Category: Experiences | Ideas | Travel
Writing on the fly
Posted by Rupert on January 5, 2009
We’re about to get in a taxi and go to the airport where we will board a Lufthansa plane, change in Frankfurt, and tonight we’ll be in Scotland. Meanwhile, from another corner of Europe is coming another contingent of Wolfe Murray’s — Moona’s mob — but they’re journey is complicated compared to ours: Moona is getting the train (see previous article) and Monica was in Romania at her Dad’s 80th birthday. They will meet up in London and I’m not quite sure how they’ll get to Edinburgh but I think all of us will have breakfast together tomorrow morning at St Leonards Bank, the family home that is now standing empty (except for these few days).
We have to leave in 20 minutes and Alina just came in and said “we’ve got to get ready”; I grunted in the hope she’d get distracted for a few more minutes and I was in luck as she is clutching a letter from Father Christmas which she will leave with our neighbour Gabi (a former gym teacher who will look after the flat in our absence.)
Another 10 minutes have passed and she’s still not back from the neighbours, no doubt they’re running through a checklist of all the things to look out, and contingency plans in case bills come in, tradesmen come round (we’re doing a roof extension) or whatever. Now my time is up, Alina says “we’re going” and so I have to unplug (I’m listening to amazing music, big John Patton, on last.fm) and coats, hats and boots are coming out of the cupboard and onto feet.
Now we’re at Bucharest airport, having got through a biblical queue for flights to all over Europe. They’ve introduced an insane new system whereby people going to Vienna, Munich, Frankfurt or Copenhagen have to all go through a narrow choke point. There were constant arguments and it almost came to fisticuffs. I told Luca we have to be ready for anything but I ignored the stress by listening to “Psychedelic Jazz and Funky Blues” on Luca’s MP3 player. Fortunately he didn’t notice as he would’ve been mightily pissed to see me using his stuff and wasting its single battery. Now the call to Frankfurt has come and I’ve gotta log off, pack up and join another queue.
Luckily this WordPress blog system we use automatically saves every few minutes and so even if I just close the lid and run my words will be saved. Pretty cool eh! So much better than the old system where you write on a word document in your computer and then copy/paste it into the system or, more likely, send it to your webmaster and wait a few days before seeing it on the site. With these new blogs you can see yourself “in print” almost immediately.
Seems like I’ve got a few minutes more…Alina and a friend she met in the queue are shopping (I don’t know or care where) and Luca and Lara have a 15 minute slot to play on a public computer. I logged on to www.cartoonnetwork.co.uk for Luca and that will guarantee me a few moments of peace. But the goddamn tannoy keeps making announcements in many languages and there are people everywhere. Chaos reigns and I’ve gotta go.
God knows when I’ll next be able to continue my gripping tale (or boring waffle) on flying to UK, because I didn’t save a copy except on this website, and I need to be connected in order to log on and write. Will I be able to connect in Frankfurt, Edinburgh or the Glen? Will my words be lost to posterity? Oh my God, I can’t take the tension.
By Rupert Wolfe Murray
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