Scribbling #39: The First Stages...

Stage One had been completed, but Stage Two has probably been the hardest so far of all.

‘Stage One, Stage Two?’ I don’t hear you cry. ‘What’s he blabbering about now?’

Stage One was the advent of the leaving of the Slovak Republic and getting into the UK, in a Skoda Fabia. It’s green, with a key scratch on the left hand side, a broken wheel trim, and the steering makes all sorts of interesting clonking noises.  If I cut you off on the way out, then I’m sorry, although not really.

Stage One was completed without any fanfare, but a lot of adult-inedible snacks for Joseph were involved, a nice pit stop was made in Badenweiler, Germany, via Austria and Switzerland, and then via Austria again via an angry Austrian policeman who wanted me to move me out of the way of all the other traffic that were all trying to go via somewhere else, with the AAP (Angry Austrian Policeman, get with it) not realising that wifey was inside at the border office, not realising that it was the border office, as we were trying to pay an overly-expensive highway sticker for Switzerland, and border offices don’t do highway stickers. All because they’re almost probably run by the French who are, at the end of the day, a little bit French.

If in doubt, bring up a thousand years of animosity and blame the French, that’s what I have never actually said, but I think I’ve implied it enough.

Post-Stage One, therefore, has been spent more-or-less half and half at the parents’ house and with another family in Dudley, who were very lovely to us for coping with a screaming child every morning at 6am on the dot, making us feel very welcome. Interviews for moi were carried out over the week., three in total over two days. For helpful contacts, I quite rightly blame Mr. Armitage. During that time, we visited a couple of friends (a couple who were friends, more to the point), and went our merry way around the area while we were booking interviews, eating fast-food and joining the sweaty, acne-ridden ranks of the British unemployed.

Stage Two was when Christina and Joseph left for snowy Romania to visit another friend and to help out/coo over with the friend’s newborn. Everything was packed and ready to go, we found ourselves waiting in the airport car park to be picked up by the bus for the very short trip to the airport, and then a thought struck me.

‘Car seat,’ I said to Christina.

With an ‘oh’, she took the car keys off of me, leaving me with Joseph who was eyeing up all the ladies at the bus stop. After a couple of minutes, Christina came back, car seat in hand, and all was good. They were now ready to check in.

In the line at the airport, we had a bit of “fun” with the bags, so Christina took off her coat and put it in the checked luggage. This is a plot point, and an important one. We did all the things that were necessary to get us through this bit, passports and whatnot, then we said a long goodbye just outside of security.

Sighing wistfully, my mind suddenly did that thing where you know that you’ve forgotten something, but it isn’t going to tell you until you’re outside a certain radius of the place that you are in right now. It confused and subjugated my poor little brain, until it decided to go into “default” and so I stared blankly into space while waiting for the bus to arrive to take me to the car park.

Getting there, I came out, walked towards the car and felt for my keys.

Funny thing about keys is that... life seems to be about them. You need keys for your house, your locker, your car and you even need a key for the little cabinet to keep all your keys in. I, at this time, especially needed one for my car.

Which is the one that I didn’t have.

Since Christina still had it.

And she didn’t have a phone.

And she was about to fly off to another country within an hour.

Joy.

English manly men do not panic  We've all seen Dad's Army, where the old man shouts out "don't panic" while obviously doing so.  Luckily, the other half of me, the Scottish bit, was a bit disconcerted so poked the English bit into action to actually do something, otherwise it would get all independent of myself.  I saw one of the car park people walk vaguely towards their car, so I rushed over, said that I needed to use their car as soon as possible due to the above reasons, so please, please, please, could you take me to the airport?

Yes, she said.

She drove us there in the same manner as Jack Bauer did after finding out that his daughter was kidnapped for the infinityith time.

Diving out of the car with a well trained ‘thank you’, and wondering how I was still standing upright after that type of car ride, I ran, ran, I tell you, up to security, praying frantically that this won’t become a complete frickin' nightmare. I explained everything to them, expecting a huge amount of help and assistance straight away. Happily, this did not happen, affirming that Luton hasn’t changed much over the years, bless ‘em.

After a bit of talk back and forth about who BlueAir was, everybody agreed that nobody could do anything at all, and that I had to go back downstairs to talk to the airline. Once again, everybody agreed that nobody could do anything, so after I prodded a bit more, they decided that the best thing to do was to put a call out using one of those red phones on the wall.

It was a small red phone attached to the wall, looking as if someone got some sort of idea that if you rang it, Batman might actually come.  In any case, a helpful person was on the other line and after hanging up, I rushed back upstairs to security, whereupon Christina was being escorted through by a Mr. McSecurity. It should have ended there but the thing is... is that the keys were in her coat which she loaded into the checked luggage earlier. Remember that plot point?

Flying from desk to desk afterwards, we eventually got the bag off the plane, the car keys were retrieved, the bag was checked back on, and we said another fare thee well. In this sweeping statement I missed out the bit when I got frustrated at EasyJetWoman’s amazing capacity of saying ‘I can’t do that’ until I was overly assertive at her, ending the problem. But other than that, no swear words were running through my internal dialogue so after two years in Slovakia I guess I have grown.

I paid the 10 quid for parking, and the first two songs to play on Radio 2 on the way home was the wildly inappropriate "Substitute" sung by Clout, and Bon Jovi’s "Living on a Prayer".

It was way too cheesy not to be a coincidence.