What a Day. Almost Exactly

Transcribed from my messy notepad while in transit. Well, an attempted transcription. 21/9/09

Well I’m a bit tired for masses of textual output right now - I’m currently about ninety minutes from Kuala Lumpur. It’s coming up to 7:20pm local time, I think that’s 11.20am GMT, but I’ve lost track. So that’s twenty hours travel time so far from Bradford yesterday. I’ll jump straight into the action by announcing my stupid jacket ended up costing me a little over £100. Well, I say ‘stupid jacket’ - more stupid me for a) leaving it at my mum’s house, meaning I had to head back there before the bus station, and b) for cutting it so damn fine in the first place. We (my mother insistent she be present to ‘see me off’) got to the bus station literally as the driver was pulling out (of the bay, not in that Catholic kind of way). Waving frantically at him to stop, he was having none of it. How rude: sticking to his schedule and not waiting for me. Asking at the National Express office for advice, the man frowned as he informed me it was the last London-bound coach of the day. However, he suggested by taxi I might be able to get to Leeds before its scheduled departure and just hop aboard. Worth a shot. My mum, of course, had to tag along too, no doubt reasoning a bit of highly-panicked tension would ease the situation. We were making good time, zooming through amber-going-on-red lights, weaving in and out of traffic, ploughing into the occasional cat and small child. The whole twenty minute scene became horribly reminiscent of a sequence from season 3 of 24, but not because of the dangerous driving. Anyone who’s seen it may remember a part where Jack and his squad are stealthily entering a building where they’re certain the baddy (I think his name is Saunders, but without Google I’m lost for verification…which is where transcribing something from a notepad gets tricky - do I look it up right now and cheat? Or do I add a pointless parenthesis-enclosed section to pad out my word count? Who knows? If you do, let me know. Anyway, he’s the Oxbridge bio weapon-toting English villain - now read back before the initial bracket to make sense of what comes after this one) is hold up, and you’re thinking ‘YES! He’s going down!’ as it flicks between shots of their advance toward the control room, and Saunders (I’m sticking with Saunders) being completely oblivious to his impending ass-whooping. The tension builds as they’re about to smash the shit out of the door just in the nick of time. ‘FREEZE SCUMBAGS!’ (or something equally PG-13) is roared as broken wood fragments and a million guys with guns fill the shot. A few seconds later comes the dreadful realisation that they’re at completely the wrong place. To use a Bradford term, they’d been skanked. With two minutes to spare, competent taxi driver man had dropped us at the train station, not the coach station as requested. I was so psyched and ready to run, we just paid the man and ran for the signpost-devoid terminal, so by the time we’d made our own dreadful realisation, he’d already buggered off £20 the richer. Argh! What a prick. Catching up with the coach was now off the table entirely, but ‘it’s okay,’ I thought - Jack always gets his man, eventually, even if he has to pay dearly for it. While forking out £83 for a train ticket to London isn’t quite the same as shooting your boss in the head, wrapping him up and DHLing the body to your local international bio-terrorist, it still stung.

So that was that. It was buy the ticket or not get down to Stansted for my flight at all. Spend £83 to not waste £188 + £45 + £120. It simply had to be done. Oh well, on the plus side, I’d arranged to meet my good friend Jodie initially at 8.30pm when the original bus from Bradford was due in to Victoria Coach Station. By train I’d got to London an hour and a half earlier, so we had more time to catch up. We met at Kings Cross where the decision was made (preventing any further bus-missings) to head directly to my Stansted-bound bus stop, THEN find a nearby drinkery. With my classic directional ineptitude on full display, it took a while to find, but fortunately BlackBerry #2 was on hand to provide some Google Maps action, after #1 had met a Buckley-esque watery end just days before. Combining that with my trusty £1.99 compass, we were able to navigate from Victoria tube station to our destination without too much trouble. It was great to see Jodie again, and the pub we found just across the road was the very aptly-named Traveller’s Inn. We caught up over a beer and a milkshake, a drink not enough pubs offer! Two hours of chin-wagging later (with a small about of talking between), we headed back over the road where, most kindly she watched over my stuff while I went to the toilet - that being the most irritating thing for solo traveller laden with bags. Forced to risk putting your stuff in a puddle of wee while cramming yourself into a tiny cubicle is no fun at all. Promising to keep in touch and send a load of poorly-worded postcards, the bus turned up and we said our goodbyes.

