Travel

I've written here in the past about being obsessive about missing flights. And in my long career of taking flights for business purposes, I missed my first flight on Friday morning.

And not to do things by halves, I missed my second flight later that same day.

Missing the first flight was entirely due to the freak weather conditions around London at the end of the week. Snow? In winter? They never saw it coming.

First Flight

Missing the first flight was virtually inevitable. I was in good time, caught the train to Stansted, trying to keep warm against an extremely bitter morning.

The first hint of travel problems came when the train stopped at a station for a while and stayed there a bit too long. It eventually inched out of the station, but stopped in the middle of nowhere about ten minutes later. That's when people started looking concerned and checking their watches every few minutes.

Last Wednesday I got dragged to France. I've never been to France, although I have tried their method of kissing before and even their ticklers once or twice.

Lisa and I had taken the kids to London for Easter weekend, their first visit to the city. That visit is another story entirely - hint: try dragging a 3 year old around London for a weekend with the Circle and District lines under repair. We returned home on Monday evening, went straight to bed. Upon waking the next day, the first thing to happen was a phone call to say that my father was in hospital...in LOURDES!

Information flowed quickly from there - he'd taken some kind of attack, been rushed to hospital, given tests (including an MRI) at which point word filtered out that he had "a 90% mass" in one of his lungs. A cousin delivered this news to me personally (which was appreciated, but unnecessary), although we'd already decided that I should fly out the next day.

Lisa - Our Lady of Internet Deals - made the booking and drove me to Dublin for my flight to France. My one-way flight to France. I didn't quite know when I was coming back.

5:59am. That was the time on my alarm clock cum mobile phone this morning when my eyes blinked open. I was vertical half a second later and spitting expletives under my breath as I threw on my suit.

Somehow I'd managed to knock the alarm function off whenever it initially went off.  No snooze, no nothing. Disaster! I should've been awake an hour ago.

I should have been standing in the check-in queue at Belfast City Airport at 5:59am. As it was, I was more than half-an-hour away in Crumlin. Thankfully (and unusually) I'd prepared well enough in advance, and had my bag packed, wallet at the ready and shirt clean and ironed over the kitchen door.

So, stopping only for a cursory brush of the teeth, I raced out the door and was soon burning up the miles between my house and the airport. I couldn't switch on the stereo. Wasn't in the mood. My little phobia about missing flights was about to become a reality.