Hethrow Airport

(On our drive into Heathrow, we gave the strikers from UNITE a friendly toot. This was not out of any particular sense of solidarity; after being comically overcharged by BA on a flight back from Edinburgh to London (my carbon footprint is the size of a yeti’s…what of it?) I’m going to be punching the newly uncluttered air when BA fold like a cheap tent, but I reckon a little toot makes the workers feel a lot better and hey, the flags were jolly. Actually, I can’t see what all the fuss is about over the BA strike. This is cabin crew striking, right? So, if the people who hand out sandwiches, crisps, tea and stun guns (I’m presuming) on National Express coaches go on strike, can we expect the same degree of media hysteria? God, I hope so.)

Heathrow Airport. It’s huge, like a modern urban sprawl composed of places that were once villages in their own right, with customs like inbreeding, morris dancing, scrumpy festivals and duck ponds for dunking witches in. At Heathrow, it’s the terminals that are the villages, with their own shops, cafes and pubs. But unlike most villages, the majority of the population are just passing through and those that do work here come from all over the world, (well, all over Eastern Europe) rather than from all over the surrounding half mile radius.

The main occupations of the transient population of a terminal village (odd name for a place where most people are going from or through rather than ending up) are: waiting, sleeping, eating, drinking, battling constipation or nerves, and shopping. Luckily the shops of the terminal village are there to provide a diversion, reasonably priced coffee and extravagantly priced luxury items.

In the golden age of air travel, rich people flew from aerodromes where the terminal was a hut and transatlantic flight was mostly powered by glamour and hair oil. The arrival of the package holiday meant affordable travel for the oiks – sorry; ordinary folk, while the rich invented first class. Now the terminal is full of the sort of people who might travel standard class on a train or even, throwing caution to the wind, decide that coach travel is for them.

However, if you want to purchase a handbag that costs three hundred quid and, because it’s tax free, still feel like you got a good deal, then the airport is the place for you.

Mostly because in the terminal you have quite a disconnected sense of reality and it does make sense to buy designer sunglasses in preparation for an English summer and a bar of chocolate bigger than your mouth (Toblerone, what’s going on there?). Boredom has a lot to answer for.

And like many villages, it has it’s own backroads, byways and winding lanes, or in this case, a walk to a boarding gate so far away that I fully expected us to be greeted with a different regional accent when we arrived and then asked to adjust our watches to the new time zone.

Postcard from Gatwick

Off to Sorrento for a family wedding (family member not Italian, just awkward). One reaches Sorrento via Naples. One reaches Naples via Gatwick.

I’ve seen pictures of what air travel used to be like. Unless you were bombing Dresden in WWII it was actually pretty glamorous. Certainly I bet it did not involve putting your shoes through an X Ray machine. Security at Gatwick is a bloody joke, it would be a lot quicker if you just climbed inside the X Ray machine yourself. Ticket check-in was terribly secure…these days one is checked in by a machine! At five in the morning I was not at my best, and neither was the witch from BA who was ‘helping’ people check in.

After that, Naples was a breath of fresh air. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a shit hole. Really, I can’t believe anywhere like that actually exists in Europe. The poorest places I visited in Cuba were better than Naples.

Still, at least you get to leave quickly – by hydrofoil across the Bay of Naples to Sorrento. The ticket booth was closed but luckily a gypsy was on hand to take me to an open booth, translate for me and then guide me to the right mooring – all for a Euro. Far better service than BA offer – wonder if she wants a job at Gatwick?

RHS Hampton Court 2007 - the cocktail!

There’s no doubt that all the gardens, show and otherwise, at the RHS show at Hampton Court were immaculate. Some were spectacular, some beautiful, some more than others. And some had bars!

"Waiters start to worry what will happen when the booze runs out."

There’s a lot you can do with a smallish plot, and one of the common themes this year appeared to be sticking a bar in the corner of it and giving away booze in the hope of a) securing the ‘people’s choice’ prize through outright bribery or b) getting one of the increasingly schloshed crowd to sign up to buying a crate of whatever it was you were giving away in thimble-full glasses.

From a drinking point of view – the day went well, starting at the Gran-marnier garden with the established tactic of ‘one for me, one for my friend’, then on through sherry, onto Australian reds, whites and sparkling before a soft landing at the excellent Torres garden and some robust Spanish red.

"Olives are delicious...obviously somebody must come up with some way of making alcohol from them!"

Remarking to a couple of welly-sporting women in front of me at the booze queue at one of the gardens ‘I believe there are plants here too’, they fixed me with a look and replied ‘really? We only come for the clothes.’. Obviously they are refugees from the Country Living tent.

There was a lot that was remarkable about this year’s show. I loved the many ‘drought resistant’ gardens, especially those being pumped out given the constant rain in the last months. I loved the ‘conservative values’ garden, the Oak, the bedding plants shaped like a British fields, the tree that doubles as a lynching post for asylum seekers and the secueters that can be used to castrate crims – but best of all the thick hedges for upper class tories to have sex with call-girls behind.

"Ah, a grove of metal trees...what was in that last gin?"

The day ended very well at the Country Living tent with the purchase of sausages and organic Gin. Not only was this gin good for me, it was good for the environment and the economy of the organic world, I was helping pandas and polar bears by buying gin….or something. One thing is for sure, the guy on the stall made the greatest small gin and tonics – the sample glasses are lilliputan and are normally filled with neat gin (they are the size of a shot glass). I insisted he make me a gin and tonic and I could see that he was glad that he’s had the request, as he profusely apologised for having no lime. I cursed him for a barbarian and drank my gin.

When one tired of helping penguins, one could redress the balance and visit the British Airways stall. Here were two club class seats and, judging by the number of people having their photograph taken in them, reclining with their bottles of gin (or was that just me?), I think BA profits are set to rise, even if, because of security scares, their aeroplanes do not.


"This year's Gold Medal for fricking creepy stall...stone children! Aggghhhhhh, Aggghhhh! Stone children! Children that have been petrified by the witch at the end of the village! No? Just me? Well, the stall owner looked like some sort of ciramic peado!"