The only thing that has ever made me sad that I don’t have pierced ears.

Or possibly these. It’s so hard to decide.

You should totally place your orders now, I think. I feel there’s going to be a run on these.
Or a something on these.
Possibly a ban.

NB: One is not strictly in my garden, and the other is not strictly freaky, but both almost exactly fit that description (except for the one half of the description that they don’t). Anyway.

The first ( the one which is not strictly freaky). It is a Persimmon tree. Not freaky. No, the freaky thing is that yesterday there was a rat in it. At least, I think it was a rat. It was either a bloody big mouse, or quite a tiny cleanly looking rat, or a particularly small monkey with short arms, mouse-like ears, a twitchy pointy nose and a long tail. Monkeys like persimmons, right? Like the phrase.
The phrase… Um… “Slowly, Slowly, Catchee Monkey Who Likes Persimmons Because Monkeys Like Persimmons And That”.

As regular readers of this parish will know, I am anxious about many things (fuck, I’m anxious about EVERYTHING, let’s not hold back, it’s a blog, for god’s sake) but there is only one thing I am phobic about, and that is rodents. I’ve moved flat because of mice. I’ve stood on the edges of a bath for hours waving a heavy object, screaming and crying until I heard a trap snap. I’ve advised people not to move to Boston because I once saw a rat there.

And yet… I am managing to keep it at bay. Mainly because the rodent/mutant monkey was clearly interested in eating persimmons, and not in invading my personal space/murdering me in the night. If that changes, then we are Amber Level Go-Go-Gadget-Rodentphobia, where I spend most of my time singing the “I Saw a Rodent” song (it’s very high pitched, for an alto) and do not stop until I have a death certificate stained by the tears of some poor rodent mother brought in to identify the messy body in my hand. But for the meantime, the funny-looking monkey (or it might have been a funny, strange, exotic Californian bird. There’s absolutely no saying there weren’t wings hidden under that brownish-grey fur, and who says beaks can’t be twitchy and have whiskers?) is staying out of my space, and I am staying out of his. Bargain.

The second thing (not strictly in my garden) is a small child who, we discovered last week, is the source of the THUD. THUD-THUD. THUDTHUDTHUD. THUD. THUD. THUD-THUD that happens at some point of every day and kicks a hole in whatever concentration I’ve managed to muster by that point. We’d wondered if someone was experimenting in daytime fireworks, or some contractors had shonkily managed to work out a way of only doing their important ‘hitting stuff with other stuff’ work for an hour a day between 4ish and 5ish.

Nope.

Clog dancing kid practices every single day on the deck behind his house (and next to the end wall of my home office). So this I had already discovered. This was fine. I didn’t know why he did it, but I admired his temerity and commitment to mastering a difficult and not necessarily cool or hip, or rad or wicked skill - and yes, I was last a teenager sometime in the early nineties, since you ask - and could zone out the noise easily enough.

But then he started singing. The day before yesterday. I missed it, but My Beloved informs me it was “hits from the musicals, at a pitch that even a pre-pubescent boy can only achieve with the aid of a bulldog clip”. And yesterday, it got better. It was a full half hour of Tomorrow (“…tomorrow, I love ya, tomorrow, yar only a day away!”) from Annie. But not sung: played loudly, and with very little finesse whatsoever, on the ocarina. Or the swanee whistle. When it’s that bad it can be hard to tell which it is. Whichever it was, it was bad. I wanted to get you some video, for the sound alone (we can barely see him from our house, or only a shadow by craning necks around the corner of *shudder* persimmon trees) but I was actually bent double on the floor holding my stomach from laughing. I could hear from the study next door, my beloved doing the same thing. It was literally that bad.

I don’t know what talent show that wee man is rehearsing for, but whatever it is, I’m booking a ticket, and I’m going, and I’m voting for him, and him alone. Because he. Is. BRILLIANT.

In the last week or so - don’t ask - we have had cause to think ‘rationally’ and ‘logically’ and ’sensibly’ and ‘do what we should’ and ‘be grown up about it’.

Anyone who has known me, or read this blog for a while, knows these words made me itch. So, in order to deal with this other, more prosaic thinking, I procrastinated by making another plan. The kind of plan that makes me happy and calm, and that I might, because it is not rational, do.

I first had this plan - or a variation of it - when I was taking a gap year between school and university. I meant to work for a big chunk of the year, and then travel in a anxiety-safe anna-type-of-way for a while more. As it turned out, I spent a big chunk of the year unemployed and signing on, and then the rest trying to financially catch up and deciding irrationally to do a drama school course.

But before that I sat down in my bedroom, surrounded by timetables that I’d got from the big student travel place in the middle of Manchester, mapping out routes and stops, overnights and sleepers, transfers and quick changes, and all points inbetween. Being very much my mother’s daughter, there is little that entertains me as much as a few free hours and an armful of timetables.

And the thing is - there’s a lot more of America I want to see, even just get a taste of, however briefly - and I very much like trains. And the fact is, the fact that really means I can justify this to myself: I work very well on trains. I can get more done in a two hour train journey than I can in six hours at my desk, as a rule. My working is thinking, and writing, and if I can line enough work up to be doing the whole way round, the maximised writing I can do will pay for itself.

So my plan, currently, is this.