From then it was to be and hour and a few minutes to Stansted Airport. Only there was almost complete gridlock in central London around Marble Arch and we moved barely a hundred yards in forty minutes. Just as I was becoming increasingly certain that some Anti-Me-Getting-On-That-Flight conspiracy was afoot, our thoroughly irritated driver broke free of the traffic and started speeding toward Essex like a coked-up Chelmsford fuckwit after a night at Gatecrasher. We arrived around thirty minutes late, which was perfect timing for checking in and going through security. By 12.20 we were told to advance to our gate for what was to be Stansted’s final departure of the evening. Oh, this wasn’t before I was treated to an intimate body search by (unfortunately) an elderly man pushing 70, not one of those none-existent attractive twenty-somethings working in airport security. Tactfully sliding the back of his hand over my crotch either as the final search protocol or a ’thanks for not being a terrorist’ parting gesture, he waved me through with a cheeky smile.

Since then it’s all been very routine, including my subtle switch back to the present tense. Air Asia seems a very competent and good-value airline. The plane’s upholstery is a bit dated (think fabric from an early 1990’s DFS advert, or that couch dumped on your street) but the leg-room is definitely to western size, not, as I feared, a shorter oriental spec. In fact thinking about it, there’s a good few inches more than on Ryan Air, which means there’s at least a good few inches. And at the risk of sounding like a filthy pervert, the air hostesses are all very easy on the eye. It’s strange because it’s the exact team glamorously adorning the Air Asia front web page, so having been on the site tons of times in the last few weeks to do my obligatory post-purchase price check to (needlessly) assure myself I got a better deal, they all seem oddly familiar.

As this piece runs out of steam, and I out of time before landing, I’ll just note that this is the first plane journey I’ve taken where an entire day’s sunshine has passed me by. Travelling against the earth’s rotation the sun rose and set without about six hours, through which I mostly slept. It’s quite peculiar losing eight hours I know won’t be reclaimed for at least a year. Anyway, while I’ve still got a few minutes before my notepad joins the masses of electronic goods and their related plugs and wires in my rucksack, I’ll just quickly mention the passenger demographics - mind-cripplingly boring as that sounds. It’s a bit of a mixed bag really. Probably a 25/75 split between those (prejudicially, of course) I’d guess were Malaysian and the western-looking people. Of the westerners, It’s predominantly youngsters such as myself - I’d say between 18 and 35 mainly because that puts me far closer to the middle of the range than 18 to 30 would. There’s also something of a middle-aged and grey army onboard, but thankfully I won‘t be making any poor terror-themed jokes about dangerous old weapons. I’ll just say I think setting up such a ludicrously cheap route into the heart of south-east Asia (or at least a gigantic regional hub) has been a really shrewd move by Air Asia. Being able to fly London to Melbourne for £175 - which it would have been had I booked the KL flight a few months earlier - is mental whichever way you look at it. Unless you are a mental, in which case you’re probably a bit preoccupied with crazy stuff to care about the comparative cost of long-haul air travel. But honestly, comfort-wise, this is definitely equal to British Airways on a similarly long flight from San Francisco to Heathrow. All you’re missing is the free food, booze and on-demand video player - but how much does it really cost to get tanked up and fill a bag with Gregg’s pasties before you get on the plane? As for the entertainment, I’ve got an iPod, a book, a cheap notepad and (not so cheap) pen to keep me going.

Now, provided we don’t nosedive into the tarmac in four minutes time, cracking skulls and smashing the faces of everyone onboard, It’s been a long but pleasant journey. Thanks Air Asia! Now give me money for bigging you up to my four entire readers.

P.S. No, we didn’t all die.