Heathrow Airport, Terminal One. 11:30 am. I’ve done the impossible to day I managed to get to the airport and check in automatically before British Airways was prepared to take my suitcase off me. “We are only allowed to take your bag within three hours of the flight’s departure, sir”. Still they took it eventually and I enjoyed one of the best communal experiences that there is in the UK: queuing to get through security. Its not that I like leaving the country, who really wants to leave home, but the heightened security means that it takes some time to get through and you inevitably start chatting to the people in the queue. That may sound silly, but the only time that people talk on tube trains here is Friday and Saturday night when they’re going out or going home. Most of the time we go off in our own worlds as we cram into the coaches. The usual where are you going, isn’t it disgraceful and so on but it shows that the people who forced us to take these measures have, if only in a small way, got us slightly closer together, if only on the one subject.
Long flights are good for reading, they are especially good for reading the kind of books that you’d normally find too boring (I got most of the way through the Tin Drum on a flight to Memphis once). However, because WHSmith, the air port bookseller, likes profits over education, I’m on for 10.5 hours of unremitting excitement with Elizabeth George’s with no one as witness. Ohran Pamuk’s Snow and Red also by him. So a Turkish theme lightened with a little upper-class sleuthing.
This should fit in with my overall anit-jet lag strategy for the trip. Which is to try to drink my own weight in water (at lest three litres) (Drinking your own weight in alcohol is not recommended) and to stay awake until at least 7:30 pm San Francisco time. That’s around 24 hours so I should be so exhausted that I get a good night’s sleep. I try not to work out how long awake for possibly 24 hours. Though, I might have my usual Saturday afternoon catnap on the flight. More sometime later