The H Factor

I’ll Fly Away - Kanye West, The College Dropout

Sorry things have been a bit quiet on the blog front, but I have been skiing again.  Just reading that makes me want to punch myself in the face, but let me explain.  I had to book a holiday, see, because I qualified for a freebie at work last year.  And it could only be through a certain holiday company, and Other Half and I couldn’t agree on a perfect romantic beach hideaway option (he feared early onset of catatonic beach boredom), so we decided to go skiing again. 

I have come to the conclusion that I will never be a skier of any real aptitude.  In the same way that I can shimmy out onto a dancefloor oozing confidence by the truckload and still manage to look like I’ve put my legs and arms on backwards, I am an uncoordinated, deeply rubbish skier.

My main barriers to being a skier of grace and competence are a profound fear of a) speed and b) gradients, both of which are a pretty fundamental, to be fair.  And yet I really enjoy it, even when I’m pottering down a green run at fuck all miles an hour, making small whimpery noises while 3-year-olds and crippled old ladies whoosh past at such speed that my hair ripples.  It’s something to do with sunshine and snow and breathtaking mountain views and clean air and a general feeling of outdoorsy wellbeing, but I’m in danger of breaking into crap poetry here so we’ll move on.

What I really want to talk about is the trip home.  Travelling back from a holiday is always rubbish, especially when your tour operator kicks you out of the hotel at 7am, despite the flight not leaving until 2pm and the transfer taking 3 hours at an absolute stretch, say for example if you included a stop at a dirty overpriced French service station, which we didn’t.  

Despite the superabundance of time, however, our intrepid coach driver was clearly keen to get home for a croissant and a wank over a picture of Catherine Deneuve or similar, because he opted to give the full speed mountain road experience, leaning the coach perilously over perpendicular drops and navigating hairpin bends in a manner that caused oncoming vehicles to veer wildly to avoid us.  All of which left me on the cusp of vomiting lavishly on the 9-year-old daughter, who was sleeping in blissful ignorance with her head on my lap.

So you can imagine my relief when we finally arrived at Geneva airport with four hours to go until our flight was due to leave.  Yay.  I say Geneva airport, but what I actually mean is a separate terminal down the road for holiday charter flights, with no amenities whatsoever.  Thankfully I had a baguette and some seriously stinky cheese and saucission in my bag - we stopped going into cafes the day after arrival, when we were robbed at tillpoint of 12 euros for a small portion of chips and a can of coke. 

Anyway, we chomped our picnic in full view of jealous fellow passengers (fuck `em, I say), then finally checked in, only to be bussed about 500 metres back to the main terminal to await our flight.  Now I’m a pretty well-travelled woman, but I have to say I’ve NEVER experienced an airport quite like Geneva.  It seems to have been designed specifically with maximum passenger inconvenience in mind, like a bunch of evil Swiss architects and designers sat round a table brainstorming how to fuck off as many people as possible.

The main problem is that it’s pokey and crowded, with no big open concourse to mill about in, because every available square foot of space is packed with crappy shops selling Swiss watches and every conceivable variation on a Toblerone theme.

More frustratingly, there only one set of departure boards which are positioned immediately over the main (and massive) queue for security, so there’s no room to look at them.  Seating areas are dotted around in the corners of the airport, but have no departure screens of their own so you have to get up every few minutes and walk back to where you started to see if you’ve been issued a gate yet, because (and this really makes no sense at all) you can’t go through security until you’ve got a gate, due to different gates having different security checkpoints.  Are you lost yet?  Yup, us too.

Our security checkpoint was a 10 minute walk away, at which point we had to walk a further 15 minutes in the direction we’d just come from to get to the gate.  The sign telling us it was a 15 minute walk didn’t appear until we were about half way, which made me wonder how many people fail to make their flight at all, because they’re perusing Toblerone options at a leisurely pace without realising they’ve got to walk back to fucking France to find their plane.

The icing on my cake of teeth grindings was getting through the gate, only to be put on another sodding bus that took us right back where we started, immediately outside the charter terminal. 

At which point we discovered that one of our seats was away from the others, at the back of the plane.  I took this one, as I was showing early signs of total meltdown and none of the rest of the family wanted to sit anywhere near me. 

It was one of those little charter planes that seats about 150, with 2 seats either side of the central aisle – the other three in my row were taken up by a Frazzled Single Mother and her two Vile Offspring, who were clearly fractious as fuck and determined to make her journey as hellish as possible.    FSM sat next to me, with her two VOs sat across the aisle.

And so it began.  Vile Female Offspring (about 3) started whining incessantly that she wanted mummy to sit next to her, at which point Vile Male Offspring (about 6) punched her on the arm to demonstrate that women’s intuition is a genetic gift.  High-volume wailing ensued, with FSM looking like a handful of valium and a bottle of Duty Free gin wouldn’t go amiss right now.  Entreaties to sit nicely were entirely ignored, so she unbuckled and told VMO to swap seats with her. 

VMO:  “Don’t want to”
FSM: “Please, darling, let me sit next to Lucy and you sit here”
VMO: “NO.  I don’t WANT to sit next to a strange lady”.
FSM: “But I’ll still be next to you, darling.  I’ll be just there.  Please come and sit here”
VMO: “No. What if she’s a PAEDOPHILE?”

Never has a plane fallen so silent, I swear to god.  He pronounced it as two distinct words, as in `Peedo File’, suggesting that whatever this terrible thing was, it could be purchased in bulk from Office Supermarket.  I guess Stranger Danger has moved on since my day.

His poor mother looked absolutely mortified and apologised profusely whilst wittering on about how she was going to murder his uncles who had obviously taught him the word.  I of course laughed it off with a wave of my hand and a chuckle, but I confess it took everything I had not to reach into my bag and ask “would you like a sweetie, little boy?”