I've managed to get a direct flight to Pittsburgh from Heathrow T5, but that doesn't make things any better; it's still a fucking hassle from the word go. I ordered a cab to pick me up at 1230pm, allowing a bit of extra time just in case. Sure enough there were problems. First, the cab driver had to fill up with gas, which took a long time, then there were traffic jams on the motorway and then I had to queue for the bag drop-off, moving from one machine to another because my one piece of out-sized luggage couldn't use the conveyors. I can't understand why I was moved from one line to another as the bag in question had to be placed with the out-sized luggage guys across from where I was standing. I think the woman took a dislike to me for some reason and I hate that as whoever it was, she works for British Airways, my airline of choice. Or I'm paranoid, perhaps that's it.
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| Close to Gate B38, Terminal Five, London |
There was some good news: I managed to get an exit row seat AND a window seat, so in a sense I was upgraded from my original aisle seat. Or was I upgraded? Thinking back, the seats directly in front of me, where my seat, 24c was located, looked suspiciously like premium economy seating, now I come to think of it, so I might have downgraded myself simply by asking for a seat with more leg room. Who knows? And who cares? I've got an exit row seat on the return flight.
But then there was 'security'. I hate 'security'. The lap top comes out, everything goes in the plastic tray and then I have to pass through the scanner and wait on the other side for stuff. Then things calmed down a bit, although my experience of the gaudily coloured Giraffe, an air-side restaurant, left a lot to be desired. Oddly, it bore no resemblance whatsoever to the graceful animal we see on nature programmes. A pretty awful chicken burger with chips and a peppermint tea accompanied by terrible music guaranteed to annoy the Dalai Lama. Inwardly, I was scowling, as I wolfed down the food and got the hell out of there after paying the bill (it was £15 and I think I tipped £2, I'll have to check my credit card statement).
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| Thankfully, we were through the clouds... |
My flight leaves from the B gates so I mosey on over to them, past the duty free shops, the society of the spectacle, which makes me angry again, but eventually I find myself at gate B38 and I take a seat, away from the madding crowd, open up my lap top and start writing. I must remember to go straight to the B gates next time as there are foodservice outlets close to the gate, a Starbucks that I've used before, but now that I've already eaten and need to consider boarding very shortly, I'll pass on a Danish and a mint tea and wait for the in-flight hospitality.
I can't say I'm overly keen on flying. There are so many things about it that I simply don't like, such as turbulence and flying in bad weather. And I'm firmly of the opinion that the weather deteriorates deliberately as soon as it knows I'm flying somewhere. I wake up and there's bright sunshine and clear skies, but as the day presses on, the weather sets in, clouds form, rain falls and, well, there you have it.
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| It was daylight all the way over... |
Right now it's 1532hrs and the skies are brightening up a bit, following rain, but there's still a lot of cloud out there. I've got to go to the gate so I'd better say bye for now. The tarmac is shiny and reflective like a mirror.
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| The frozen wastelands of Newfoundland... |
Pittsburgh, 2100hrs, local time: Getting on board the plane was easy. I stood in front of my seat for a while getting myself sorted out when along came a morbidly obese woman and her husband. Yes, morbidly obese, and I hoped she wasn't planning on taking the middle seat otherwise I'd have been squashed into the wall. Fortunately, she took the aisle and her other half sat next to me with his hairy forearms and bright orange laces on this trainers. He had a very annoying, make that interesting, Kermit the Frog nasal voice, which I'm planning on practising in the hotel bathroom tomorrow, but in all truthfulness, he didn't bother me and nor did she. In fact, they were nice people, at least I think they were, and I felt a little sorry for the woman. She was massive! Alright, I'm exaggerating a bit, but not by much. She managed to squeeze into the seat and sat quietly for the duration of the flight, which was roughly seven and a half hours.
When we broke through the cloud I checked my watch, it was 1710hrs and from then on, when the clock hit 10 past the hour I knocked an hour off the flight time, so a countdown of sorts had begun and I figured that when the clock read 0010hrs (although my watch is analogue, not the 24-hour clock) I'd be virtually there. I tried to imagine myself being at home, so at 1810hrs I would have been boarding a train to Purley, at 1910 I would have been home watching mundane television, probably the
One Show or
Channel Four News, by 2010, God knows what and so on; and slowly the time passed.
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| I won't stick my neck out for Giraffe again.. |
I spent most of my time reading Will Self's
Psychogeography, which is a brilliant book, in between trying to read a copy of the
New Statesman, which, it has to be said, I found extremely boring, a waste of £4.50 as there was nothing in there by the great man, Will Self. I should have bought the
Economist. There was, of course,
High Life and John Simpson's column, this month about the Commodore Hotel in Beirut, but that was it. Food punctuated the journey and I took a couple of strolls to the back of the aircraft to stretch my legs. It was a good flight, even if there was thick cloud as we approached Pittsburgh and I hate cloud. I'm talking white-out conditions and then being sandwiched between white-out conditions. While the scenery from the plane's window was never more than cloud below and blue sky above, there was a great moment when I looked out and saw, some distance below, a kind of bank of cloud that resembled a huge wave, a tsunami even, roaring and rolling towards an imaginary shoreline.
People do weird things on planes, like they turn up and start doing stretches in the aisle. Fine, people do that sort of thing on planes, but I can't abide exhibitionists. On this occasion it was a woman - of a certain age - and it's moments like these that put me off women, I don't know why. I find myself looking at them doing their stretches and thinking 'what is it we men get so excited about?' Perhaps it was just this particular woman, I found her annoying for some reason, but sometimes I get these moments of clarity when I see through the fog and the smoke and mirrors of 'being a bloke' and view women as they're supposed to be viewed, as the human beings they are, and it is both liberating and a little depressing. This woman, in the act of doing her stretches, took away a little of the magic and there's nothing worse, although I think as you get older (and in my case grow up) the magic dissipates and you begin to see the world for what it is rather than what you think it is. At least she wasn't morbidly obese, I thought, as I watched her twist and turn in her white trousers that stopped a few inches short of her ankles.
And once the woman had moved on I started imagining a random scenario, completely out of the blue, involving a gunman who was loose in a restaurant, not in Pittsburgh, but somewhere in Europe, my favourite restaurant, Da Bruno, in Dusseldorf. I escaped through a back door, hid behind it and then slammed it into the gunman as he ran through it in pursuit of yours truly, dropping the gun and enabling me to pick it up and return fire, disabling the terrorist and thwarting whatever evil he was planning, although I guess he'd already committed his evil act, that of shooting innocent people. None of this was true, of course, it was all in my mind.
There was heavy cloud as we started our descent into Pittsburgh and I hate it. I find it disorienting gliding through white-out conditions and not seeing the ground until just before we hit the tarmac. It wasn't as bad as New Delhi when we never saw land until the very last minute before hitting the tarmac with a thud, an instruments-only landing, the pilot said. In New Delhi it wasn't fog or cloud, it was smog.
After we had landed, everything was easy from thereon: immigration was fine (albeit a fairly long wait in the queue); my bags were on the conveyor when I got there, I drew some money from the ATM ($100) jumped into a taxi and here I am. I had cumbersome luggage otherwise I'd have found a train into town.
The hotel's fine and I need to get some sleep, although it's only just gone 2200hrs here in Pittsburgh. That said, for me it's almost 0305hrs so I'm going to say goodnight.