There are rail passes on Amtrak that last 15 days, and allow for eight separate portions of travel. From San Francisco, there are several different routes we could take - cross-country to a mixture of journeys out to somewhere far off, and back again - but I wanted to work out the best round-trip, and the one that we could have a mixture of sleeping arrangements without spending an extortionate amount of money or relying on any form of transport that isn’t a plane.

The train routes that would allow the longest round-trip, passing through the most states I haven’t already been to (more of that another time) happen, as well, to have some of the most romantic names I’ve ever heard.

Also, when I planned it out on a Ticket To Ride board - my current favourite board game and a bit of an obsession at the moment - it took up all the carriage counters each player starts off with, EXACTLY, with none left over. And even if that IS coincidence, I don’t care, it pleased the bejeezus out of me.

This is the fastest way the route could be done:

On the first day of the trip, the Coast Starlight would take us from San Francisco to Los Angeles, where we would have to stay overnight, and then have some of a morning to hang around in LA complaining again about how little we like LA (it is a smelly city, do not go there). Midafternoon, we would get on the Sunset Limited. And then stay on it for two whole days. Exactly two days and fifteen minutes later, if there weren’t any delays (which there will be), would get off in New Orleans. Then, after almost 23 hours in New Orleans (there are slightly faster ways than this, but they don’t involve me getting to go to New Orleans, and don’t give enough allowance for delays at the next stage), we could get the City of New Orleans (not the most romantic name, I admit) at lunchtime, and arrive in Chicago just after breakfast the next day.

From Chicago - which is a very nice city, but not one I have a driving urge to overnight in for no reason - we could get the Empire Builder - yes, THE EMPIRE BUILDER - midafternoon the same day (which gives a comfortable cushion for delays, if not an unbreakable one), and stay on THAT for two days until we get to Seattle. Or perhaps Portland. It splits just inside Washington state and takes the same amount of time to get to either. We’d have to overnight in whichever one we got to anyway, before hopping on the Coast Starlight - the route on which we started the trip - to roll through the Redwood forests and the mountains of Oregon and Northern California, albeit mainly in the dark, and arrive back in San Francisco the next morning.

In its fastest, form, the trip could be done within ten days, and use up five blocks of travel.
But as I say above, the ticket allows for fifteen days and eight blocks. And I’ll be damned if I’m not going to get value for my money. The thing to take into consideration with the big US routes is that, unsurprisingly, given the distance involved, there’s only one train a day on the majority of these lines, and so any overnight or change of plan most likely involves an overnight stay before catching the train onward at the same time you got off it the day before.

It seems like a couple of days in New Orleans might be the most sensible (or not, but certainly the most enjoyable) way of using a couple of extra nights, as well as meaning we could find a laundrette and get washing done, which would allow us to travel lighter. And the strong temptation is to break the long leg across the top of the country - the EMPIRE BUILDER, let us not forget - by simply getting off the train as it passes through somewhere remarkably beautiful (Glacier National Park seems to be the obvious choice) and spending a night and a day sleeping in a proper bed and marveling at the glory of nature before hopping the next day’s train.

That uses up another allowable chunk - even though it’s still the same line, getting on and off the EMPIRE BUILDER (seriously! What a frikking NAME!) that way counts as two. But that still leaves two unused segments of travel, though, because I have a need for neatness, and leaving them hanging doesn’t satisfy it. I’ve tried to work out a logical way I can avoid Los Angeles and take the gloriously named Pacific Surfrider, which skims the beaches all the way from the Central Californian Coast to San Diego, and still manage to get on the Sunset Limited (which has the added complication of only running three times a week) but I haven’t quite figure it out yet. Give me a day or two more with these timetables, and we might have a plan.

I think we can do this in the middle of September. I think we will.

I realise this is a lot of detail, but I’m determined to keep a proper record of this, and this is the best place for me to do that, so forgive me in advance.

[Oh, and anyone who is willing to pay me to write about this, by the way, is welcome to do so (though I think you all know that I'm just going to write about it anyway, so I can see I'm not exactly offering a pressing exclusive opportunity for you...)(*sigh*) (still though, anyone? No?)]

By the shores of the lake we arrived first thing in the morning, and laid our stuff out under a tree. We swam, we ate, we read, we slept, we swam again.

Hours passed. By lunchtime, the shores of the lake were busier. Huge family groups had arrived, carting truckloads of chairs, tables, shelters and grilling equipment and children from the car park down the stairs.

At the edge of one of these groups, the nearest one to us, the little boy sat a few feet away in red cart and a world of his own. I could only see him from the rounded middle upward, his legs tucked into the bright red cart with a handle on the front that, presumably, his parents could use to tow him from one place to another. Him and another child, in fact - there was another seat at the other end, for a second, smaller child who could converse with the mostly naked toddler on events of the day as they were pulled along, under a white plastic canopy with a scalloped fringe.

Or at least they could if his mouth wasn’t full. Because, for minute upon minute, while I sat and read my book, the chubby naked toddler sat, in the back of his trolley, surveying his domain and holding to him a packet of tortilla chips the same size as he was. And given the size that he was, this was no trifling bag of crisps.

Every few seconds he would dip a hand into the bag - not grabbing, or extending his reach, but almost a magical wave in the opening of the chip-sack that brought a single tortilla flying into his chip-magnetic fingers. And then into his waiting mouth. Chew chew chew. Next chip. Chew chew chew. Next chip. And all the time gazing out, lord of all he surveyed, a rotund miniature emperor, two-foot Nero. A two-foot Nero with a two-foot bag of crisps.

