From Jester To King XLIX

Boy do I love taking flights in the UK, and this time was no exception. I’d been on to my sister about this plane to St. Anne’s, where the options were a two-hour drive starting from Blackpool or this twenty minute flight. And you’d have to get to Blackpool in the first place if you're driving. I love these short hops, the fact they’re short and fun, I love the propellers and the little jaunts over the sea, popping up and down, not to mention the view. I love the idea of taking a plane when you could have easily driven, where the road’s a bit windy and you circumvent all the trouble. It seems wasteful and louche and that’s part of the attraction. I think I was secretly hoping for snow but I didn’t want to find out either way in case the answer was no.

So I’m in the airport all chipper and charming in one of my rare buoyant moods and there’s this vacant little desk that they have at bus stations just before the outside doors which I assume is the gate, so initially there’s no one to buy from because I don’t have a ticket, but then I think, well, perhaps I can just buy on the plane, not an unreasonable assumption to make, and I do think about just walking through without arousing attention but something makes me decide against it and it was at this point that the phone call with sister takes place, me pacing about in the hall, I suppose I like letting her know where I am, and after the phone call people start coming up from nowhere so I figure there must be a flight soon and a queue forms at the desk, behind which a young dreadlocked bespectacled black man is now sitting. So reassuring now to have a manned desk where before it was vacant, so life-affirming and industrious and what a lovely chap he turned out to be! By the way this phenomenon of how people suddenly manifest from nowhere at some specific time before the scheduled departure time always fascinates me; because before this time there’s no one, and after this time the whole world and his dog are there, and there were now three people at the desk and a whole load of people in the main hall pushing up to the desk area, anyhow it didn’t take long till it was my turn, and I ask the guy when the next flight was, I ask him if there’s any chance of getting on now, using the any chance expression as a bit of a red herring, using it in the way it’s commonly used by people to denote that they’re fully expecting the thing to be done but just need to make sure they don’t fall foul of the person’s caprices and/or foul mood with the power he or she happens to hold in the interaction i.e. to be able to deny and prevent the thing happening. So you fawn and make yourself small, build them up, anyway his relaxed and breezy manner seemed to guarantee it, the instant rapport we’d built up through my chipperness and charm seemed to have made it a dead cert, which made it all the more shocking when he just dismissed it, and not only that, his bearing seemed to imply it was unrealistic of me to have expected to go now, the next flight was 18:3o, and so I said out loud, what am I supposed to do until then, it was now about 15:30, and he said,: well you can have a drink when you get there, but what did that have to do with the price of eggs? Anyway I felt this curious mixture of intense disappointment mixed in with the good cheer and benevolence which had built up from earlier, bear in mind the effort I had gone to in being obsequious had gone abegging but all in all the disappointment made way for the good feeling, it displaced it and I managed not to fall foul of one of my jaw-clenching bouts of resentment.

So I got my card out, which wasn’t quite as snazzy as the one belonging to the young Asian gentleman in front of me, a golden Amex which he sort of thrust at the desk guy, thrusting it as if the whole exchange was an enormous burden he was desperate to lift from his shoulders, anyway mine was a simple grey or blue card, and it turned out that the a full return flight was £99 which is hardly a bank-breaker and I was a happy bunny on my way to St. Anne’s.

You might well know a lot of older folk take to St. Anne’s and there are a fair number who go for the resort. Well, I struck up such a nice conversation with one older traveller who was beholding the large cardboard advertising hoarding thing they have next to the desk when I approached him, and we had a lovely little exchange about this and that, I can’t remember the exact details, but it was so nice to share our respective joys, me and this older man, and he told me what kind of thing they did at the resort, was it called Atlantis?, what sort of activities, and I was delighted for him and all the others attending, everyone was down for a thoroughly good time.