The Journey

I promised an entry, then I didn't bother, but here it is now.

After a ridiculously early morning start, my day of airborne travel began in Aberdeen. Even though I've always been nervous about airport security, I had never been searched at all, but this time my backpack set off the alarm. They pulled the bag to the side and proceeded to take out the contents one by one and search through them.

I was particularly worried that my laptop might have set it off, especially as it was the only significant change that had been made to my bag's contents since the last time I took a plane journey. This concern was made worse by the fact that I thought that I would be questioned about having the most suspicious-looking keyboard in the world (I was cleaning the keyboard and decided to rearrange it to model a Linotype machine in a moment of extreme desperation to avoid revising Databases). They didn't even notice, though. It was put under a large scanner thing, but they seemed happy enough with it. In fact, they couldn't find anything that would possibly have set it off.

After a short plane ride I found myself in Heathrow. Despite the huge size of the airport I was unable to find any shop that interested me apart from the small Virgin Megastore (more like a microstore, actually). The most entertaining thing I found to do was to sit and have a bagel from Bagel Street. I had hoped to find a seat with a socket nearby so that I could use my laptop, but none were immediately obvious.

When the gate number finally came up about four hours later, I went there and handed in my suspiciously blank boarding card. This time my bag got through the scanner without setting anything off despite having had nothing changed about it since the last time. With the airport obviously thinking this was too convenient, I was then selected for a random search which went through roughly the same stages as before.

After that, it emerged that my e-ticket hadn't actually allocated me a seat number, so I had to stand in a group of about five others who were in the same position and wait for everyone else to come through first before we got ours.

I hope someone is still reading this, because this is where the good news starts. Economy class was overbooked somehow, so I was given a Business class ticket instead. As a result, I felt like I was being treated like royalty throughout the eleven hours (at least a full hour of which was spent fiddling with the five individual controls for my seat). I even got to sleep decently because of the amazing amount of legroom - I couldn't touch the back of the seat in front of me with my feet at all. Because of my height, that might mean it was about eighteen inches away.

Even the meals were pretty decent. We were handed out menus that wouldn't have looked out of place in one of the classier St Andrews restaurants, and even though the food was still airline food and therefore muck by definition, at least it was presented well, with tablecloths provided and everything. I thought I'd finished a meal only to be served another course.

There was some turbulence when we neared San Francisco because that's where Rod Smallwood's gravitational pull starts, but otherwise it was a much smoother flight than the last time. Drinking gallons' worth of free orange juice must have helped as well. I wonder what the chances are of the same thing happening on the way back...

I don't need to worry about that yet, though, because I'm here for a month, and after that I get to go back and work at the RGU. My contract for them arrived at home this morning - 37 hours a week of typing things in to computers and playing Yahoo pool when no one's looking. It's going to be a good summer.