Return to the Land of the Free

Well, I survived. Despite Whitney's best efforts at keeping me up (I managed until 9:30), I was exhausted at the end of my 24-hour day. I thought I would sleep better, but woke up at 2am and again at 6am. Now I don't feel very tired, but am in an almost Jack Dee-like state of annoyance and can only shout at inanimate objects and sit here watching Television for the Terminally Stupid.

Yesterday, or two days ago, or something, I had dreams about little things in the hotel room eating me and woke up at six. After repacking my suitcase I got out of the hotel at seven and dragged the whole lot down to Bayswater station before the heat boiled me alive. The Heathrow express, which was jammed in a tunnel for fifteen minutes, eventually got me to the airport.

I was slightly worried about my luggage because I was carrying an X-ray film of my chest in it - I thought it would go through the airport security, they'd see a ribcage and think that I had a body in my bag. (There's also the issue of carrying about fifteen thousand years' worth of copyright theft across the Atlantic on my hard drives, but that didn't come to anything either.) I did ask about upgrading my economy ticket, but on Virgin you even have to pay if you want an exit row.

I've been on a different route virtually every time I've travelled to the USA, and my memories of the airports and what's in them seems to blur. As soon as I got past security, though, I recognised Heathrow as one of the duller waiting areas that I had previously experienced. After burning my mouth on an absolutely volcanic breakfast bagel from Bagel Street, I went into the newsagent and bought the Top Gear magazine, mainly for the free book being given away with it as I needed reading material for the plane. It must have made everyone think I was a detestable boy racer when I carried the magazine through the flight gate, though.

At first glance, the plane didn't look too good - thin seats and not a lot of legroom, but that never bothers me because I'm too short to actually get my knees to touch the chair in front of me anyway. However, Virgin airlines certainly beats all other airlines I've flown with for the value of their in-flight entertainment, which is far more than you'd ever need. Because they're rather proud of it, they're not just screens in the back of the seats - they're IFE consoles. A massive list of films and TV programmes are provided, along with a selection of games that can be played against other passengers. The TV programmes are mostly rubbish - for the "UK Comedy" section there's no sign of true quality like Black Books or Blackadder, the airline instead having opted for Little Britain and the Catherine Tate show - but I did spend a while watching The Simpsons and Scrubs.

I appreciate that the IFEs have to be built cheap, but my HCI student side forces me to mention some points about the controller. For a start, there are several places the Cancel/Quit button could be, and in the middle of the D-pad wouldn't exactly be my first choice. Secondly, many people (quite rightly, I suppose) mentioned that the PS controller's buttons are hopelessly wrongly named - Square, Triangle, Cross and Circle are less quick to remember or say than X, Y, A, B - and because the IFE controller doubles up as a VCR-type control, the buttons would probably be named Square, Triangle, Two Triangles, and Two Triangles But Backwards.

The game hosting architecture is a bit wrong as well - the only way to host a game is to sit and wait at a game's listing screen until someone else happens to turn up, rather than being able to see the number of active players and invite them yourself. It seemed I was the only one on the plane bright enough to play chess (even though I kept losing to the computer), so I tried one of the solo games that was bound to turn up - Sudoku.

I should mention that I'm not particularly into Sudoku - I'm not like kingradix, whose burning hatred for the game is almost equivalent to mine for buses, but I just hadn't really tried it before. The only problem I had with it is far too computer-sciencey to be mentioned, but I'll do it anyway - logically it should be solved subtractively by elimination, but all the help files about it recommend that it's solved by adding possibilities instead. By ignoring the advice and working out a system myself, I was able to solve most things fairly easily (if in a time-consuming way) even on the Hyper-Extreme-Death difficulty. I found myself wondering whether it was always possible to solve the games algorithmically. Then I stopped all of that line of thought, because I realized that I had just invented a senior honours project.

Audio channels are also provided in the IFE, though their collection of metal was inevitably non-existent. I wouldn't mind too much, but they had genres of Awful Pop, "Urban", Soul, Classical and all other major shelves that you would expect to find at a Virgin Megastore, so why my genre of choice is underrepresented is a mystery. There are also a couple of specialist and relaxation tracks - I put on one that was supposed to help stop smoking. It sounded like normal lift music to me, but I suppose I didn't feel like having a cigarette at the end of it, so you could say that it works in some way.

Even with all that (and I apologize for going on about it for fully five paragraphs) the flight began to drag a bit after seven hours, but soon we arrived and the last hurdle was to go through Customs and Immigration. I was pleased to see there were hardly any queues, and went right up to a woman at one of the Visitor desks. Unfortunately this woman turned out to be totally useless, and had to keep asking another official over her shoulder what to do with a K-visa. After confirming that I needed US-VISIT done, my passport was stamped and I thought that was the end of it, but I was then directed into an office at the end of the corridor.

Passing under a sign saying "Secondary processing", I emerged in a terrifying pristine white room with a row of chairs and a group of shifty-looking people. I went up to the front and handed my gigantic bundle of forms to the official, who looked decidedly like Mr Miyagi from The Karate Kid, then sat down to wait as people were called into the interview rooms or up to the desk. Curiously, I didn't see anyone who went into the interview rooms come out again, but I tried not to think about it. Instead, I watched my distinctive pile of paper being shifted along places in the toastrack-like counter leading towards the computer, all the while thinking that something was disastrously wrong with my visa.

The student in front of me was using a visa that expired six months ago, so I had to watch them trying to sort him out before they eventually got round to me. I had to watch the officials looking at the computer, then at me and back again, shaking their heads and talking amongst themselves - it was clear that none of them had any idea why I was there.

Eventually I was called up to the desk, and was asked if Whitney or I had any children, then the normal questions about how we met all over again. The official seemed happy enough, stamped my passport and visa then stuck my 90-day ticket into it, and I was finally free to leave. I thought that customs would give me a hard time about bringing $1500 worth of wedding rings into the country, but fortunately I was waved straight through to the all but deserted Arrivals area, where Whitney and her mother were still holding their greeting sign up for me. And so ended the scariest experience of my life (apart from the driving test).

So that was the end of the journey, but I still have a vast amount of text written during the period of limbo in London. I'm going to put it up over the next few days and re-date the entries so that they're recorded on the days that I wrote them - they might appear in the Friends pages, they might not. They're all absolutely immense, but I think they're quite good.