Well…going through security is as bad as ever – “go over there please” where’s the plastic bags?… “no take that out as well please sir…no more liquids, sir?” – crowded, panicky, pressurised. And that was just fast-track.
Maybe it doesn’t help that most of the people here have forgotten how to do flying. Including me. You can tell from the blog that I travel a fair deal. Normally. Today would be my first flight in a year and a half. Eighteen months of forced contemplation, sometimes wondering when I get to go on the road again, wondering if I’d ever want to. Until that is the COVID vaccination numbers rose and case numbers dropped, and travel restrictions across Europe started to un-buckle. And I realised how much I missed foreign travel.
So here I am again, through security now, Masked-up, vaccine-passported to death, did I download everything I needed to? Will my phone run out of charge before the border? OMG where’s the passport?Ah got it, now on board, about to jet off into a pandemic era of seeing old and new places, comparing their life and culture with what I had seen back home, but also bearing the new weight of paranoia about all the documentation the border guards would want to see and whether I’d missed something…
…too late now, we’ve taxied out, those two clear beeps have sounded to announce we are about to accelerate down the runway, the whole plane thundering and shuddering as it reaches rotation speed and the ground becomes the land below us as we lift away…
(Don’t tell Greta.)
orwellianTwo 