Chapter 1
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I have a routine common to many men – The Three Amigos. Just as The Three Amigos went Hands on Shoulders, Hips then Thrust … Whoa , my Three Amigo move is Wallet, Keys, Mobile … Phew. This is a manoeuvre shared by many men, but I make it my own by doing it constantly. Constantly.
When I have a plane to catch, I check, and check, and then check again not only that I have my ticket, passport and other travel accoutrements, but that I have not read the time of the ticket wrong, that I did not read the airline incorrectly and that I am going to the right airport – even in a one airport town. And I check. And check. And check again.
When I stay in a hotel, I take my own towels. I mean, who knows whether the cleaners have changed the towels since the previous occupant? And if they have been cleaned, how do I know they have been cleaned properly? And what kind of filthy, dirty laundry has been thrown in together with these towels? Can I trust that? Can I leave that to chance? No – I’ll bring my own, thanks.
As I said, I like to think that I am just more aware of things that just might go wrong.
So I can say, with a certain heightened sincerity, that I was surprised as anybody when I was due to return from my previous trip to the Greek Islands I mistook A.M. for P.M. on my Easyjet plane ticket. Normally, that would not matter. In the normal course of events I would have checked the ticket the night before. I would have then checked the ticket again first thing in the morning. The whole journey to the airport would then become one long ticket-checking exercise. But this did not happen. I trusted that I had correctly distinguished A.M. from P.M.. So when I walked into (the Greek) airport around 6:30 PM I was a little surprised to see that my flight number and changed. It didn’t even occur to me that anything was awry. There was a very long queue at the Easyjet counter. As it turned out, their computer system had gone down. I know this, because I asked a girl at the counter why my flight number had changed. She was so unable to comprehend the stupidity of my question that she went off to find out why. Then it dawned on me: I should have been there at 6:30 AM, not PM. When she returned, I asked if I would fit on the next flight. She had no idea. Of course she didn’t: the computers were down.
At that point I did something completely unexpected. I chuckled. If I was stupid enough to confuse A.M. with P.M., I reasoned, then this I should be prepared to pay a certain price. That price, as it turned out, was a one way ticket on the next British Airways flight to Heathrow.
For me, this was a complete paradigm shift. No stress, no fuss. Go with the flow, spend a bit more and get on the next plane. And then smile. I can only put this extraordinary response down to one thing and one thing alone.
It would seem that I had found the ability to relax.
I wish I could claim total responsibility for this newly found status. I wish it were all my doing. For if it were, then I would surely have learnt something. I would have learnt that there is more to life than the petty trivialities I allowed to occupy my mind. Instead, my pedantic, phobic and – dare I say it – anal demons have returned in full force. I wipe my Coke can before I drink from it get the gunk off it – a habit originally borne for fear of catching Leptospirosis from rat urine that may, potentially, reside around the rim (I know, of course, that this is highly unlikely but I still struggle to break the habit). I open toilet doors with my pinky as I am least likely to stick a pinky into my eyes, or nose, or any other orifice likely to warmly welcome any nasties I might pick up (pointer fingers, I have witnessed, find their way into all kinds of places). And now I rather enjoy slipping a t-shirt over hotel pillows, as a kind of pillow-prophylactic, should I have to stay at a hotel.
No, I am fairly certain that it was the Greek Islands themselves that brought about this dramatic, if temporary, change. The sun, the (sometimes) sand and the (complete lack of) surf are terribly compelling. Combine that with a lifestyle of sleeping, eating, reading, sleeping, eating, dancing, drinking and sleeping again and, of course, the laid back Greek nature and, well, something had to rub off.
So it was with much anticipation that I looked forward to the current expedition to the Greek Islands. I had spoken about it often and in much detail with my long-suffering partner, Melissa (herein referred to as Mel, Moo, or The Other Half). I had shown Mel photos and told her plenty of stories about my time in the Greek Islands. It would seem that I had delivered a more than sufficient sales pitch because it took very little persuasion for her to start looking for prices of airfares on the web and even less persuasion for her to hand the completion of that task on to me.
I could write at least a chapter outlining my disdain for the on-line travel booking. Bugs in web sites, important information given insufficient emphasis on the booking page, the fact that some sites only accept a certain subset of credit or debit cards and that other sites accept a completely different subset … let’s just say that I hate online travel booking.
The problem is that I hate offline travel booking (that is, going into a travel agent) even more – they don’t ring you back, or they ring you to sell you something when you don’t want anything, they upsell you … I would rather deal with a bad web site than a bad person, but I still feel I maintain the right to whinge about it.
Suffice to say that I ended up booking (another) Easyjet flight online. It cost more than I initially imagined it would, the web site was buggy (as best I recall) and I just swallowed the inflated price, the inconvenient departure times and the generally negative booking experience in order to get the damn thing booked.
Soon enough the big day came – as big days do. I set my mobile’s clock to go off at 3:00 A.M to catch a cab to get to Gatwick for our 6:25 A.M flight (did I mention something about inconvenient departure times?). I also set my travel alarm to go off at 3:15 A.M. – remember, I like to think that I am just more aware of things that just might go wrong.
Little was I to know that something just might have gone seriously wrong, due to the forgetfulness and myopia of our cab driver.
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