Wednesday 7 March - London Gatwick to Cuba

An early start and a smooth taxi ride, made exciting by our taxi chap taking the ‘back’ way to the airport and kick-starting early concerns about people not understanding you or, indeed, kidnapping. The Motorway avoidance has been programmed into old cabbies and new sat-navs. Check-in brought the first (but not the last) sighting of track suit bottoms. Indeed so frequent did spottings of track suit bottoms become thereafter that I have re-christened the place ‘Chavwick Airport’.

Landside Gatwick and, say what you like about terrorist threats, it certainly does make check-in easier. Around a mile from the check-in gate they have people telling you to have your passport ready, have your jacket over your arm, that sort of thing. This means that by the time you actually arrive at the security gates (which are all open, as opposed to one or two and a long queue of bearded bombers), you just fly through, even with the half tonne of metal we all carry these days, iPods, mobile phones, laptops and so on.

Airside of Gitwack is like Bluewater. Complete with Chavs. I had assumed that they were all flitting out for a hot hot hot blue WKD fuelled break in the sun, which made me wonder a bit about their clothing choice. When I knew I was heading for the tropics I decide on a wardrobe of cotton, linen and wool, all good fibres for soaking up lots of European sweat in the Caribbean. Breathable fabrics, in short. It appears our chav friends decided between nike or reebok but, either way, nylon was much in evidence.

Still, for those last minute purchases there was always French Connection, where the sales assistant appeared to be managing to tuck her micro-skirt into her knickers, without actually wearing knickers. This left me wondering just a bit what she had tucked her skirt into.

I sat in a café guzzling tea like a man who knew this was his last chance for a decent cuppa for many thousands of miles. As strong as my addiction was, it was as nothing compared to the smokers. The smokers were corralled in a sort of ghetto in the centre of the mini-mall upstairs at airside Gatwick. It was, I first thought, an opaque cube, but I eventually realised it was clear glass! There they pollute and serve as a warning to others. Awaiting their call to long-haul and ten hours without a fag they truly looked like the damned.

Should have just guzzled beer, like a few others were doing, at 7:30am. Top.

Chavs on a plane

The departure lounge/gate/whatever was awash with Chavs…and kids! Young kids! Surely this shell-suited lot couldn’t be going to the Caribbean with babes in arms, or, more likely, on laps? Surely we were sharing a departure lounge with some sort of connecting flight to Butlins in Skegness! But no, apparently the kid is no barrier to international travel these days.

It was not always thus. Once upon a time when you had a kid that was it, you spent your next sixteen years having a damp holiday in a caravan in Rill. You hated the early years but that was okay, because your kid really, really hated the later years and before long the resentment sort of evened out - and then you started taking long haul holidays again and this time your kid hated you because you were pissing their inheritance away. Now though, kids fly with their parents.

And with their extended families. I had a bit of a wake up when I noticed one particularly rough-looking mother playing with a toddler and then say ‘come to nana’. Nana? The woman was about my age! I felt like advising her to stop dressing like a teenager, get a decent haircut, lose weight, get elocution lessons, and a time machine…and sterilised.

The flight was actually one of the best I’ve ever been on. Thomas Cook treat you like bloody royalty if you don’t moan. This instantly singles you out from the rest of the passengers. Bulkhead seats to stretttttttttttttch out my legs – tripping up those who, seconds after the ‘seatbelts’ light flicked off, decided to treat this area as the
town square and do ridiculous anti-DVT exercises.

It was heaven. The tee vee folded up out of the arm of the chair, as did the food tray, then this lovely lady came along and asked you if you wanted a drink. Okay, this was charter so you had to pay for your drink, but…thank Christ…the sound on the telly was buggered. This meant that a) we were comped our drinks the whole flight and b) we got to make up out own soundtracks to movies. Believe me, I saw ‘Night at the museum’ with sound on the way back and my version was MUCH funnier. For instance, I called the dinosaur ‘Barney’ and made Dick van Dyke say ‘M******f****r’ a lot. A lot.

Hell, I did not come on holiday to watch television.

The food was actually pretty good on the flight, especially when they wheeled out the cream tea in a box at 35,000 feet. This is surely the peak of civilization, having a telly that folds out of the arm of your chair and a cream tea delivered to you. I suspect that people don’t get DVTs on aeroplanes because of the quality of the air, it’s because they don’t really have to move! And why would you?

