Small Spaces

One of the odd things about the hotel that I usually stay at when in London on business is the lift.  For a modern lift it really is quite a dismal affair, mostly because of the morose voice that informs you that the door is closing, or opening, which direction we will be travelling and which floor we have reached.  It does sound as if she (for it seems the lift is female if the voice is a guide) is about to slit her wrists.  The thought of being in a suicidal lift doesn’t thrill me.  I flex my knees, waiting for the inevitable drop.  I wonder what the hotel and/or the lift manufacturers were thinking when they recorded the voice.  Rather, I doubt they were thinking.  The hotel is one of a chain and recently I stayed at another of their London residences and clearly the lift was a slightly less depressed sister of the first one, but she was definitely feeling somewhat under the weather.  Clearly they were spawned by Marvin, the Paranoid Android, though who the mother was I really can’t imagine.  If I am sharing the lift with a stranger I frequently share my concerns with them.  I usually get rewarded by startled looks for my troubles. I have thus decided to visit all the hotels in the chain (I think there are around 20 in the UK) and write a best selling book on their lifts.

Last Friday I left the cold clutches of the depressed lift (the really depressed one, that is, the one nearest Trafalgar Square) and met the missus off the Gatwick Express and we went down to check into another hotel in Dulwich which, for those who don’t know, is so far south in London it is virtually in the English Channel, but it is in London.  I long ago gave up the phlegmatic English pretence that staying in a B&B ‘standard’ room – i.e. one where you shared ‘facilities’ with others miserably camped on the same floor as you – was a decent thing to do.  No.  I had insisted on an ensuite room, just like other civilised people.  And for just ten pounds extra we had a loo, a wash basin and a shower.  Very fine, you will say, but when I say that the whole unit was no bigger than a postage stamp I am only slightly exaggerating.  If you brushed your teeth vigorously then your elbow would hit the nearest wall while the non-handle end of the toothbrush would strike the other wall.  The missus warned me that I wouldn’t be able to remove any clothing in the space provided before taking a shower, and she was right for I got stuck trying to take a t-shirt off.  Post-shower was no better as drying yourself involves movement with a towel, which all ends in confusion and bruised knees and bits of towelling stuck on hooks and in taps and you end up tumbling out of the tiny box in a sodden heap on the bedroom floor. Of course, this made the lift daughter-of-Marvin, the Paranoid Android seem a very tame affair.  No sullen voices talking of the fifth floor and imminent suicide.  This was death by suffocation and the scourge of claustrophobics: the minute killer bathroom.

The rest of the ‘hotel’ barely reached the challenge of the ensuite bathroom (for only 10 quid extra) and though I suspect that the owner of Fawlty Towers was also behind the carefully planned, anti-guest campaign to make life as difficult as possible for the paying customer, we checked out (well, actually, we didn’t – we left our keys where a check out point might have been if anyone had been around to collect said keys) alive. Clearly we had stumbled upon yet another example of the embarrassing state of British hotel hospitality, a state I find indefensible, with sky high prices carefully attached to the barest minimum of facilities provided and a level of service that makes fun of the customer – as in, taking the piss.

Perhaps living on the overcrowded islands of Britain is taking its toll.  The spaces provided to live in are getting so small that you can’t actually live.

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Navy Day and Undefended Borders

We were somewhat surprised to find out that today is the Dia de Marinha or Navy Day (a day which lasts a week, it seems) and that the whole of the navy has gone on holiday down to the Algarve.  There they are parading about in their dress whites or whatever they’re called and blowing on bugles and being very…erm, well … summery. Seems they’ve taken most of the ships with them (I don’t know how many the navy has but I believe they can all fit into a normal sized bath tub) which of course leaves us here in the north completely undefended.  Where is the navy to stop marauding pirates from making landfall along our bit of the coast – memories of the English pirate, Drake, are still quite fresh in some quarters – and what if the Galicians decide to invade, huh?  Where will we be then?  OK, I know that we actually get invaded by hordes from Galiza every weekend, but what if they decided that they want more than what IKEA offers, what then?