Every now and again - or more, when I could feel his little eyes burrowing into me and not be able to help but look - I would glance up from my book and catch the eye of the chip munching half-naked toddlerish buddha figure a half-dozen yards away. I would smile, and nod, until I realised that all I would be getting in return was a level stare from the Little Godfather, and then I scaled it down to a barely-there head-flick that someone so high in the East Bay Toddler Syndicated Crime Family would recognise and appreciate as a mark of respect.

And I did mean it as a mark of respect.
That stillness, the calm, chip-munching cart-sitting contentment that only a chubby half-naked toddler can fully embody: It reminded me very much of myself. Well, of myself in this picture, anyway.

And it did all the way up until the point that the covered red cart tipped in real-life slow-motion from upright to not-right position, without the chubby todfather raising one pudgy finger to make it so.
In fact, it surprised even him.
You wouldn’t have known he hadn’t seen it coming.
You wouldn’t, unless you were as luckily placed as I was, and able to see the cool stare slowly turn into a mask of wide-eyed surprise and a speeding up of chewing action on the particular chip he was eating as the cart tipped from 90° to 100°…. 120… 135… and I’ll swear he issued nothing but a little squeak of dismay just before the cart hit the floor (it was very, VERY like a scene from The Untouchables. Only with Al Capone being the one in the babycarriage).

His father, sitting nearby under a collapsable gazebo with several dozen members of extended family, threw his ukulele off his lap as he jumped up to right the situation, the cart, and his son. “Aiiiii, Papi” he said, voice filled with love as he picked the small half-naked big cheese off the floor and hugged him, and brushed the dust off his rounded shoulders “the whole world turned upside down, but you still have a hold of your chip. That’s my boy”.

And the little half-naked todfather’s eyes flicked over to me. And I gave him a smile, and his father too. And the miniature Nero slowly, with great intention, hugged his bag of chips to his chest (and his hips, his knees, and his almost-ankles), and put the tortilla chip, the one he had safely pinched between his fingers, into his mouth.

Why did the cart fall? An accident? A coincidence? Perhaps an orchestrated distraction technique on behalf of another arm of the Half-Naked East Bay Toddler Mafia? Perhaps all of the above. We”ll never know. Except… except…

But an hour later, L’il Papi spent literally half an hour beating the living shit out of a pine cone with a ginormous stick and giving me huge, toothy grins for every successful smash while I tried not to break something laughing at the amount of pleasure he was getting out of it.

I think we all know that somehow, somewhy - the pinecone had it coming.

This is really just a note in case anyone thought I was actually still in the UK, since I was writing things about being back in the motherland. I’m not. I’m back at home in San Francisco, at least for the time being, and just about sleeping rationally again.

I had forgotten what a heavy dose of Jetlag can be like. In fact, I’ve never had it so bad as I did going East and arriving in the UK.

Being on the West coast of the US, we have an -8hr difference to GMT. For those who don’t continually have to get their head around this, it’s simplest to think about it this way: If you are waking up at 8am, I am just going to sleep, because it is midnight. When you are finishing work at 5pm on Monday, I am just starting, because it is 9am Monday in my time zone. When you are three bottles of wine down and tits to the wind stumbling out of the restaurant at 11.30pm on a Friday night, I am just cutting the crusts off my cucumber sandwiches for high tea, because it is 3.30pm, and being three bottles of wine down by that hour is frowned upon.

Which is fine. I mean, strictly speaking, work-wise it’s a pain in the arse and has led to me losing a lot of my day to day writing work, because everyone’s decided who and what they’re publishing five hours before I can wake up, so it’s not ideal, but that’s just the way the world turns. Literally. So it’s fine.

What is not fine, or fun, are the things it does to your head when you try and move between time zones. It is worth remembering this. I didn’t.
Remember it.
I did, however, move between timezones.

It basically takes a day for your body to adjust for each timezone you’ve travelled through. That’s what they say. So with a destination that is 8 hours removed from your usual timezone, it should take your body eight days to adjust properly. That is the official line.

My body, however, pays no attention the official line, and seems to believe the way forward is to cram it into two days of physical and mental moronitude, and then just settle back in to its normally erratic state instead.

The first night after we arrived in the uk, I slept reasonably well, as I’d been on a night flight on which I’d managed about an hour of kip, and then managed to stay up until bedtime, although making less sense by the second, and with every glass of wine hitting me like a half-gallon bottle of whisky. So I slept like a daisy. I don’t think that’s a phrase. Never mind. I slept like a daisy that was asleep.

At 6am, after a very respectable 9 hours of sleep, I woke up. PING!

(It’s weird, I make a noise like a microwave when I wake up)

I was very pleased with myself. In just ONE night, I thought to myself, I had beaten jetlag completely, and would not only be ADMIRED by all my friends and peers, but I would probably henceforth be asked to write MANY BOOKS on the topic of “Beating Jetlag Like The EXPERT”.

Unfortunately, at 8am, my brain decided that it was in fact midnight, and that since this was the time it traditionally went to sleep, it would be going to sleep now.

I don’t know what it thought the preceding nine hours were. Presumably the mother of all naps. But at 8am, pretty much on the dot, my brain went to sleep. Like a DAISY that was ASLEEP, it would not be woken.