I’d bought a book in Waterstone’s in Gatwick all about wargaming, airfix kits, modelling, commando comics and so on. This brought on a fit of nostalgia. I remember Dad coming home on a Friday night from some foreign trip and giving me the plastic cutlery and condiment set that he had saved me from his in-flight meal. I thought that this was the height of sophistication, to sit on a Friday night, shovelling my dinner down my throat with my plastic cutlery after seasoning it from my collection of sachets. They should package that sort of kit with flight simulators. Who knows, when air travel becomes too expensive, maybe there will be a new genre of video game, the passenger simulator.

The food all came wrapped, the crackers, the cheese and so on. The cabin air pressure must have been lower than the pressure on the ground, because the packaging had blown up like balloons.

Top marks to the cabin staff though. Turns out the airline used to be British Caledonian, which explains the Scottish accents. There’s not much to do on a long haul flight. Finished book in one sitting (been a while since I had time to do that), ate, drank, went to loo, ate, went to loo again and so on. Managed to down a bottle of champagne at some point.

Arrival

Ten hours later - Cuba. Wet and hot, more tepid than tropical. Into the airport and see the familiar labs and spaniels attached to uniformed staff. The Cubans actually run you through a security check on arrival, which was quite interesting. Then it got very interesting as the immigration guy asked for my profession.

I told him - and it was all downhill from there really. I don’t know if he pushed a button or something but admitting I worked for the Government - and them then finding my laptop - got me pulled to the side of the queue. Oh oh.

Standing across a desk from me was a young lady with a ‘tash that Magnum PI would be proud of, in a uniform that included, I shit you not, the shortest mini-skirt I have ever seen. All the women had them. You could actually see their stocking tops when they walked. The last time I saw a woman in uniform with a skirt that short he was a stripper. I strongly suspected that trying to stuff a fiver into her cleavage would have been a bad move, so while I couldn’t get the image of her and her colleagues chasing me around the building to the tune of ‘the Benny Hill show’ out of my head, she asked me to explain what I did for the Government. I had just about managed basic greetings and counting to ten in Spanish after listening to language learning podcasts for months, so fell back on my English foreign language skill of speaking loudly and slowly. Three or four different English speakers were called before she realised that the problem was not language, but that the description of my job is dull and impenetrable. Christ, normally when I describe what I do I’m speaking to a bunch of nerds and have a powerpoint presentation to help. This lot had no chance.

I then had to find the laptop serial number. This involved open-laptop surgery on the table-top (removing battery to see innards). She started to write out what looked like a receipt for it and, seeing the blood drain from my face, assured me the laptop would stay with me but I’d need the receipt to get it out of the country.

I suspect that, in a crowd of football shirt wearing chavs, a bloke in a panama hat, linen shirt and jacket and decent shoes must have looked like the type to bring in laptops to hand to insurgents keen on destabilising the country. Or a journalist. I later learned from our guide that the Cuban authorities are not keen on journalists.

Then I had to tell her how much the thing cost. She did a double-take when I wrote down the figure (lesson one, be honest) and I bit back an explanation of having to save for months to afford it. By this time I was starting to wonder if it would not have been simpler just to buy those extra memory cards for the camera but sod it, the reason I bought a laptop was to use it when travelling.

In truth, it was all rather exciting. These days when you travel in Europe you just get waved through passport control. This was like some sort of spy thriller and, now I knew the laptop was not going to be confiscated and that I probably wouldn’t be spending my holiday in a Cuban detention centre (‘get the orange overalls out, we’ve got another one’), I was enjoying myself. My wife, I later found out, was not, but sat watching the whole thing in various states of worry that never dropped below ‘very’ and peaked when I apparently pushed away the immigration officer’s hand when she went to touch the laptop. Don’t remember that bit but I suppose I may have done as I’m a bit precious about these things. (i.e. stupid).

Beside me other passengers were mostly all leaving. One chap had to unpack his fishing rods but that was about it. The fact that they’d never heard of the ‘apple’ brand, surely the single most recognisable computer marque in the world, got me thinking about what the country might be like, but by then it was time to skip through the barrier and join the tour.

