Last minute rush

8 October 2015

In a long, snaking queue at the airport, hot in my padded coat because there was no room to pack it, I dragged my huge suitcase behind me, looking at my watch as I edged ever closer to the desk. The woman with heavy makeup wore a British Airways uniform that reminded me of the ones we once had at Dream Factory with sun ray pleated skirts that blew over your head in a high wind. She smiled and held out her hand for my passport. As she took it I struggled to get my case on the conveyor belt.
“Where’s your visa?” She asked, the smile suddenly gone from her face. “You can’t enter the United States without a visa.”
I turned to Commando standing behind with his own case. “We forgot to get the visas!”

Sitting bolt upright I opened my eyes to the darkness of the bedroom. I could hear Commando in the bathroom cleaning his teeth. It was six thirty. The dream had been so vivid my heart was pounding.
“Visas!” I said as Commando opened the door. “Did we get the visas?”
I could remember sitting in the travel agents talking about them when we booked the flights. The travel agent said it was too early to get them and we should come back. I couldn’t remember going back and we now had just two days until our flight. How long did it take to get American visas?
“We went and got them, remember, they did it online. That was ages ago.”
Panic over.

The morning was spent clearing unidentifiable things whose labels had fallen off out of the freezer in order to fit in food for CJ while we are away then shopping for said food. As usual we chose the shortest check out queue but the elderly lady in front of us took forever packing her shopping away. Then she got her purse out and spent an age searching for her Nectar reward card. She asked the cashier three times how much the shopping had come to and then began fiddling in her purse again. Commando rolled his eyes and mimed slowly counting out money.
“Probably all in pennies,” I joked in a whisper.
By the time she’d finally paid, zipped her purse in slow motion, put it in her bag and then zipped that, moved all her bags into the trolley and very, very slowly, walked away I’d read so much of the magazine on the stand by the till I thought I probably should have paid for it. In the meantime all the other queues had disappeared. Why does that always happen to us? The trouble is, I couldn’t help thinking that one day that would be me dithering at the till and holding everyone up. When I said as much Commando laughed.
“I promise I’ll shoot you and put you out of your misery before that happens.”

All the while there was a vague feeling hanging round me that I’d forgotten something. Why does that always happen? Looking back over past holidays things were always forgotten. Usually small, unimportant things apart from the time I left my toothbrush at home and had to make do with a rubbish manual one for a week. Still we survived with whatever it was we didn’t pack or bought it there. There was one memorable time, on a Dream Factoty trip, when I almost forgot my passport, was actually in the car on the main road before I remembered and had to go back and hunt for it, but we’ll gloss over that.

The afternoon was mostly spent checking things to see if there really was something I’d forgotten. Battery packs were charged, cables and plugs gathered together. There was a Google search to make sure Commando was right about our phone/iPad chargers working with American electricity and not blowing everything up. Apparently he was right, they will charge, only slower, whereas American electrical goods will blow up in our sockets. For the hundredth time I asked Commando if he’d got plug adaptors. He sighed  and said, “do you ever listen to me? I’ve already told you that several times.”  He asked me for the millionth time if I’d packed my pills and if I thought my suitcase would be big enough. I wondered if he ever listened to me but I didn’t say so.

Over coffee I checked Facebook and found a funny article written by an American after a holiday in England. He listed one hundred differences he’d noticed between my home country and his. It made me smile but it also made me wonder what differences I’d notice on the other side of the pond. Maybe I’ll write a list of my top one hundred differences while I’m over there.

When I finished chuckling over the list I noticed a friend had posted an interesting recipe for apples roses. They looked simple to make and, when I cleared out the freezer, I’d discovered half a pack of puff pastry so thought I’d have a go at it. It was pretty simple and, while the little deserts were cooking, I knocked up a pasta meal to go with them. Being at home all day does have some advantages and fresh, home cooked meals is one of them.

Then my phone rang. It was the office manager from the charity place.
“I’m sorry to ring you so late in the day,” she began. “We’ve had a tough time making the decision over who to give the job to. There’s no easy way to say this, but I’m afraid we decided not to give it to you. There wasn’t anything you did wrong. In fact we liked you very much and, if there’d been two jobs, we would have loved to have you work for us. There’s very little other feedback I can give you. As I said, it was a very hard decision.”
So that was that. It was disappointing, but not devastating. The job seemed interesting, the people were nice and the office was lovely but the journey would have been a nightmare. There will be other jobs and, sooner or later, I’ll get one of them.

Finally, there was my first driving alone at night experience. Commando had the night off and he took the chance to go off and join his running club in Woolston.
“If I run down there, will you pick me up in the car afterwards?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said, after all wasn’t this just the sort of thing I’d learned to drive for?
It hadn’t occurred to me that it would be dark by eight o’clock when I had to go and get him. Then there was the problem of timing. How long would it take to drive down there, especially factoring in the time to get outside, start the car, make sure all the lights really were on automatic, blah, blah, blah?

In the end I left way too early. It wouldn’t be me if I wasn’t early somehow. This was my very first experience of driving in the dark on my own and I was nervous. Before I set off I sat in the car for a while checking everything. The lights worked, the music was on and not too loud, there was no one about. I took a deep breath and pulled away from the kerb then drove round the crescent very slowly, feeling sure a child, or at least a cat was going to appear from between all the parked cars. Once I got out onto the bigger, better lit roads I felt more comfortable and I pulled into the car park a good quarter of an hour before I needed to be there.

There was a space right in front of me so I drove straight into it and sat for a moment listening to a song on the iPod. Then I thought I was a bit far from the feather sculpture and Commando wouldn’t see me and would think I hadn’t come, so I turned on the engine again, reversed out and drove further up. Then I reverse parked. Even if I say so myself, I did a pretty good job of it. After a bit I walked up to the feather where the runners were beginning to gather. It was freezing but Commando was pleased to see me.
“It’s nice to have someone to come and pick me up,” he said, giving me a sweaty kiss.