Lift Off
“Please sit down Madam. The plane is about to take off!”
Well this was different. Someone didn’t seem to have got the message. You know, the one about staying in your seat and buckling up at the moment you're about to set off skyward. All of this was going on behind me and I didn't bother to look round to see who was causing the commotion. For all I knew the trouble maker was standing up to try and get a better signal so she could send her mates a selfie from the cabin.
A few moments later the captain's voice came over the intercom and he didn’t bother to disguise his irritation. “Everybody needs to sit down!” Everybody? Was there more than one of them now? Was someone having second thoughts at the last minute? “If I'm accelerating down the runway and you're standing up, you're going to have a terrible problem. Sit down!” He put a special emphasis on the last two words and repeated them twice. It was an interesting way to start the short flight to Dublin, and one I'd never experienced before. The captain always sounds so assured on an aircraft, but this one had evidently lost his aura of sangfroid. But at last it seemed the message had finally penetrated whoever's abnormally thick skull was holding us up and after a few more minutes, the plane raced along the runway. At this point, Ali and I always hold hands, just in case it's for the last time ever, but today I was travelling alone. I resisted the urge to reach across the empty middle seat and offer a clammy mitt to the young man hiding beneath the pair of enormous white headphones beside the aisle, and instead gazed out of the window as we headed out over the North Cornwall coast. There below was Newquay, with a series of well loved landmarks falling away to the west. Fistral, Crantock, West Pentire, Carter's Rocks, the Cow and the Calf, the bulky outline of St Agnes Beacon near home. All of my playgrounds. As we climbed through the clouds I started to think about the new playgrounds where I'd be spending my time in just a few more days from now. The seat belt signs were switched off and a disorderly queue for the toilets formed within seconds. Boarding had only been delayed by twenty minutes but that was plenty enough time for a number of passengers to swallow another pint of Guinness in the departure lounge before making their way to the gate.
Dublin is a place where a lot of people like to go for the craic, and today, a Friday afternoon, was no exception. There were at least two groups of young men as far as I could tell, and because a certain airline likes to charge extra for passengers to choose their seats, they weren't all sitting together. Just behind me, two guys in their early twenties, who I soon realised were complete strangers, struck up a conversation, and it was impossible not to listen to every word they said. One was from my old home town in Falmouth, the other from a village just a couple of miles from where I live now. The latter was on the first instalment of a double beano weekend. Dublin today, Amsterdam next Friday. He was very excited about it all. Party cities. I needed to have a lie down just thinking about it. Come to mention it, the last time I had a bit too much of the falling down nectar was in Amsterdam in the summer of 2018. I met up with a local photographer who had been hiking in Scotland at the same time as ourselves a few months beforehand, and it soon turned out that neither of us were really drinkers. After we'd taken a few photos around the city centre together we had some beer. Quite a lot of it actually. It's not often I'm singing “Love Really Hurts Without You” at the top of my voice at half past midnight on a tube station concourse. I was a bit delicate at breakfast the next morning.
The cabin crew began the in-flight service. At the same time, the pilot decided to make what may have been an important announcement, but I didn't hear a word of it, such was the clamour among the first five rows to part with six euros for a small can of lager. As you've just learned, I like a beer myself, but I can manage without any for the duration of a one hour flight, you know. Unless I'm in Amsterdam. One of the two young fellows behind me went from announcing he wouldn't be having a beer until he was in Dublin, to ordering three cans in a heartbeat. Although one of them was for his new friend. I thought that was rather nice.
The thing with these short flights is that not long after the noise from the engines changes and you're cruising away towards your destination at maximum altitude, the steady thrum loses an octave once more as you begin to descend. Maybe that's what the captain was trying to tell us. Maybe he was making sure the lady who'd caused some bother earlier was going to behave this time. Or maybe he was putting in an order for a can of Moretti too. Perhaps he needed something to steady his nerves after the earlier incident. For a while we floated beneath the azure sky above a white sea of cotton clouds, before plunging through them and back into the greys, sea blues and greens of autumn in Northern Europe. Below us lay the famous city, pierced down the middle by the River Liffey, the darker colours splashed with patches of weak yellow light that promised much for the adventure to come. To the south stood the Wicklow Mountains, stoical and silent, already receding into the darkening purple hinterland of a November afternoon. Ireland was calling, just as it always has done.
For many on board, Dublin was the end of the journey, those groups of young party people reforming on the ground and racing for the exit and the buses into the city. I had much further to go. Tonight I'd be three hours south of the capital in Cork, where my long since departed Grandad was born at the start of the last century, and where much of the family still lives. A few days spending precious time with loved ones who I hadn't seen for far too long, sharing stories and drinking endless cups of tea. And then later, after I could take no more tea I'd be here, sitting alone on a distant headland in the far west, much like I so often do at home. So familiar, yet so new to me. So wild and untamed in this extraordinary remote peninsula at the edge of the world where Europe finally gives way to the vast and unforgiving Atlantic Ocean. To come to a place such as this was worth every inch of the journey.
