Getting There

This was interesting. Well not that interesting. There was a queue for mens toilets, unheard of. And then we waited. “I thought I heard a flush at the end” came a voice from behind me. Such was the boredom and unique novelty of having to actually queue to go to the toilet, people had started to analyse which cubicle would be free next. My turn. Then I found out the problem. The toilets were blockeding up. On a ‘request’ basis, the people coming out of the cubicles were informing the attendant if their toilet had been blocked, which then triggered the signal for large bearded man to wade in and do some plunging.

Shit. Mine didn’t flush. Do I tell the attendant or do I briskly walk away claiming all innocence at 6.30am. I turned straight out, looked straight ahead, avoiding eye contact with the person walking across to enter my recently departed cubicle. Just as I was cursing my cubicle selection luck, the man who had just replaced me, came back out “This ones blocked too”, clearly referring to my act of cheekyiness. Maybe I wasn’t that unlucky. After all, I wasn’t the one with a plunger in one hand, man, he was in deep shit.

I looked up at the screen over my 6.45am pint of Guinness and saw, Flight Z40511 to Toronto, DELAYED, DEPARTURE 10AM. Fantastic. Not only had fate given me the wrong cubicle, it had also given me a shit plane with poor time keeping. Just as I was working out how many pints of Guinness I could now fit in whilst wallowing in my self pity, a voice appeared from beside me. “Is your plane delayed mate”. Just as I was choosing the tone in my reply I looked across. There were eight empty whisky glasses. “Yes, only by three hours, what about you?” I replied. “I’ve been here for 6 hours, I’ve got another four to go. Quite clearly, my delay wasn’t that unlucky after all.

My luck was about to change. I was going to be sitting next to Miss Canada, she had just come back from some promotional work in London. Of course not. Sitting in seat B came the figure I had come to dread. A more ‘mature’ lady with expected bladder problems. It got worse. After an hour of the flight, I realised that in fact she had not moved one inch. Just as I was contemplating pressing the cabin assistance button and requesting if they could move the dead lady next to me, her armed moved. She was asleep.

Her impending death seemed to take on less significance to me the longer the flight went on. Clearly she was in some kind of deep sleep, but this wasn’t helping my toilet matters. Every glass of water I accepted from the cabin crew grew into a game of Russian roulette. Just one more, one more, and I could piss my pants. My ever increasing bladder problems were getting worse. A Canadian girl sitting behind me kept on referring to a place called ‘Virgina’, but obviously not known to her, she was pronouncing it as ‘Vergina’. “You know what, that Virgina, what a great place to go”, followed by “Virgina, yeah, it’s quite large, though not that many people go down that way”.

Just as I was contemplating my bad luck in selecting a dead lady over Miss Virgina, I finished the article that I was reading from the Times. “She gave me a smile, I saw there was a space next to her in that carriage, but I had a bag and wanted a another spare seat. She went down to one end of the carriage, I went to the other end. Three minutes later there was an incredible explosion, I looked across at the other end of the carriage, all I saw was bodies”.

With a new sense of luck perspective, I made my way down to immigration. “Have you booked your internal flights Sir” came the loaded question from the poker faced immigration official. Well, I thought it was loaded. Maybe they thought I was going to do a runner in Canada. Just as I was about to pull out my documents the face smiled, “No, there’s no need for that, I was just checking to make sure you knew which terminal you needed”. Blimey, Canadians, they just too nice.