Of course we wouldn’t have known about any of this if we hadn’t had the TV on in the kitchen and no doubt would have been spared the mental anguish of feeling vulnerable and in danger of being raped and pillaged by sea-born foes.  But then if it hadn’t been for the TV then we would have had a pretty quiet or at least unremarkable week anyway.  I mean, what is one to do with the knowledge that prodigious amounts of oil continue to spew out in the Gulf of Mexico in spite of the director of BP’s blandishments that all is OK with the world or that another plane has fallen off the end of a runway, or that Bangkok is under martial law or that there has been a train crash in China or, as bad in its own way, that Cameron and Clegg continue the charm offensive and offer to do all the easy things they can do (and which Labour should have done if they’d ended their term of government with half a brain between them) and thus gain lots of popular support.  Of course, what is wrong with all of this is not just that these are all inherently disturbing events but, more significantly, there is absolutely nothing you can do about any of it.  In the case of the recent UK election even less than usual in my case as this is the first year I have been disenfranchised and so have no vote.  What is it that makes us want to be witnesses to horrible actions and ogle at the results of disasters over which we have no control?  Of course, I defend our right to be morbidly curious and to know about those things that will plunge us into varying degrees of depression but I do believe I am reaching the point when I simply don’t want to know any more.

That way I wouldn’t have had my Sunday spoiled by knowing that Portuguese navy has left us defenceless against a cruel enemy.  Best for us to meet the barbarians half way, I suppose, and go to IKEA ourselves.

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….. and then His Holiness said to me ………

Quite why the Pope gets the red carpet treatment onto a TAP flight, one that actually gets airborne, while I don’t even get a sniff of the cabin is beyond me. He even got three fully licensed airline captains to fly his plane. When I tried I didn’t even get one, though I suppose there might be a connection. Perhaps, just let’s suppose, that the pilot who was supposed to fly my plane last Monday was resting, just in case, ready for the Papal flight to Rome so he was refreshed and alert. That must be it.

The city wasn’t clamped down in a huge security operation in spite of all the warnings that it would be so. Why, even our street – which the Pope wasn’t going to come anywhere near (most probably because I rather spitefully didn’t invite him for tea and His Holiness was no doubt sulking) – had red lines all through it. On the map at least. That was supposed to mean that traffic would be banned. It wasn’t. We’d been told that the Metro would stop. It didn’t. The buses were going to be rerouted. They weren’t. It was all very confusing. Nevertheless around about 9 this morning the air was all a clatter with the sound of papish helicopters chop chop chopping their way over the city centre and up and down the river. Just about everyone’s access to the internet went down at about the same time. Was this merely a coincidence? Of course it was. Being a bit stymied at work due to lack of connectivity I wandered off down town to see what was what and to try and tick the page in my Eye Spy book with pictures of men in white dresses. Of course I didn’t get anywhere near His Whiteness because of the crowds being funnelled down narrow streets by very large numbers of police though I’m sure he was looking out for me in the crowd, if only to chastise me in a monkish way for not providing tea and biscuits. The crowds were far more interesting than an old German muttering his way through mass in the town square, though, and apart from the many groups of scrubbed, red faced scouts who had been bussed in to make up the numbers, there were women of a certain age clutching little ‘Bem-vindo’ flags, accompanied by similar aged but differently motivated men also clutching little flags. The difference between them was that the women were merrily waving the flags and looking like they were having a good time while the men were holding their flags tightly curled, pointing timidly downwards, and looking very sheepish about the whole affair, and occasionally absorbing an elbow nudge from their flag waving women folk.

The Pope-mobile chugged up the other side of the square from where the faithful were being shepherded, though I do want to know how the Pope-mobile got to Porto in the first place. An hour earlier it had been in Fátima and I know this because we’d see it on TV. Is there a second Pope-mobile? I think we have a right to know. Or perhaps it had been hoisted military style into a Chinook helicopter, but I didn’t think the Portuguese airforce had any. Regardless of how it got there, we didn’t see it, tucked away on the far side of the square, except on the giant screens thoughtfully scattered around the city centre. In which case we all might as well have stayed at home and watched it from the comfort of our respective sofas and without the discomfort of small ‘bem-vindo’ flags being shoved up noses by very stout women.

