It’s funny how life turns out, sometimes. You plan and plan then all of a sudden a twist shakes you off your tracks and you end up somewhere totally unexpected. This is how I feel writing this letter in a hotel room in Edinburgh. I had already mentally composed half a letter from Cairo, but that will have to wait for another day.
For those of you who weren’t informed by my drunken email, I missed my flight to Egypt. As the brusque gentleman at the Lufthansa counter succinctly put it – “These tickets – London to Frankfurt; Frankfurt to Cairo; are now useless.” There were no other flights I could be put on and as my heart sank he gave it a little kick. “That’s what you get for buying a cheap ticket.” I responded maturely with “For fuck’s sake! I was five fucking minutes late,” before I stormed off.
I was mightily angry that morning, possibly angrier than anyone has seen me, apart from my sister when she kept stuffing dead leaves down the back of my shirt and I punched her in the stomach. I could relate to how angry the Incredible Hulk had to be for muscles to pop out of his clothes. To make it worse, I couldn’t direct my anger towards anything. My lateness had been a combination of getting up a little late, waiting for the bus, sitting in the bus while it groaned towards a tube stop, getting slightly lost at Elephant and Castle, and waiting for the underground. It all added up to five minutes past the gates closing, literally.
I felt terrible on the way back from the airport. I couldn’t believe it, shit like this happens to other people. Tears sprang to my eyes and my shoulders were so tense it felt like I had been hanging from clothes pegs all night. When I got home I threw my bags on the floor and stomped around, swearing. I wanted to break things but in the end I quelled the voices with strong alcohol. I wasn’t too fussed about losing money on the ticket. It was all the frustrations from working in London bubbling to the surface. I know a few of you on this mailing list have experienced how working in London can transform you into a snarling beast chained to the treadmill of commercialism. I had been so close to escaping but the tendrils had closed around again and I was back in my flat, drunk.
As you can surmise, I was feeling a bit down at this point, but it takes more than a minor setback to keep a Bacon down. Perseverance beyond the sane is a family trait and I was damned if I was going to hang around London moping about my lost holiday, so I jumped on the Net and booked a flight to Edinburgh. I was happy to be going anywhere that wasn’t London, and if you think about it, there are a lot of similarities between Edinburgh and Egypt. They both start with E, people have lived there for a long time and there are lots of old buildings. To be honest, now that I’m here, I feel good about it. I think it might be a better break for me – more of a rest than an adventure. And let’s face it, the pyramids aren’t exactly going anywhere, it’s just increased my determination to see them.
The day I flew to Edinburgh it was raining heavily and I didn’t hold high hopes for the weather in Scotland being any better. I got to the airport about two hours early, even after the first bus I caught was felled by a faulty door. The one good thing about flying is that it’s always sunny at 30,000 feet. From my window seat I basked in the sun and watched the sea of clouds slip by. Coming into Scotland the clouds started to clear and I could see small mountains jut out, criss-crossed by streams. As we descended through some straggly clouds it cast my mind back to the book I had brought with ‘e ‘Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’. Robert Louis Stevenson was from Edinburgh, and although the story was written in Bournemouth and set in London I like to think that he was imagining Edinburgh’s narrow cobbled streets wreathed in fog. It was a slight disappointment that blue skies and a warm sun greeted me at the airport but these feelings subsided as I relaxed into the bus journey into the centre of town. I’m just resting now as I wait for the midnight hour when I will quit my room in a bid to exorcise my inner demons in the quiet, dark lanes.
Dave out.
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