I tried giving it some cold showers. Well, I mean, I tried giving them to my brain by way of giving them to my body, I mean. I didn’t stick a shower nozzle up my nose. That would be terrible. That didn’t work.

I tried inducing wakiness with a double-sized, octuple-strength coffee, which I washed down with half a blister pack of caffeine tablets. Unsurprisingly, this punched me twice in the bowels, but my brain still wouldn’t wake up. Even once.

We had to go and catch a bus, a tube, two trains and a cab in order to see the second arm of family we were excited to be visiting, so My Beloved attached something like two jet-engines-with-stabiliser-wheels-attached to me, and we somehow left the house and started on the journey.

All I can remember is looking around me with wide blinking eyes like an iguana with new contacts, and staring at every element of the world as if it was something I had never seen before but which I suspected might be about to run up to me and pee on my shoes. I burst into tears at least five times, never for any reason that either of us could see coming, least of all me, because I couldn’t see things like “we’ll have to get off the train sometime” coming. Because my brain was asleep, and would not wake up. As previously discussed.

I have been afeared to discuss it with My Beloved much in the meantime - I fear he was also on autopilot and on discovering that he’s happily not-at-all-married to a complete jetlag moron and had just forgotten, might dump me - but from what I remember, he did a very good job of steering a cluefree, beligerent, stubborn and occasionally tearful woman around London. What it is about thinking it should be asleep that makes my brain behave like someone with her brain capacity cut down to 45% hormonal teen 20% despot, 15% farm mammal and 20% idiot, I have no idea: I’m only grateful that My Beloved managed to wrangle me onto a train and not, as I must have attempted (SURELY!) into the nearest cinema showing Twilight.

By 4pm that day I was fine. Of course I was, it was wakey-uppy time. And with a few pints, I was able to convince myself to sleep earlyish and, quite soon, get back on a better cycle.

(It is the British way: A few pints solves everything. It is, in this case, not frakking wrong)

And on the way back?

Well, you’re asking the wrong person. The time difference coming back means that one should get back to California, want to go to sleep early, and then want to wake up ridiculously early.

My thing is, I can sleep. Whatever happens, Once I am asleep (and that’s the good thing about jetlag: it can certainly twatkick insomnia for a few days) I stay asleep. For a long time. And My Beloved is so used to me not-sleeping that he was happy to go to bed whenever I gave in to it. So the first night I had 17 hours sleep, the next night 15, on and off, and so on through the next couple until I got back to normal. Ish. And now I’m back to about five. Well done jetlag!

So there.
I’m here. Not there. Just in case I was making anyone think I’m still there. I’m here. For now.
And the jetlag has passed.

Seriously, give it two days, you’ll be fine.^TM c
[NB: phrase trademarked and copyrighted, in full expectation of my ANNA EXPERT'S TWO DAY PLAN book offers rolling in]

That sounds rude. It isn’t. There must be another way of saying it. Plug your gaping sausage hole? No. Fill the void a lack of good meat quality cylindrical products have left you with? Again? Man, there is really no phrase for that that doesn’t sound dirty. Weird.

Being away from home for an extended amount of time, it’s likely that there are certain foodstuffs you might get a little obsessive about not being able to get. As those with long memories or long concentration spans might remember, squash was one of mine. Not the vegetable, the juice: and certainly not the juice OF the vegetable, which is wrong and weird and only served in the kind of cafes where the serving staff have their glossy straight hair malformed into dreadlocks and rub rocks on their armpits because deodorant is apparently too representative of evil corporations and society’s unreasonable demand that people packed into small urban spaces should consider not smelling bad where at all possible.

I discovered I could get squash if I wanted to. One of those evil sweet-smelling corporations deliver all manner of groceries now as well as books and dvds and those other types of evil things. You can get beans from them too: proper baked beans of the kind that comfort a person when they are sad and need some manner of non-too-fancy substance on toast. Of course, you pay a ridiculous amount for ex-patriate goods, and after a while, the novelty of being able to get them weighs up against the pain of having to pay a premium for them (because let’s face it: they’re ONLY squash and beans. Or you could spend your money on something local and cheaper and yummy: not a hard decision).

But the perfect sausage proved elusive. We have tried a goodly number of sources and not managed to find anything like a good, handmade cumberland or lincolnshire sausage. There are many german and german-descendants making more-than-decent bratwurst which are also lovely, but thick of skin and nice with pickles and sauerkraut and so solid in texture that you could probably take out a large mammal from a short distance with a mediocre aim and a girly throw. They’re good, in their own way, and they must be some source of comfort to ex-pats of german extration, and there are many. But they aren’t the sausages I was looking for. Never. There are also hot dogs, of course, but let’s let those go unmentioned, as unmentionable as they mostly are.

So on coming back to the UK for a three week trip, it was a basically a hunt for the mighty sausage for me, homesickness-quenching-wise. That and a couple of particular meals from particular restaurants that I couldn’t imagine being within 500 miles of and NOT ordering.

So the particular meals at the particular places were dutifully done, one being a brunch in our favourite cafe in Brighton that had the pleasing knock-on effect of making us feel like moving back there would be a thing that we would be perfectly ok doing (it’s a mighty breakfast indeed that can promise future happiness at 6000 miles remove. Respec’) The other was a meal at pizza express, taken on my own on a rainy night in Glasgow with a glass of white wine and a book, and found to be quite so disappointing and unable to match up to nostalgia that it had the pleasing knock-on effect of creating one less thing to miss when I’m in San Francisco.

