Well, one last spin of the wheel as the cab wasn't picking us to go to the airport until 3.15. So we packed and said goodbye to our lovely hotel room and then headed out for lunch followed by a quick trip up the Rockerfeller Centre. It was a little bitter-sweet to look down on our haunts for the last seven days knowing that we were about to leave it all behind. But you get a great view of Central Park which isn't quite as good from the top of the Empire State Building and also a view of the Empire State Building which you barely see at all from the top of the Empire State Building.
A middle-aged woman from Europe (best guess is Germany, or maybe Holland) tutted loudly and moaned when my girlfriend and I accidentally wandered into the back of a photo she was having taken. We moved immediately, even though she had been quite impolite about it and she didn't think to thank us or apologise for her overreaction. People are rude. Some of them get ruder the older they get which seems a dumbass way to live your life. We were out of the way in seconds and her photo was taken without any significant interruption.
We couldn't stay long and soon enough we were heading off to the airport, for another rapid and efficient jaunt through security.
I had been intending to sleep on the plane, but once I'd watched a couple of films there wasn't going to be enough time to snooze, so I watched another one. I got hooked into the awful "Knowing" with its typical Hollywood agenda that science is ridiculous and faith is amazing, which was interesting given all I was writing about yesterday. Cage the cynical scientist (estranged from his pastor father) believes that life is random and unpredictable, but then finds a piece of paper that predicts 50 years of tragedies (though uselessly it's been hidden in a time capsule while they all happened) including date, numbers of dead and longitude and latitude (though it isn't made clear where the cut off point is - is a tragedy with 10 victims big enough? Or 1 or 2?) Ultimately he realises that life is all planned out in advance, which seems like a negative thing to me, but also that there is definitely an afterlife and his dad and sister were right to be religious all along. But it's only in films that it's possible to control a story in this way, because in real life things are random and unpredictable, so the only time an idea like this works is in a ridiculous fantasy. Luckily everyone dies in the end, except a couple of children who are saved by some angels. It's not clear why they couldn't have saved a few more of us. Just in case of accident or impotence. I don't know if the angels saved any black or Asian kids. Or whether just white people will survive. But at least one of the children is partially deaf showing that the angels aren't disablist, even if they are racist.
And stupid.
They did, after all have fifty years notice of the event and could have got more of us out. But they know what they're doing. And the rest of us will definitely live on after we've been horribly burned to death.
It was rubbish. Perfect plane film. Even though there is a massive plane crash in it, with people on fire running around and screaming. Which might make it less perfect for the sensitive traveller.
Somewhere over the Atlantic I lost five hours of my life (but I'd nicked five on the way over so it all balances out) so it's hard to know where the 30th ended and the 1st began. As I write this at 11pm (London time) on the 1st October it's hard to believe that I was on top of the Rock yesterday and not as it seems earlier today.
But top marks to Virgin Atlantic for their entertainment package which once again left me wishing the flight was an hour longer. I saw the end of "The Hangover" at least, but only got about half way through a film about Michael Caine being a magician in an old folks' home, which I am now going to have to seek out. Or maybe tape when it's on TV.
