, and, where possible, next to an untaken seat. Of course, I made a thorough investigation into the likelihood of my second flight staying on schedule, and was reassured that the aircraft was dutifully on its way from delay-free Japan, and all signals suggested things were operating normally. Reviewing my itinerary I noted that I’d only be afforded about 90 minutes between connections, but flying back meant that the horrors of customs would be saved until I was firmly on home soil, and so I wasn’t especially concerned.
My concern rose slightly, however, when my first flight was delayed by half an hour, but I knew my way around Houston Airport well enough to dash across to my required terminal with time to spare. Picture the look of dread and nervous anticipation, therefore, that befell my whole person as I arrived at the gate to find it had been delayed by over five hours. This, we were all told, was because Heathrow would not be opening until Midday, and this calculated delay would put us high on the list of incoming flights at that time. The convenience of this seamless compromise sounded somewhat suspicious, so I enquired, “Is this delay realistic?” I was assured that, yes, it was.
I’d elected to take along just two books with me: The Last Tycoon by Scott Fitzgerald, and a book of select poems by Thomas Hardy. The Hardy collection is delightful to dip into on journeys, undemanding enough to provide light amusement, while dense and powerful enough to keep the mind ticking over at a decent rate. Fitzgerald, as ever, somehow combines the humour and light-heartedness of the American joie de vivre with the melancholic and the bittersweet. The Last Tycoon was incomplete at the time of Fitzgerald’s death in 1940, and this story of Hollywood in its prime, presents the idiosyncratic enterprises of the ambitious individual, and the burgeoning promiscuity of a generation in which all wars have been fought and all ideological boundaries explored.
Before the five hour layover was complete I’d read both books back to front, and yet, what depressed me more than anything was the inability to find a bookstore that shelved anything besides Robert Ludlum and Patricia Cornwell books (I refrain from calling them novels). Ah, the sickening airport paperback with its embossed fonts and gold lettering: the dregs of society’s waning literacy.
At last, and not without the exhaling of many lungs and the formation of a few wry smiles, we all boarded our plane to London, albeit five hours behind schedule. We were relieved to relinquish our passivity and the malaise of helplessness that accompanies air travel. I stepped onto the plane only to find that my carefully chosen pew was filled (literally) with an obese Yanqui woman who offered little explanation for why I found myself in such an awkward and embarrassing impasse. I scuttled back to the door and, stifling my trepidations and donning the charming smile that has become the toast of many fellows around the world, asked the stewardess what the best course of action would be now that I had no seat. After a moment in which she conferred with her colleague, I was told that there was another aisle seat free in row 26. Now, given the furor of the past 5 hours, and the lingering concern that we were not in fact going to reach London, I felt that the offering of an explanation, or even an apology was in order. Not so. Surely, even if only out of an involuntary respect for human politeness, the attendants should have waited before I’d boarded the plane to ask me whether I would be comfortable exchanging seats. Obviously, I would not have been, especially at this stage of proceedings, but their concern would have softened the blow somewhat. Regardless, I took up my new seat and found that I was accompanied in the regular row of three by just one other, meaning a free coffee table in between my new friend and yours truly. Just as I was getting comfortable and spreading my salad of distractions and various other necessities around my person, undoing my shoelaces, and generally broadening my person into the vacant seat beside me, a skinny and fidgeting teenager came and plonked himself down. My dismay would have been foregone had he been there to begin with, but to arrive at such a late hour and sabotage my little home-making was a step in the direction of retaliation.
The army of stewardesses delivered the meal options with untoward zip and vim, which, had it been another day, may have raised my concerns, but given the unassailable fact that we were now 36,000 feet above ground and floating atop the clouds of North America, the meal came at no better time. By this point the fidgeting teenager and his glossy locks of black hair had exhausted the Sky Mall magazine twice over, and instead of occupying a position alongside the devil himself in my mind, he had now become a figure of some humour. Settling, therefore, I gulped back the accoutrements of any successful long-haul flight: two sleeping pills and a box of Vitamin C. Because of the five-hour delay, Continental, to their credit it must be said, had dealt every passenger with a card promising a free alcoholic beverage. I took them up on no uncertain terms, demanding a glass for my miniature bottle of red wine (the plastic sort – imagine the terrorizing one could do with a two inch shard of glass).
