After the insanely boring bus journey from Cornwall to London Heathrow, arriving at 5am, I sat and tried to stay awake the long 8 hours before my flight departed. As it was the day after Boxing Day there wasn’t the usual travel options to hand. The bus journey was in some ways better than travelling by train, as I would have. The major downside to all travel is that I can’t sleep a wink!
When flight check in time eventually came I wondered over to Terminal2 and right into the most shite system I’ve ever had the misfortune to be controlled by! Virgin had taken all the destinations and flight numbers out of the millions of check in points held to the virgin empire and instead manned four or five said points with the objective of checking in any passenger for any flight within the day!
Needless to say, the queue grew to gargantuan proportions spilling into other and out of their own slices of ground to sky domination.
Thirty minutes before my flight and two hours into resting a book upon my vaguely moving trolley, I was checked in. ‘oh you better hurry’ was the information uttered by my check in attendant seemingly oblivious to the fact that their incompetence was causing that days entire flight schedule to be grounded… the check in point next to me left a customer waiting while he casually wondered off returning some ten minutes later, two coffees in hand.
On my tickets it says ‘doors are locked 30 minutes before take off’.
My flight left in approximately twenty minutes, I still hadn’t been through the fake gold watch detector, my luggage still un scanned for sex toys, dead animals and explosive lighters.
Sod it! I bought time by running the 300 meters to the gate, as I just wasted another 10 minutes buying tacky London souvenirs to pay off a friends family in Japan. As I got to the gate, and produced my boarding pass, the flight attendant asked me if I could speak any Japanese. ‘Can you announce a final boarding message for us? In Japanese?’ – I didn’t have much of a clue how to go about it.
Found my tiny seat on this new Virgin skybus sitting next to probably the most hated breed on earth (for myself); a female Japanese artist studying in London… so at least I didn’t have to talk very much! The entire contents of the seat sack… what can I call that place pushing into my legs laden with stuff? Anyhow, the entire contents of that place was covered in molten chewing gum. Given the opportunity to move I declined as sitting in the center of the place just ain’t my thing man. One vastly redeeming factor was the v.port system that was embedded within the back of each seat! Everyone could watch movies on demand… very cool. (the whole system ran on linux and crashed countless times, a right botch up. Half of the screens were in linux dos for the entire journey.)
As the speedy flight was drawing to a close, I treated myself to a trip to the toilet. Fantastic spaces, these new Virgin toilets on both their planes and trains… certainly enough room for mile-high club antics! It was rather dark inside but I could make out some graffiti scrawled into the plastic walls; ‘Virgin staff stole from me’ it said. Make up your own mind as to what that might mean!