Lift Off
“Please sit down Madam. The plane is about to take off!”
Well this was different. Someone didn’t seem to have got the message. You know, the one about staying in your seat and buckling up at the moment you're about to set off skyward. All of this was going on behind me and I didn't bother to look round to see who was causing the commotion. For all I knew the trouble maker was standing up to try and get a better signal so she could send her mates a selfie from the cabin.
A few moments later the captain's voice came over the intercom and he didn’t bother to disguise his irritation. “Everybody needs to sit down!” Everybody? Was there more than one of them now? Was someone having second thoughts at the last minute? “If I'm accelerating down the runway and you're standing up, you're going to have a terrible problem. Sit down!” He put a special emphasis on the last two words and repeated them twice. It was an interesting way to start the short flight to Dublin, and one I'd never experienced before. The captain always sounds so assured on an aircraft, but this one had evidently lost his aura of sangfroid. But at last it seemed the message had finally penetrated whoever's abnormally thick skull was holding us up and after a few more minutes, the plane raced along the runway. At this point, Ali and I always hold hands, just in case it's for the last time ever, but today I was travelling alone. I resisted the urge to reach across the empty middle seat and offer a clammy mitt to the young man hiding beneath the pair of enormous white headphones beside the aisle, and instead gazed out of the window as we headed out over the North Cornwall coast. There below was Newquay, with a series of well loved landmarks falling away to the west. Fistral, Crantock, West Pentire, Carter's Rocks, the Cow and the Calf, the bulky outline of St Agnes Beacon near home. All of my playgrounds. As we climbed through the clouds I started to think about the new playgrounds where I'd be spending my time in just a few more days from now. The seat belt signs were switched off and a disorderly queue for the toilets formed within seconds. Boarding had only been delayed by twenty minutes but that was plenty enough time for a number of passengers to swallow another pint of Guinness in the departure lounge before making their way to the gate.
Dublin is a place where a lot of people like to go for the craic, and today, a Friday afternoon, was no exception. There were at least two groups of young men as far as I could tell, and because a certain airline likes to charge extra for passengers to choose their seats, they weren't all sitting together. Just behind me, two guys in their early twenties, who I soon realised were complete strangers, struck up a conversation, and it was impossible not to listen to every word they said. One was from my old home town in Falmouth, the other from a village just a couple of miles from where I live now. The latter was on the first instalment of a double beano weekend. Dublin today, Amsterdam next Friday. He was very excited about it all. Party cities. I needed to have a lie down just thinking about it. Come to mention it, the last time I had a bit too much of the falling down nectar was in Amsterdam in the summer of 2018. I met up with a local photographer who had been hiking in Scotland at the same time as ourselves a few months beforehand, and it soon turned out that neither of us were really drinkers. After we'd taken a few photos around the city centre together we had some beer. Quite a lot of it actually. It's not often I'm singing “Love Really Hurts Without You” at the top of my voice at half past midnight on a tube station concourse. I was a bit delicate at breakfast the next morning.
The cabin crew began the in-flight service. At the same time, the pilot decided to make what may have been an important announcement, but I didn't hear a word of it, such was the clamour among the first five rows to part with six euros for a small can of lager. As you've just learned, I like a beer myself, but I can manage without any for the duration of a one hour flight, you know. Unless I'm in Amsterdam. One of the two young fellows behind me went from announcing he wouldn't be having a beer until he was in Dublin, to ordering three cans in a heartbeat. Although one of them was for his new friend. I thought that was rather nice.
The thing with these short flights is that not long after the noise from the engines changes and you're cruising away towards your destination at maximum altitude, the steady thrum loses an octave once more as you begin to descend. Maybe that's what the captain was trying to tell us. Maybe he was making sure the lady who'd caused some bother earlier was going to behave this time. Or maybe he was putting in an order for a can of Moretti too. Perhaps he needed something to steady his nerves after the earlier incident. For a while we floated beneath the azure sky above a white sea of cotton clouds, before plunging through them and back into the greys, sea blues and greens of autumn in Northern Europe. Below us lay the famous city, pierced down the middle by the River Liffey, the darker colours splashed with patches of weak yellow light that promised much for the adventure to come. To the south stood the Wicklow Mountains, stoical and silent, already receding into the darkening purple hinterland of a November afternoon. Ireland was calling, just as it always has done.
For many on board, Dublin was the end of the journey, those groups of young party people reforming on the ground and racing for the exit and the buses into the city. I had much further to go. Tonight I'd be three hours south of the capital in Cork, where my long since departed Grandad was born at the start of the last century, and where much of the family still lives. A few days spending precious time with loved ones who I hadn't seen for far too long, sharing stories and drinking endless cups of tea. And then later, after I could take no more tea I'd be here, sitting alone on a distant headland in the far west, much like I so often do at home. So familiar, yet so new to me. So wild and untamed in this extraordinary remote peninsula at the edge of the world where Europe finally gives way to the vast and unforgiving Atlantic Ocean. To come to a place such as this was worth every inch of the journey.