I was, to be honest, disappointed not to get a big, fat stamp on my passport. You don’t get anything in Europe any more and I was hoping for something official and bold. What you get is a visa. This, apparently, is because the US don’t allow you into the States for 6 months after a Cuba visit and if you’re American they take an even dimmer view of visiting Cuba. So US citizens travel to Canada, get a flight to Cuba after getting a Canadian stamp, get their visa but not their passport stamped and so, on return to the US, get asked ‘where have you been?’ - ‘Canada’. ‘I see, in March? Nice tan! Welcome home.’ Hence the lack of stamps.

Sprinted from the building, changed money (paso pegged to same rate as US dollar, so in return for reasonable amount of Stirling got a huge wad of cash - hoorah!), boarded coach and endured stares of those who had had to wait for me and were now wondering why I had been detained. (Apparently the Cuban authorities would have confiscated anything with GPS on it…good job they missed my ‘phone!). I explained that they took exception to my hat.

If being interrogated by the Federalies was scary, it was nothing compared to the way the coach dodged trucks, motocycles, pedestrians, motorcycle-sidecar combinations and everything else on the road. One thing it didn’t dodge was a huge black cock that played chicken with the coach…and won. The bloody thing wouldn’t move so coach stopped and guide got off, picked up cock and placed him on the side of the road. Cuban lesson number two - food is rationed here for the locals, you don’t go around killing their livestock.

Over causeway onto mainland. Past flamingos - a line of pink on the lagoon waters. A change of hotels means a longer drive, so stop for coffee or beer at a local bar, mixing with the locals who sit around drinking rum and smoking. Then on into the gathering darkness, past sugar cane fields that are having their stubble burned off; whole fields on fire, the low clouds ruby with the reflected glow.

Predominant form of public transport appeared to be trucks, with the passengers standing up in the back, like a tightly packed crop, swaying with the movement of the lorry.

Arrive at Sancti Spiritus and have a refreshing cuba libre (the first of many, many, many) which was more rum than cola. Hotel amazing, an open courtyard in the middle, ideal for sitting under the stars drinking rum. In the hotel room we could hear the familiar fart of scooters outside. Dinner brought the first experience of Cuban food. My chicken was, I suspect, one that had lost a battle of wills with a bus. The cut was unfamiliar but could be produced by a tyre running over the bird in question. Wondered if I would sleep at all with sound of scooters and hoots and shouts but, knackered, did, and dreamed of incomprehensible immigration forms.

Hey nonny non

You can tell that Spring is here. The daffs are out, the cherry blossom is blooming and in pub car-parks across the land middle-aged bald men with an interest in real ale are dressed in white with bells on their legs and are Morris dancing.

As a nation, we should be grateful, as long as they are outside the pub in the car park, they are not inside the pub talking to me about music in the middle ages. I know all about the middle ages than you very much, I’ve seen the woodcuts. Mostly, life appeared to consist of dirt. Even the plague was black.

There is something comforting about Morris dancing though. Mainly the comforting thing is that I’m not doing it and that other hobbies, say trainspotting or carving WWII combat dioramas out of cheese do not look quite so odd when compared to the activities of ‘The Frome Fiddlers’. Certainly it’s comforting that it’s traditional. Indeed, for centuries stout fellows have stood, pint in hand and thought ‘look at those prats!’.

Free Tee Vee

Ah har me hearties, avast behind! That’s right culture fans, piracy has once again reared it’s eyepatched head. This time it’s as the result of an illuminating article I read in the paper about a site that directs you to where naughty people have posted streaming video.

Corking, you don’t actually have to download anything, just click and watch.

You can see why television and movie companies don’t like this. There are no ads and so no revenue. Maybe the television companies should do it themselves, with ads?

What occurred to me though was how much we are used to paying for our entertainment. A DVD is around a tenner - and a cinema ticket is about six quid (before popcorn too!). How can that be? They GIVE DVDs away for free with the Saturday newspaper, how can it cost more to buy a DVD than it does to go to the cinema, where they have all sorts of overheads to cover?

Possibly that’s why so many people go to these sites with a clean conscience, they don’t feel they are ripping anyone off, they feel that they are getting even.

