Chapter 2

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I am often late. I don’t know how that happens. I am acutely aware of how rude it is to be late and worse still to be consistently late. I hate it when other people are late. Yet, despite all of this and the aforementioned setting of two alarms in the morning for special occasions I must – to my own dismay – admit to being one of those perennially late people.

This admission, of course, in no way affected my disappointment when our cab driver rang me on my mobile to tell me that he would be 15 minutes late, 15 minutes after he was due. We booked the cab the night before for 3:30 A.M. and even Mel was asking the rhetorical, yet obvious, question as to whether there is a purpose at all in pre-booking a cab.

It should be noted that we had booked a mini-cab, not a black cab. For readers outside of England, all you need to know is that there are two types of cabs in London: black cabs, which are the ones you will be familiar, driven by drivers who need to obtain ‘The Knowledge’ (a comprehensive test of street and directional knowledge built up over a number of years and, it would seem, being made increasingly irrelevant by GPS and SatNav), and; mini-cabs, which are not miniature in any way I can discern but are, in fact, driven by pretty much anyone who wants to use their private car for such a purpose (this is not quite accurate – a spate of rape attacks by dodgy mini-cab drivers forced the government into introducing a licensing system. In the main, though, the term ‘pick of the crop’ does not come to mind when I think of mini-cab drivers). As you might expect, mini-cabs are cheaper than black cabs. And given that it is about a 45 minute drive from our place to Gatwick and public transport is not an option at the ungodly time we needed it, we were keen to exercise the cheapest option available.

So our mini-cab driver arrives 30 minutes late. This was not such a problem as my proclivity to consider the worst case scenario had trumped my propensity for lateness. That is to say, I built in a fair bit of slack into the morning’s timeline.

The car he picked us up in was more of a problem. It was a dodgy VW Passat, the boot was full of personal items – a pram, some tools and items of clothing, as best I discern at that hour of the morning – and I had to move a bulky, slightly smelly coat from the back seat in order to sit down unhindered by the slightly disturbing thought of smelly-bulky-dodgy-cab-man jacket resting underneath my otherwise pristine buttocks. I could have just thrown the jacket onto Mel’s side, but her tolerance of this would have disturbed me more than it was worth, so I just threw it into the boot.

Our cabbie was about 60 years old and apologised profusely for being late, though something told me that he might just have the same issue with timeliness that I have. Given that we were still on schedule to catch our plane I’d rather he’d apologise for the mess that was his car. Soon enough, I would wish that he would apologise for his driving. Soon enough, he would.

Our vehicle kept moving from lane to lane. I wasn’t so bothered as I reasoned that our driver was making use of the kind of space that become available on major arterials at 4:00 A.M in the morning. It wasn’t until the cabbie spent a disturbing amount of time and distance on the painted divide that separates freeway (or motorway, depending on your dialect) from off ramp that I thought something might be awry. The near merging into a fast moving truck confirmed my suspicions (I must confess; I let out a yelp).

Five minutes out from Gatwick the cab driver confesses that his erratic driving is due, in no small part, to him having left his driving glasses at home. For the next five minutes, every available set of eyes in the car were focused on the road ahead.

You may be surprised to know that I still left the driver a tip at the trip's conclusion: ‘It is dark; your are old and quite blind – wear your glasses’. Forgive me for indulging in such an obvious gag.

Mel and I canter up to the notifications screen, looking for the gate from which our 6:25 AM EZY5085 flight to Athens to due to depart. But if you arrive on time there is a good chance that your flight is still a country or so away, so there is no way that the airport staff can know the gate at which your flight will be arriving. Knowing this, I still fret somewhat until a gate is allocated. Eventually, Gate 13 appears against EZY5085 on the notifications screen and we make our way over.

I do not consider myself a bad flyer but I do consider myself a bad take-off-er. My logic is hard to question: as a rule, planes crash when they take off and when they land. At least when you land, as my train of thought goes, you are on the way to a safe place to land. So I figure it is worth being a little edgy on take off.

And it is at that point, when the engine noise of the aircraft escalates from loud hum to formidable roar in preparation for take-off that the phrase ‘Low Cost Airline’ takes on a particular resonance for me. Where exactly are this mob cutting costs? Sure, there are the things we see – the lack of food service, the cabin crew that are ever so slightly eclectic than, say, the cabin crew on a Singapore Airlines flight. And I am certain they meet all the safety standards the ‘premium’ airlines meet, but who do they employ to meet these standards? Mechanics who are only good enough or qualified enough to be satisfied with less pay? And what of the pilots? Is an EasyJet pilot paid the same as, say, a British Airways pilot? If it is less, what kind of pilot does that buy you? One who has come just out of training, perhaps? And whilst the cabin crew was headed up by a suitably camp head steward (‘… please watch as the ssscintillating Sonia indicates the direction of the plane's exits …’ - I am not exaggerating in any way what our head steward said, this line is verbatim) I took very little solace from that alone.

Did I say I was not a good take-off-er?