Sausages? Yes. I found sausages. I found sausages in sausage sandwiches, in full breakfasts, crowning piles of mashed potato and nestling in batter. Some of the sausages were very bad. They were a nasty pink, flavourless or textureless, or saturated with inedible oil reserves and containing something that you hoped was gristle, because it was the least horrendous possibility you could imagine.

But there were enough good sausages to satisfy. At people’s barbeques, reputable sausage-dealerships and some other of those Brightonian cafes I will now crave instead of stupid Pizza Express (seriously, Pizza Express people, you’re diluting a perfectly good brand and also flagging up your low-calorie options in the worst possible way. Stop it). Sausages remain one of the food things I have missed the most, and are likely to remain so.

Well, and beans. You can’t have too many beans. I noticed a worrying trend while over there, by the way, for full breakfasts to not come with very many beans, with inferior beans or, worst of all, with no beans. NONE.

Seriously, the second best breakfast I had while over there was at the Isle of Mull hotel in Craignure, when I was presented with a breakfast buffet, and came away with a rack of granary toast, and a single, good local sausage… floating in an entire SEA OF BEANS that took up the rest of the generously sized plate. Brilliant breakfast. Brilliant.

So what was my point, again? Ah yes. As someone living in “Away” and returning for a visit after having plenty of time to get homesick, you will most likely find yourself fixating on one or more particular foodstuffs that have taken on an importance out of all proportion with their level of gourmetishness (unless they are sausages you were fixated with, in which case you generally will find them to be just as perfect a culinary creation as you ever could have imagined or remembered).

Most importantly, you will want to ensure that you have stocked the cupboards and the freezer with a high proportion of healthy, fibre-filled foods and sketched out at least a preliminary exercise regime for your return to your current home in the land of FarAway. Because you may - and this is purely hypothetical, of course - you may be about the size of a house when you return. Accumulated homesickness and a punch-gut full of jetlag are, it turns out, two of nature’s headiest appetite stimulants.

One of the best things I heard all holiday was from a young man at Boots in Stanstead airport.

So I was grabbing a few pharmaceutical and make-uppy bits before our flight, and impatiently waiting for the till, and hoping that no one would hold up the queue but no, of course, it is forever my luck, the man just in front of me had a few important questions about his purchase. I’d have guessed him to be about 25, if it didn’t make me sad to think of someone of 25 being this clueless.

He’d picked up a disposable cardboard camera. You know the kind, they cost less than a fiver, can be used once and once alone, come in a foil packet, you get them at weddings sometimes, have to be wound on by hand, sometimes have a flash which you very rarely remember to use and, when you’re done you have 24 or 36 prints or whatever. He’d picked this up, I had seen him looking at the packet, and then he took it to the till, waited his turn and asked:

“Is this video capable?”

The man behind the till just stared at him, weighing up the question.

“It’s just a camera.” he said.

“Yeah” said Master Clueless “But will it do video? Or does it just do pictures?”

Oh my son, my son, I wanted to say. Not only does it not do video, but there’s no viewing screen, no auto-focus, no anti-red eye, no way of plugging it into your computer or connecting wirelessly to facebook. And what’s more: when it has taken a small amount of pictures - hardly any, really - you’re going to have to carry it down to a shop, pay another amount of money, and then wait some matter of DAYS perhaps before you get to see the pictures.

I almost felt tempted to tell him this, since I couldn’t possibly follow him around and see it with my own eyes but no, I decided: why spoil the surprise? It’s just going to be too, too beautiful when it does come.

I’ve more of this series to post once I’ve time to do them, but one thing that struck me in the light of everyone reading the ryanair post was that I wanted to point out one thing I’ve noticed a LOT in my visit home: people are ACTUALLY lovely.

I’ve cracked jokes with ticket takers when they should have been stern. I’ve seen youths (on more than several occasions) that I have previously considered to be twats stand up and leave Old People seats for Old People boarding. Kindness has been offered to me. At the sight of tears, sympathy has been given me by complete strangers. And I have liked being here.

I didn’t think I was going to like being Here so much. Being Away, you build a mental image of Here that means you don’t want to be there anymore, because it’s easier that way. And while there are many bits of Here I am not that keen on, the comfort in the knowledge that people are essentially nice, will keep me going a while.
(Or at least until I sober up and finish the rest of these posts I have written in my diary….)

Tomorrow - flights. Long ones.

And I would like to thank the lovely peoples of London for making us welcome, where they have. Also the peoples of Suffolk, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, Gloucestershire, Brighton, Norway (Unte), Glasgow, Bunessan (Isle of Mull), Iona, Craignure, Shropshire, London again and all points inbetween for their welcome and their patience.

When I moved to California a couple of years ago, I would quite often worry that I smelled funny. Or looked funny. Or was emitting weird high-pitched whistling noises as I bent over. Or that there was some other thing about me that was making people want to steer clear.

This turned out not to be the case (well, not generally the case, at least) - it’s just the normal way of things. Standing in a supermarket aisle, puzzling over whether there was a single type of chilli sauce I hadn’t tried yet (and any one that tasted like my favourite peri-peri from home), I would suddenly realise that I was flanked by polite Americans, not wanting to pass either side of me, even though I’d left a clear three or four feet between myself and a shelf, because they might, by some terrible accident, brush their person against my person [NB: not a euphemism] or otherwise invade my personal bubble [ditto].