He’s gone now, so perhaps we can get our city back. They’ll be talking about it for ages, though, and the only regret I have is that, perhaps, after all, I should have put the kettle on. It might be the only way to catch a flight these days.

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Now you see it; now you don’t.

It must be magic, making a flight disappear like that.  Mind you I suspect that I didn’t help matters by sniggering unkindly at the poor unfortunate souls whose flight to Paris had been put on indefinite hold when I had arrived at the airport.  It was the day after the latest closure of airports because of the Icelandic volcano and though technically open for business, Porto’s fine airport, Francisco Sá Carneiro (named, lest it be forgotten, after someone who had died in an air crash) seemed to have a lot of planes that weren’t going anywhere.

To be honest, I’d never seen so many planes in the airport.  Every docking port was occupied and all the available space between the runway and the taxiing lanes was filled with Airbuses of every size.  A quick check and the plane to London was also docked at gate 10.  Or, actually, on closer inspection, it wasn’t docked.  It was parked somewhere near the gate, but not actually connected to it, with its doors firmly closed against the rain.  Never mind.  It was 09.30 and we wouldn’t start boarding for an hour.  Time to settle and read or haul the laptop out and catch up on some work.  Nah.  Read.

By the time we were due to take off the substitute for information which airlines are so good at started.  This consisted of a few words on the departure board against our flight number: “Further information at ….” giving a time an hour or two in the future.  This is a clever device because it changes at the hour designated to another time a few more hours distant thus appearing to be keeping the weary traveller informed but in fact not giving away any information at all.  Let’s face it “Further information” is only accurate if there was some information to begin with, and if some news other than the statement that there will be news at some remote time in the future was actually intended.

Clearly our flight was delayed and I started to feel comradely affection for the passengers still waiting for the Paris flight.  Oh fickle me.  Meanwhile, flights by every other airline that uses the airport – Lufthansa, Air France, Iberia, Ryan Air etc – were taking off and landing on schedule outside, clearly visible from the plate glass windows.  Only TAP were grounded. As the second hour slipped into the third and then the fourth the little café which had been supplying us with coffee and buns ran out of food.  There was no alternative, trapped as we were behind the wall of immigration and the plethora of outlets on the other side of it for those wise enough to be travelling to other destinations in Europe other than isolated, haughty Britain.  Even our Paris bound brethren had a large choice of food and beverages and my feelings which had first produced unkind sniggers and then turned to comradely affection were now transmuting to jealousy. The poor girl serving increasingly irate customers at the café without refreshments was beginning to panic.

Similarly the girl at the desk at Gate 10.  She had been plonked there by unkind bosses at around 09.45 and by 2 p.m. her position was becoming untenable.  She was being constantly besieged by would-be passengers demanding information, but she had at her disposal no more information than we had on the screens “Further information at ….” And she clung to the telephone like it was a life raft, pleading with her superiors to help her.  They, of course, would not be venturing anywhere near the gate until it was safe for them to do so, that is, after we had left.  By now the passengers had divided into two camps.  Those who were understanding of her plight and, while trying to be reassuring, were also trying to assert their rights to some information.  Then there were those whose voices could be heard shouting above the rest, insults mixed with impatience.  The impatient were beginning to win, and the mood of the crowd was starting to turn nasty.

Then our flight disappeared from the display boards altogether.  Didn’t exist.  Gone.  This had happened to me once before, in Madrid, and when I went to the enquiry desk to ask what had happened to the flight to Naples the helpful receptionist glanced at the display board where the name Naples was clearly missing and said that there wasn’t a flight to Naples, and that there never had been and that it must have been a figment of my imagination, poor deluded traveller that I was.  She looked at my boarding card with the word ‘Naples’ clearly printed on it with great suspicion, and looked at me accusingly, clearly a forger of boarding cards, before reluctantly picking up the phone.

Our plane at Porto was still near Gate 10, but still as locked up and unloved as it had been six hours earlier when I first saw it, but now it finally became clear: the flight was cancelled.  There was no crew to fly it.  My question was not why there wasn’t a crew to fly it as I can hazard a guess at that one, but why they hadn’t known that earlier?  Why did we have to wait for over 6 hours before being told we weren’t going anywhere?

