The area surrounding a boarding gate is always an interesting place. Gate 421 Terminal 2 at Dublin airport is no different. It’s easy to spot the Irish teenager. They stand out for all manner of reasons. Oh, I don’t mean the usual pale skin, red hair and thick ankles. (You didn’t know about the thick ankles? Believe me it’s true). No, what makes this generation emerge from the pack is the wide girth, black trainers (runners if you’re Irish) and an uncanny ability to perform in front of a urinal while simultaneously reading, and often responding to, every Tweet and Post known to man. (For obvious reasons I can’t verify what happens in the Ladies. Please don’t Tweet and tell me).
Sadly, flying has a habit of confirming just how weak willed I really am. Despite swearing on the Bible multiple times that I wouldn’t spend the whole flight watching movies, I did. I sat for eleven hours watching a tiny screen that bounces up and down in rhythm to the rather large passenger seated in front of me who couldn’t seem to settle and was determined that I accompany him on his roller coaster ride. I watched all six episodes of Derry Girls (a comedy about teenagers growing up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles), Kim Swims (a story about a Kiwi – a woman not the fruit – with a quest to swim alongside Great Whites and not get eaten) and Sully (a tale about what happened when Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger landed an airliner on the Hudson river saving all 155 passengers and crew). That last one was probably not the best choice. My fellow passengers didn’t appreciate me screaming ‘Brace Positions Everyone’ as the landing gear was lowered on our approach to Las Vegas. (Okay, I didn’t call out, but it was real inside my head).
While it’s impossible to overstate just how much air travel has developed since Orville and Wilbur Wright flew a few hundred feet above a beach in North Carolina more than a century ago some things still bother me. For instance, I still resent being stuffed in a seat alongside an overweight American who would occasionally raise a buttock to aim her silent farts in my direction. (Yes Madam, I knew it was you). That said I did have some sympathy with her argument to close the window blind from the get go. A pilot once shared with me that the reason we’re told to make sure it’s open during take-off and landing is that in case of an accident we won’t be disorientated, and we’ll know which way is up. It might be just me, but I would have thought if I was suspended upside down, held only by a seat belt, I wouldn’t need to look out the window to confirm it.
“Darling do you have another knob of butter? Ah look, there’s some on the ceiling with Harry and Mildred and that lovely air hostess who just handed us our meal.”
This was my 10th time travelling to Las Vegas. I’ve never enjoyed it. Spending tens of millions to bring close on 20,000 people across the world to the capital of narcissism might sound like the Holy Grail for a multinational hi-tech company or even one of Trump’s campaign rallies, but for someone like me, who has more passion for trees than technology and is liberal left rather than hard right, that outlay on a trip to Las Vegas is equivalent to an annual trip to the dentist with root canal treatment guaranteed. I don’t gamble, I abhor casino’s and when the seedy side of the nightlife surfaces, as it inevitably does, I high tail it back to my near impossible to regulate air-conditioned sweat box of a bedroom and watch another movie.
storiesfromadam 