Certainly if the entertainment world wants to make an argument about paying for a product, it should work both ways - case in point: I went to see ‘The Horse Whisperer’. Shite. If I had had any sense at all I would have demanded my money back, because it was so bad. But I stayed, watched the whole movie and only a couple of days later realised that it was unmitigated crap. So, I want my six quid back and I want compensation for those three hours and the flashbacks. Then we can talk about ‘fair’.

Is this the way to Amarillo?

The resident ethnic minority in the office (Welshman) has declared his intention of getting a ‘Tom-Tom’ sat-nav for his next driving holiday down to the South of France with his family. We have suggested that he spend his money instead on ear-plugs or ‘plane tickets, but he’s adamant.

I was recently in Halfords, buying some engine coolant and wondering if I should pimp my ride with under-car lighting, spinny things on the wheels and possibly a Garfield for the back window when I wandered over to the sat-nav section.

I remain unimpressed. No machine is going to tell me which way to turn. I don’t take directions off strangers or women so I’m sure as hell not going to take it off a box. This is how the Terminator got started.

For the money, you’re far better off buying a shitload of maps. The Welshman contested that Ordinance Survey did not map France. This, I argued, was surely a point in favour of going down the map route. Not only would you have an excuse to holiday in Britain, but you could actually find out what some of the map symbols mean by visiting them. My tip - start with ‘PH’.

One of the drawbacks of the things is that they are hypnotic. In a cab last night the driver had one stuck to his window and I was watching it instead of the road. To a generation of video-game players used to keeping one eye on the action on the screen and one eye on the environment-map usually in the left hand corner, the temptation will be to concentrate on the map, using it to navigate. The problem is that while it is great at picking up corners, it’s less great at picking up parked cars and so on – and let’s face it, it’s only a mater of time before the first Tom-Tom virus is out there and you are idly toodling along some road when the display shows hoards of attacking orcs descending on your car.

Strangers on a train

Considering the English invented train travel, I can’t see why we’re so bad at it. I mean, we’ve had longer than anyone to get used to it, so why don’t we enjoy it. Thinking about it, it’s a wonder that train travel ever got invented at all -

Stephenson - It’s called ‘The Rocket’.
Bloke - Cool, what does it do?
S - It drags carriages full of people from A to B at high speed and at affordable prices.
B - Hold on, you mean that instead of sitting on my horse and dropping in at a tavern en route, I’ll be shut in with other travellers.
S - Yes.
B - But…I’ll have to talk to them!
S - Christ, you’re right - quick, help me throw this tarpaulin over the thing.

The drawback of public transport is the public. Normally, I just plug in my iPod, raise my book or paper and tune out the world. However, occasionally one sees a colleague or acquaintance. Then you may have to converse.

I tell you what though, you had better make damn sure you’re right about their identity. There’s a bloke on my train looks the spit of a fellow I used to work with, but I’m obviously never, ever going to acknowledge him, because if it’s not him (good chance, a lot of people look old, bald and pissed off when on the train) I’ll be mortified and if it is him, I’ll run out of conversation after ten seconds and every time we meet thereafter it’ll be awkward.

Obviously he’s had the same thought and so we studiously ignore one another whenever we see one another. This is easy because, thanks to three different free newspapers being distributed in town at the moment, by evening the train carriage resembles the inside of a paper recycling bin. The problem with these papers is that you have to wade through six pages of celebrity diet and dirt before hitting any news, so I don’t bother as a rule.

They do have puzzle pages and this seems to occupy a lot of travellers. Surely though these puzzles are not always finished, either because the puzzler runs out of time or intellect. So why not leave it for the next person to carry on with? Chances are they might make some progress after you’ve started them off. People tend to travel on the same train in the same carriage every day, I bet you could set up an anonymous ‘puzzle buddy’ system.

I may try it - have a go at a crossword, then leave it incomplete, with an invitation to complete it. After all, who can resist that sort of challenge?

Of course, you could be sinister. Fill in the cross-word spaces with words and phrases that have nothing to do with the clues and are all weird, or refer only to whelks and the contents of rock-pools. Or put something in that’s thought provoking or uplifting.