At dinner or lunch, waiting staff would move around you, placing dishes and refilling glasses without the slightest nudge - unless they had to place something on a part of a table that meant somehow invading your space, at which point they’d murmur, with great apology, “pardon my reach” - before throwing something on the table in a swift, seamless motion you wouldn’t have noticed without their pointing it out to you in advance.

Far from being the touchy-feely California culture I might have been led to expect, these were a society of people far more - literally, at least - far more stand-offish than the ones I’d left behind in my rainy motherland.

It amused me greatly at the time. I felt like I was walking around in some kind of protective bubble; like the forcefield had been not only invented, but was automatically placed around you at US immigration, for the comfort and safety of you and everyone around you.

Almost two years later, of course, the things that seemed silly are normal. And then you come back to your privacy-loving, reserved, withholding, overly-polite darling motherland for a visit and discover that far more than you ever realised, far more than you ever remembered, EVERYONE IS STANDING TOO CLOSE.

At the baggage claim they huddle together and crowd toward the carousel as if for warmth, meaning that the only eyeline you have with your luggage is a half-second glimpse before it disappears behind your neighbour’s shoulder, and no chance of grabbing it at all. In the line at the newsagent, you have to think twice to check whether you remember offering anyone a piggyback to the sweetie counter, before realising that it’s just the next customer up in line. Where “line” is a polite way of saying “your bum”. As you type your pin into the chip-and-thing machine, you have to fight off the temptation to brush people off your shoulders, like dandruff, or flies, or flies with dandruff.

And it seems completely contrary to the nature of the countries you’ve been in. And it seems as though, if you’d been asked about it, a long time ago, you would have answered with complete confdence, the direct opposite way around: but that’s the way it is. Presumably because there’s safety in numbers and wisdom in crowds, and it’s a small country, if you get too close to the edge you might fall off or get eaten by angry cockles, or mussels, but whatever the case, it is just so, and I just SO VERY wish it was not, but EVERYONE IS STANDING TOO CLOSE and it is REALLY ANNOYING.

This has been a public service announcement on behalf of my nerves.

Before you left the country to go and live in the “Far Away”, you never would have thought twice about this sign:

Now you think it is the most brilliant thing ever, and will risk the funny looks of the nosy prats on the hotel reception next to it to get a photograph.

You will also delight in using phrases like “nosy prats”.

As we are all aware, the UK is a remarkably small place. Many people wherever you have been living while in the “far away” will confirm this, given the fact that as soon as you mention you are from there, they will say “OH! I have a friend from London! Do you know Simon?!” (even if you originally mentioned you were from a corner of the UK far far away from London).

But returning to the UK after a while - especially, like me, after a matter of a couple of years - you start to wonder whether maybe, you DO know Simon after all (actually, having said that, if you work in the tech industry or hang around with as many geeks as I do, you will almost certainly know Simon, as most of the people in that industry are called that. That or Paul. And when I say “that” I mean “Simon”. Not “That”).

In fact, you start to wonder whether you know everybody, because although when you left you might remember not knowing that many people at all, on returning, you’ll recognise people. You can’t think where you know them from - work? Bus routes? Pubs? Friend of a friend? Secret Ex-husband?Newsagent? Celebrity? All at once? - but somehow, everyone is suddenly maddeningly familiar.

For the first few days back in the country I kept wanting to rush up to people and say “Hello!?! What are YOU doing here?! And where do I know you from, again?” - but luckily I am not so Californian as all that, already. Because of course I didn’t know them. Yet I couldn’t work out why my brain thought I did.

So it was a relief when My Beloved turned around and asked whether I was getting as freaked out by how many people seemed familiar as he was. They’re not actually all your friends: they just look British.

They just, I slowly realised as the number of them grew (and the number of people I know stayed humbly small), look British. Having spent a lot of time around people whose features, clothing, carriage and demeanor all reflect something other - whether American, or whatever - I think there was just something inherently British about people that was familiar enough that it would start ringing bells. And it was nothing to do with race - whatever that aforementioned pillock in the lift at Heathrow airport might say - just little clues about the facial structure, or haircut, or clothing choices or walk or mannerism that add up to someone your brain thinks you should know.

Either that or I know a fuck of a lot more people than I previously thought I did.
Go on: ask me if I know your friend “Simon from London”.

Dearest Ryanair,

Hello! Just a quick note to tell you that I will never, ever, be flying with you again. Never. That I will be seeking out any and all possible alternatives, and take whichever route to my destination that means I get to avoid setting foot on one of Ryanair’s flying flea markets from now until you go into receivership. Not for lack of my custom, obviously: just because you’re too dreadful to exist in any reasonable world.

I realise you’re probably shrugging and making that corporate ‘meh’ face that is intended to convey the very true fact that you’ve plenty of customers, that my custom (rare anyway, what with me living abroad) will not be missed, and that you couldn’t give a shit whether I fly with you or not, and that’s fine. I would expect nothing less from you.

I just needed to get this down on paper somewhere, because goodness knows it can’t be said too often:
You suck, Ryanair. You suck, and I hate you, Ryanair.