Picture the scene, if you will, of your humble and exhausted blost reclining in his seat, sufficiently boozed and drugged up, satisfied to allow the remaining six hours pass by in what would seem but a moment. Picture then, the following.
We had been flying for about 2 and a half hours. As my resistance against the disease of travel seemed nearing its end, the captain came over the address system at what can only be described as a rather inopportune time. “Ladies and gentlemen”, he stammered, “unfortunately, due to the adverse weather conditions in London at the moment, Heathrow have decided not to open today”. Silence. A mild yet increasing sense of panic and urgency crept from the back of my mind to the front. Was it really the case that I would be forced once more into the helplessness and hopelessness of airport navigation? Will we be diverted to Paris perhaps, or Glasgow with their almost utopian infrastructure of dealing with climatic issues? What about Dublin even? My thoughts were interrupted half a second later when the captain continued: “regretfully, this means we’re going to turn the plane around and go back to Houston.” He clicked off. My head fell back against the head-rest without making a sound. My eyes rolled back of their own accord into the depths of nothingness. My mouth was closed and it felt as though my lungs had failed. There was no anger, no sighs, no turning to one’s neighbor, no gasps, no voices, nothing. The silence was penetrating.
Your being crawls with futility. What was there to do or say? Groggy and nauseous with resignation I fell asleep.
I awoke as the plane touched down on the tarmac of Houston airport and just as the captain reappeared for what I hoped was the only time since my departure into ignorance. He assured us that, upon exiting the aircraft, we would be directed left towards the service desks where we would be handed documentation entitling us to one night at the local hotel, and from there we could retrieve our baggage. The first-class passengers, we were all assured, would instead be directed right. Wankers. It was now 2.15am, one hour after I was originally expected at the arrivals gate at Heathrow Terminal 4. As I was stumbling down the aisle towards the doors I caught a glimpse of a flight-map screen; the resultant loop of yellow that documented our simple and pathetic journey across to Ohio airspace and back was almost poetic. I wish now I had taken a photograph.
The news about the turnaround was, as Bertie Wooster would have said, a bit of a facer. And yet, what perturbed me most of all was the news that the passengers, including myself, were expected to make their own re-reservations; we would be offered no preferential treatment, let alone any help or pointers. And so, at 3 o’clock in the morning nearly three hundred disillusioned travellers got on the phone and immediately got put on hold. For four hours. Were it not for my diligent and sympathetic father, awake and alert after having woken early to pick me up (or not) from the airport, I doubt I would have made it home for Christmas. Three more hours listening to the recorded messages of Continental’s sales team was not the most appealing prospect after five meaningless hours spent in the night’s sky.
So here I lay, awaiting the onward flight, filtering the incoming weather reports through a sieve of both optimism and resignation, garnished with a festering sense of hostility, which, it so happens, was beautifully summarized by the infinite eloquence of Thomas Hardy in the closing stanzas of his poem The Impercipient.
I am like a gazer who should mark
An inland company
Standing unfingered, with, ‘Hark! hark!
The glorious distant sea!’
And feel, ‘Alas! ‘tis but yon dark
And wind-swept pine to me!’
Yet I would bear my shortcomings
With meet tranquility,
But for the charge that blessed things
I’d liefer not have be.
O, doth a bird deprived of wings
Go earth-bound willfully!
Enough. As yet disquiet clings
About us. Rest shall we.
Post-script: It would be wrong of me not to point out that Continental, presumably in opposition to the totalitarian decrees of BAA, conducted themselves at all times (apart from that minor seat altercation) with due dignity and diligence, maintaining a veritably comforting air of professionalism and helpfulness. I dare say, were it not for the American fervor of the pilots and all involved, that plane would have never left the runway in the vain hope that Heathrow would, in the end, open its doors. One struggles to imagine a British Airways flight taking off when unsure of its destination. Continental gave it fair old go, and I do not begrudge them taking the handle and firmly cracking the whip.
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