Or you could to make up sentences like ‘What are you doing in my seat’ or ‘sorry about the dampness, it’s my new pills’.

From a more romantic point of view you could leave little lonely-heart messages, or my personal favourite ‘I’m watching you right now’. It’s like ‘you have mail’ for perverts.

Finally you could be ultra-sadistic, complete it with ‘I have done some of this crossword. I hope you have fun finishing it. I am sitting in the seat next to you. I am very shy. If you ask me about this I shall deny everything. But please persist and talk to me.’ Of course, you’re not actually on the train, you dropped the paper off in a busy carriage when you got off at your stop.

Ice ice baby

Whoops! I forgot to fully close the door on my freezer the other day and so the next time I opened it, I found that the interior had gone from ‘a bit icy’ to ‘drifts’.

Of course, I know that sooner or later you’re supposed to de-frost your freezer - the natural indicator for this is when a bottle of vodka is frozen in the back somewhere and you have to get it out…which is why we have knives! I’m a bloke - I don’t de-frost - I hack! This has the benefit of being jolly good fun and also provides sizeable chunks of ice left over afterwards for that cooling gin and tonic you’re going to need. It also occasionally floods the house with freon from a pierced tube but that’s an occupational hazard.

The situation is a bit grim though, the ice build up means it’s getting difficult to close the door properly, meaning more ice, meaning it’s even more difficult to close the door…and so on. At the moment it’s only at the ‘good overnight dump’ stage but before long it’s going to be ‘march of the penguins’ and way up to Titanic before finishing with ‘I’m just going out, I may be some time’.

Obviously, I have to defrost before yetis move in - this will probably take place over the weekend and will, I have no doubt, result in a torrent of water like the Zambezi in spate and me with a towel to soak it up.

The benefit is that I get to eat all the stuff I’ve had in the freezer. This includes various items of stuff that I’ve frozen after meals in a fit of economy. Luckily, this means either chilli or curry, both of which go well with rice, the only drawback being I’m having them for lunch and as a result my office now smells like a Bombay brothel after a particularly tricky chicken jafrazi.

My card

Because I’m relentlessly cheap, I’ve always favoured hand-made greetings cards, even more so now that the advent of the internet has made it possible to get just the right pornographic image for just about any occasion. ‘Congratulations on your promotion - here’s a picture of a dwarf taking a really fat bird up the wrong ‘un - like you, he’s on the ladder to success’. That sort of thing.

Obviously, I’m not the only one. In my local stationers the craft section is growing, with more and more card crafting kits going on sale. To a certain extent this mystifies me, surely the point of a hand made card is that is unique, rather than assembled from a ready-made kit. Also, they don’t make porn kits. I think what’s driving the whole business is that people go into a card shop, see a hand made card, think ‘nice’, pick it up and say ‘three quid? I’ll make one myself!’, then go out and spend a tenner on the kit, but it’s the thought that counts. My response is closer to ‘three fucking quid! They must be kidding’ and on to the bargain section.

The hardest thing about making cards is actually having an idea but once you do, you start noticing all these gaps in the market that are being generated by the rapid pace of modern life - ‘congratulations on your coming out, you big gay man you’, or ‘congratulations on your ASBO’.

I prefer to recycle stuff around the house or garden to really make an effort with hand-made cards. For instance, for Easter I’m toying pop-up crosses.

Shame to say that in a moment of madness I attended a craft fair at the weekend. These are excellent opportunities for middle-aged men to behave like petulant teens, sulking, being dragged from stall to stall and bickering. It did give me a chance to scope out the card competition though - ha, no competition! A bloke manning a stall was flogging kit-made cards for two-fifty a pop. Sorry, but for two-fifty I expect a bit more than a folded bit of card with a silver dolphin on it, I want ribbon, feathers and inside a token for a pint.

There is a big big difference between hand made and home made. Hand made results in something you can sell. Home made is something that is usually put together by a child, features bold designs in finger-paint and biscuit crumbs and is only loved by parents or grandparents - those members of the family that have shut down certain sections of their brain to allow them to live with children - basically the section that tells you it’s wrong to talk about poo at the dinner table. This same section is responsible for the parent thinking their child is a virtuoso on the recorder, while any sane visitor to the house thinks a cat is being buggered in a nearby room.