I considered just digging myself into the sand and refusing to leave. To add insult to injury it was a gloriously hot morning and I sat with my lounger in direct sunshine, which meant positioning it on a place on the beach that was being battered by waves. I lay back, reading my book, with my feet dangling off the end, being cooled in the gushing water. But however much I dug my feet into the muddy sand, they weren't going to let me stay.
You can find out a bit about the hotel, the Sargesse,
at their website. I recommend it to anyone who wants to escape the real world and be extremely lazy.
Soon enough though, we were at the airport.
Airports seem to bring out the worst in people. It's the combination of the crush and the tedium and the gnawing fear of impending death. But people, including myself, become very impatient and try to jump queues and get through the gates as quickly as possible - even though they just have to wait around once they're through. Just as they rush to get off the plane, even though they are going to be hanging around by the baggage carousel anyway.
Maybe I just got more of a chance to observe people as I wait behind them in slow moving queues, but I nearly always see something that makes me laugh. Today it was a girl of maybe three or four years of age, who was sitting in a pushchair, despite being a little too old for that now and whose parents looked frazzled and miserable even at the start of what was to be a mammoth fourteen or so hours of travelling and waiting around. The father seemed tetchy and humourless and barely caught the eye of the woman he'd just spent more time than usual with on holiday. I imagined they had once been deeply in love, but now five or seven years in, neither could remember what they had seen in the other, but here they were, a child holding them together, holidaying in the hope that they would forget how long dead their relationship was.
I was just imagining a possible life for them. They did look a bit unhappy, but so did everyone else. We were being forced to queue for half an hour outside of passport control and we were leaving the sunshine and heading for the pissing cold rain and had to endure being crammed into a plane first. It's fun to make guesses and presumptions about strangers. I may have accidentally got it bang on, but I doubt it.
But then the daughter asked her father why we were being made to wait in this queue. I might have been tempted to come up with some untrue explanation, so as not to frighten my tiny daughter, show might already be anxious about flying in a plane, but the dad did not agree with this parenting tactic. He said, "We have to go through security in case someone puts a bomb on the plane."
I stifled a gasp mixed with a laugh - a lasp or a gaff. But that was not the end of the lesson. The dad then mimed a plane blowing up with his hands, making an exploding sound as his hands parted with fingers flailing. "Someone did that once, so now we have to go through this to make sure it doesn't happen again."
He was actually slightly beginning to spook me.
"Who did it?" asked the daughter, apparently unconcerned, so maybe the dad knew his child better than I did.
"A bad man," said her father.
"Was it Mr Angry?" she enquired and the dad laughed at this Mr Man reference and suggested other Mr Men who might be willing to blow up a transatlantic aeroplane, like Mr Naughty.
Well it's up to him what he tells his own kid, but this seemed slightly off script and a look in his eye made me think he was enjoying his inappropriate behaviour. Maybe it was part of his continuing battle with his wife. Which I had probably just made up.
A few minutes later he made another comment that seemed less playful and more bullying and suggested maybe my daydreaming, spontaneous therapising had been closer than I dared imagine, because as he gave his child a little bit of food he said, "Make the most of it, there won't be any food on the plane. Nothing more to eat for 12 hours!"
I don't know what this lie was supposed to achieve.
Funnily enough he turned out to be almost right on all counts. The plane was very packed when we got on. It was an unusual situation, as the plane had not only brought a fresh load of new tourists from the UK to Grenada, but was now going taking some others on to Tobago, where we would get rid of them and take on more people to come home with us.
But you'd think from the way that the airline handled it (the incomparable
Monarch Airlines), you'd think this had never happened before. We'd been given boarding cards, but were sold to sit where there was a space for the moment and entering the plane was like walking into a warzone, not only the dangerous combination of stressed people who had been in a plane for half a day mixing with people who'd been on the beach for a fortnight, but the air conditioning was also going crazy, pouring white clouds of gas that looked like smoke, but which one had to assume was condensation into the aircraft. It wasn't the most settling of sights and we were left waiting on the runway for ages as the seating problems were being resolved.
When the plane took off, the air conditioning units, crackling with the ice that was forming in them, started spewing out rivulets of liquid on to the people sitting beneath them. If this wasn't unpleasant enough the liquid was dark, looking like it might be leaking oil. People had to hold up their blankets and pillows to stop the filth falling on them. Maybe the plane was going to blow up, just like the dad had predicted with his hand sign.
We got to Tobago safely, but then were herded like cattle into the tiny waiting area with another plane load of people. I hadn't eaten anything substantial since breakfast and it was now getting on for 6pm. But the queue for the snack bar was massive and they'd given us nothing on the plane. So again the dad seemed to be vindicated. Maybe there would be no food til we were home.
So everyone was even more frazzled and unhappy and once we were back in the plane the air conditioning was still spewing out crap and the lights and entertainment system weren't working properly either. This is not a good feeling. If basic things on a plane are malfunctioning, you're bound to start questioning the reliability of the more important stuff. And all through this the cabin was filled with billowing white vapour, whilst beside me a man was complaining that his blanket was unusable because it was soaking wet and there were still issues with the seating arrangements. It was actually making me laugh, but feel sick at the same time.
And because of the turbulence they couldn't even bring the trolleys around to sell us some snacks.
But I was still chilled enough from the holiday to let all this wash over me. It was the start of a slightly Hellish flight with a very shitty airline, but once the vapour dissipated I began to think we might actually make it home.