Reasons I hate Ryanair
- I hate Ryanair because you seem to take pleasure in misleading passengers.
- I hate Ryanair because you pretend that your shitty attitude is excusable because it is ‘no frills’ and compensated for by low prices, and then heap hidden charge upon hidden charge on your customers.
- I hate Ryanair because you seem to have no respect at all for the people who choose to use your service.
- I hate Ryanair, because in fact, you seem to believe that treating people like crap is the punishment they deserve for being stupid enough to fly with you in the first place.
- I hate Ryanair because you seem to have spent a long time working out, in detail, what it means to provide good customer service, and then made a conscious decision to do the polar opposite of that, in every single instance.

You might say that it is “transparent” to advertise the base price of your flight (whether it be £1 or £20, it bears no real relation to anything, let’s face it) and then to detail the other costs as if they were somehow optional or reasonable, but you’re fooling no one.

For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure - and I imagine that not a single person on the board at Ryanair would actually choose to ever fly on their shitty excuse for an airline - I can outline some of the more annoying things added to your fare when you purchase a ‘no frills’ Ryanair flight online, outside of airport taxes and vat which are, of course, actual real things.
- There’s the fee for booking online.
- There’s a fee for checking in online, too, which you can do 15 days beforehand. Which is good, because if you turn up to the airport without printing out your boarding pass or somehow having lost it in the intervening days, you will be charged £40 to print out a new one. Yes. £40. Unless they have machines at the airport where you can print a replacement (and many of Ryanair’s destination airports won’t). £40 for a 6-inch piece of cardboard.
- There are the fees for every piece of checked baggage. It should be noted here that the ‘only one carry-on bag’ rule is enforced more insanely by ryanair than any other airline. I was refused my ’second piece of carry on luggage’ (a 75cl bottle of water) at the gate unless I could fit it in my handbag. Worth noting too, that Ryanair’s carry-on baggage allowance is smaller than anyone else, and a bag size around 1-inch smaller in all dimensions than standard luggage sizes. You can buy a special Ryanair-sized wheelie case that Ryanair have made in partnership with one particular bag company, but it costs £100 (and is too small to bother using as carry-on for any other airline).
- They’ll try and sell you ‘priority boarding’, and insurance, and all manner of other crap. Most of which is ‘opt out’ rather than ‘opt in’ during the booking process.
- About a billion other things that I can’t be arsed to dredge from my memory, and am hoping never to see again. They’d charge you for every yard of check-in terminal they made you shuffle along if they could. *Please god that doesn’t give them any ideas.*

Once at the airport, any passenger can expect to be treated like cattle, shuffled into straggling, unruly lines that have no organisation whatsoever because putting queueing barriers up makes pulling passengers for closing flights into a new line impossible. Pulling customers from the main queue to one for closing flights is always necessary, however, as the lines are always long, and slow, because there are only ever about two check-in desks open per thousand customers or so. But that’s the same for any budget airline.

For Ryanair, “Check-in desks” is the wrong term, though. These are bag drop desks. Strictly nothing else. Any customer who doesn’t realise, or has brought an extra bag they suddenly need to check, or left any other part of the aforementioned ridiculous booking system out, will be turned away (generally after an hour or so of queueing) to go to a ‘ticket sales desk’, where they will be able to purchase the right to check a bag, and pay any other fees. They will, of course, also need a new boarding pass printed out with the amount of luggage amended, which will cost them another £40. The ticket sales desk - at least on the day we were at Stanstead - claims to only take cash. They will then need to join the back of the ‘bag drop desk’ line again.

The choice of airports and location of such aside - my sister post “I Hate You, Stanstead, More Than Words Can Say” will be available at some point in the future - my main argument for the monumental suckage of Ryanair are the things that happen when you get on board.

On one 70 minute flight I took this last weekend, this is what happened:

- Before the doors closed, pompous classical pops were pumped through the onboard speakers. These were interrupted every minute or so by loud, aggressive adverts for J2O (“Now that you’ve made your flight, what better refreshment than an overpriced mediocre juice drink from concentrate etc? …”), Ryanair’s partnership with a car rental company, and for the ‘bar and bistro’ service we could look forward to, with several branded names of coffee, hot chocolate etc.
- As this was happening, cabin crew came round and handed out menus/price lists of the things mentioned on the advert and other available consumables. These were hilariously exorbitant. During the very short flight, the crew came round once for ‘pre-orders’, and the beverage trolley and bar came through the cabin three other times.
- Immediately after take-off, they played the J2O advert again, but REALLY LOUD.
I now hate j2O as well.
- “We will now be coming through the cabin selling copies of the independent newspaper for your inflight reading pleasure. These are £1.50 each” shouted the speakers above our heads, marking the moment the Independent sank lower in our estimation than ever before.
- “This is just an announcement” shouted the speakers mere seconds after the paperboy had made his way down the aisle “to remind customers that all Ryanair flights are now strictly NON SMOKING” - which seemed fair and reasonable. All of everyone’s flights are non-smoking… “To that end, we would like to offer the opportunity to buy some of Ryanair’s exclusive collection of smokeless cigarettes, which offer all the nicotine and experience of smoking that you want, but without the smoke, which you can use on any of or flights or airports, or anywhere else. We will now be passing through the cabin if you would like to purchase, or have any other questions”.
- The bar came through, doling out their ’special offer’ of two spirit miniature bottles for the price of one, which is both irresponsible AND misleading, seeing as the price of one tiny miniature was already about eleventy billion pounds.
- After an announcement of several minutes and several dozen brand names length, a trolley came through offering perfumes and other duty-free type goods.
- After another announcement, the same trolley came through again, because there was a special offer this week on sports watches, and fuck knows we’d've hated to miss out on that.
- “Ladies and Gentlemen, it is our special pleasure to announce that it could be your lucky day. We will now be coming through the cabin offering Ryanair’s incredible scratchcards, offering incredible prizes and with some portion of the money that we won’t elaborate on going to children’s charities. You could win a car, cash, or even vouchers for Ryanair flights in the future” Oh what a treat. “And there’s a special offer meaning that these tickets are five for only ten pounds this week. We have a target of tickets to sell this flight, so please help us meet that as we pass through the cabin offering this remarkable opportunity.” They continued, like we had ANY vested interest in helping them meet their sales targets. Or any interest at all.