We were escorted down a tunnel and back towards immigration, colliding with the cancelled flight to Newark also seeking egress from the inner sanctum of the airport.  We had to go through immigration check again, even though we’d been nowhere, and the five hundred passengers of the combined flights were having their passports and IDs checked by a solitary immigration official.  When my turn to shuffle forward eventually came he asked me where I’d been.  I was a bit snappy with him, but not too much.  Best not to antagonise an official holding your passport, I thought.

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Sunday is Another Day

Sundays are not what they used to be. If we go back far enough then they consisted of family walks, in uncomfortable best clothes, in the quiet streets of post-Sunday lunch Cambridge. That was shortly after the Roman’s left Britannia, I believe. More recently they have been days when we might take a gentle walk around the city park in very comfortable and exceeding casual clothes before lunch. Not a huge change, you might think, but don’t underestimate the effect of uncomfortable clothes – having to wear a tie and tightly buttoned collar when you are 8 years old is not something to be lightly dismissed.

Even more recently they have taken a more sinister turn. A few weeks ago I found I was presenting some of my work to a group of people in Harrogate who clearly didn’t think that Sunday mornings were a time for dossing around. Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t a bad thing to do, but as I worked my mind did slip back a couple of decades when I might have made the effort to pick up the papers on the way to the pub for a Sunday pint with some mates. The following week I was only saved from more Sunday work by the unusual event of the Icelandic volcano, which just shows how bad things have got when only an act of God can make your Sunday a day of rest, and the week following I found myself swiping the mozzies at the end of the conference in Namibia. Last Sunday had hardly got underway, though, when I was accosted by more-than-miffed colleagues who had been presented with hotel bills in Guimarães where the APPI Conference had been taking place. It isn’t that they were expecting free hotel rooms, just that they expected someone else to pick up the bill for them. Quite right too, but my worry – soon to be confirmed when I went to the hotel to sort out the mess – was to find that our VIP guests, the god-like figure David Crystal and the more ephemeral figure of the divine poet Moniza Alvi had also been asked to pick up their own tabs when checking out some two hours previously. Time for maximum possible red face on my part and rehearsal of the most abject apologies possible to esteemed guests when they finally climbed off their London bound plane.

Never mind, a chance to recoup Sunday when we drove Claudia and Juan up to Vigo (the only alternative to the 90 minute drive would have been a 5 hour train journey), stopping off for lunch in the attractive riverside town of Ponte de Lima, where we admired the Roman legionnaires still plucking up the courage to cross the river Lima, which they had mistaken for the memory sucking river Lethe. Crossing into Galicia we were reminded of the curious roads the Galicians seem to favour. Are the lanes really narrower than usual, or are the banks than seem to line the roads exceptionally high, or what? You definitely know you’re driving somewhere else quite unlike anywhere else in either Spain or Portugal. The airport was fun, if your idea of fun is rather a bent and twisted variety. Finding it was fun enough and the road works had Auntie Doris, the voice in our hard working GPS machine, getting quite excited – hysterical even. Even when we found the airport we weren’t too sure. I mean normally one recognises an airport. Planes are one normally reliable indicator. Terminal buildings are another. Signs saying ‘Welcome’ or ‘Bienvenido’ to XXX Airport/Aeropuerto are also a fairly decent clues. None of these, but gradually it became clear by the baggage that people were wheeling about the building site that we might be near. The multi-story car park was a typical Galician construction – with lanes constructed up a gradient of 45º and only 1 mm wider than the vehicles, with a tight 180º turn at the top of the ramp. Clever. Now we left Claudia and Juan in their hired car, by now expertly negotiated from the Europcar people, trying to find their way out of car park number two where their car was parked, a car park of such cunning design that it had an entrance but no obvious exit. Now it is quite possible that they are still trying to find their way out and that they never got to Baionna at all but we were still in full Sunday mood, skimming back down the road in the bright sunlight and planning where we’d eat that evening.

Which just goes to show that you have to get hold of Sundays and shake them a bit and they turn out all right. That, and make sure you don’t wear short trousers and ties to go walking the streets in.

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