Literally, as soon as one sales pitch and product march up and down the aisle had ended, the next begun. As the flight ended, a fanfare went off, announcing that “Ta-da-ta-DAH! This Ryanair flight landed on time!”, and we were supposed to hand them some kind of mental medal for managing to do the ONE AND ONLY THING we had paid them to do in the first place: get to the place they were going, at the time they said they were going there. Because if you can’t charge people again, you might as well try and get a fucking round of applause out of them, right?

While I know that the cabin crew and staff of Ryanair are people doing their job, and that the decisions on policy and company personality are taken far above their heads, and that they are, at end of day, only following orders…

And while I know that it is not easy to deal with people who are grumpy and tired and fractious because they have been pushed around like cattle all day, I cannot but hate the job it is that they do. I hate the game, not the player, but it’s hard to differentiate the two sometimes. Particularly when the players are sometimes as astoundingly surly, dismissive and smugly unhelpful as some of the ryanair staff I’ve met. Still, poor lambs. It must be hard dreaming that one day you’d have all the glamour and travel and opportunity and responsibility of an airline steward/hostess/whatever-we’re-calling it-this-week, and then you end up a cross between a cheap chain-pub bartender and a market trader, with just a touch of prison guard thrown in for good measure.

I can’t fault your ability to tap into a market of travel industry glamour-seekers ready to have their souls crushed for a steady income and all the flights to third-rate regional airports they could dream of, Ryanair - but what you must do to source a steady stream of cut-price pilots, I shudder to imagine.

There’s just so much to hate about Ryanair.
Apart from the positive effect that after flying Ryanair, every other flight feels like a business class ticket on a luxury airline (even easyjet, who I flew with straight after ryanair yesterday. In comparison, it was like stepping into the rolls royce of air travel. seriously) there’s just so much about you, Ryanair, that sucks, that it’s hard to put a finger on what it is about the Ryanair experience infinitely worse than any other carrier - including, yes, the US domestics, before anyone says it. Why it is that one Ryanair flight can undo almost all the relaxation and calm that a week’s holiday might have given you? What is, if you’ll excuse my American colloquialisms, the epitome of suckiness that ensures though I intend to fly every which where and every which who in the future, I will never, ever fly Ryanair again?

The thing that sums up how much you suck and/or should be hated, vilified, and ignored, Ryanair, is this:

I think I realised it when I was trying to work out what the weird thing was about the seating area. It wasn’t legroom - heaven knows no airline has any of that anymore - it was the fact that the seat pockets have been completely removed. Presumably this is because it stops people trying to inconvenience the cabin crew by using them, then potentially leaving stuff in there, which would slow the cleaning process between the flights, and mean that the current practice of embarking the new passengers within ten minutes of disembarking the last lot would be subject to unthinkable holdups.

This means that the safety information about what to do if the plane crashes is given on a sticker, stuck to the back of the seat ahead at eye level for the whole flight, which is charming. But I realised another possible ramification of their taking the seat pockets away as we descended into London Stan… sorry, Remote East-Anglia Stanstead, and it sums up everything I hate about Ryanair, and why I hate them so very much.
It is this:

- Taking the seat pockets away means that there are no small, discreet white bags tucked into easy reach for passengers who might feel ill.
- Sick bags might not be the most important or glamorous part of flying, but there are plenty of people who get very nauseous in aeroplanes, whether due to nerves, or air pressure, or over-indulgence, or any combination of the above.
- Generally, people seem to get the most sick on the final descent. I don’t, generally, I’m lucky, but I’ve seen the change in pressure and usual turbulence at this point have some quite colourful effect on people around me on flights.
- It’s not a point at which a steward could be called to give you a sick bag (or sell you one, most likely) as they too will be strapped in to their seats for landing. And it’s generally not a sensation people plan for in advance.
- So it’s the fact that in the eventuality that the process of being in a landing plane (or whatever) makes you ill, your Ryanair passenger has no alternative but to vomit on their own lap.

- And then almost certainly be charged for the clean-up fee.

It’s this kind of thing that sums up for me all the most insidious, petty, mean things about the way Ryanair choose to treat their customers.

Bad service doesn’t cover it. It’s like an utter disdain, complete contempt for people who are fool enough to want to travel with them. It may be a great business model, but it’s a horrible attitude to have to your customers. And just a really unpleasant way to treat people.

And that, Dear Ryanair, is why, though a trip I took this weekend will remain beautiful in my memory regardless of the fact we stupidly decided that Ryanair was the most efficient travel solution, it is not a mistake I will make again. I will find any other mode of travel, any other route, anything at all that ensures I never have to set foot on a Ryanair plane again.

Because you suck, Ryanair. Really, REALLY hard.

Love anna