All the way up to Gatwick I'm thinking, "Goodbye, X." Goodbye, Littlehampton. Goodbye, Arundel. Goodbye, Worthing. Goodbye, Three Bridges. I'm not going to miss the architecture of England at all. England is flat, and yet it still feels cramped. The landscape is shadowy, with no space to breathe. The only places where you can feel like you're out in the open are fields (generally owned by someone). We don't have a Big Sky in England. Anyone who's driven in America or Australia will know what I mean. In our towns the streets are narrow, the buildings are annoying, and the horizon is so rarely visible. We've been lucky to live near the sea. Bristol was much worse.
Gatwick. Our suitcases are heavy. We have four, and in theory we're supposed to weigh in at under 60kg for the lot. I'm pretty sure we're over. It turns out we're massively over. Sarah, hailing from an aviation family, is cool with it: we just have to pay the surcharge. I'm constantly expecting us to be ejected from the airport. This remains a heavily-fortified fear for the next eighteen hours. This just isn't real. Someone, somewhere along the line, is going to call me out and say, "Gil, you can't possibly be expecting to move to Canada. It's just not the done thing. Go back to England where you belong."
The bags go through and we make our way through security. I'm going to tell you a little about the daftness of English airport security now. (Frequent flyers can skip to the paragraph break.) Basically, after an in-flight scare involving the potential creation of an explosive device from toothpaste, foot cream and, er, belly lint, security has been stepped up to the point where Tom Cruise and the rest of the Mission: Impossible squad would scout out the place and give up in embarrassment. You are no longer permitted to bring liquids, pastes or gels onto the aircraft unless they're in small containers placed in a transparent bag and demonstrated to the security staff at the scanning gates. The checks are rigorous. It's safe to assume you are now officially safe. Yes. The even-more-recently-reported case where the guy operating the X-ray scanner didn't notice that it had shown a suspicious package until five minutes later was surely an aberration.
Well, that's all well and good, but it turns out that smuggling unauthorised substances through security is quite easy, even when done accidentally rather than with malicious forethought. I'm not mentioning this to give the dreaded Dennis'Quaida a much-needed idea or two - I'm sure the internet holds plenty of seditious information, but I seriously doubt even terrorists are so ardent as to want to read everyone's goddamn boring blogs to pick up tips. I am planning on notifying BAA about it, though. Basically, halfway through the flight, I went searching in the side pocket of my carry-on bag for a pen - and instead I found a tube of moisturiser and a deodorant, which have presumably been in there since the last time we used that bag to transport stuff to a hot tub party. I'm guessing that, since my bag also contained a big laptop and external hard drive, the X-ray scan showed up a pattern of lines resembling three hours' detailed work with an Etch-A-Sketch, and the toiletries just blended in. So much for rigorous security, though. The phrase "f**king pathetic" comes to mind. For this level of security, millions of travellers are held up for up to an hour in long, dull, sweating lines. Thousands of perfectly innocent toiletries and similar products are being binned. (Or possibly resold as new: did your duty-free purchases look a little used too? Mmmm, as I thought.) Someone, somewhere along the line, has made an absolute fortune selling the government a billion transparent plastic bags. And who's getting surcharged for this? The taxpayer, of course. And it doesn't even bloody work.
The Irish security system is much more streamlined (typical example of a penetrating Customs challenge at Dublin Airport: "How're ya?" followed by being waved through despite not actually having my passport to hand), and I note they haven't had any planes blown up, despite the country's demonstrable reputation as the home of many an explosives expert.
But back to the airport for a moment. You'll note we're flying from Gatwick, an international hub and at least the second most important airport in England. It's now 10:45am. We had breakfast at seven, and what with the flight and the unknown duration of getting through Customs at Vancouver, we might not get another solid meal for god knows how long. But can we get proper food anywhere? Can we hell. The entire airport is on the breakfast menu. Now I grant you, it might be unusual for people flying *from* England to need a steak dinner this early in the morning. But the world is a 24-hour place, and for anyone who's just landed at Gatwick with the intention of connecting to some other destination, the chances are they're bloody hungry and they want a meal. If this is you, don't bother trying to argue with the waiters - if it's before 11am, you're gonna get served the breakfast menu. Your other option is going to McDonalds, which is the only way you're going to get something that is, or masquerades as, meat. (Obviously it wasn't actually meat at Macky D's, and I can attest to this because we both got double burgers by accident and Sarah couldn't handle hers, so I wound up with a triple. Bleeech. The guy at the table next to us was complaining to his girlfriend about the customer service. Jesus Christ, you're eating at MacDonalds and it's more important to worry about the customer service?) Anyway, I can only imagine the horror that anyone arriving from six hours away at the crack of dawn with a stomach thinking "It's dinnertime!" would experience. Get with the programme, England!
We booked our flights with Zoom Airlines. Sarah's online research skills are second to none, and this was a good price. We even splashed out on the upgrade to premium economy, and the total for the two of us, one-way, was still only about £650. I still don't understand airline pricing. Sarah tells me it's to do with supply and demand. I'm used to higher demand pushing prices down, but apparently most airlines use it as an excuse to push the price up - I guess because they feel they have only a fixed number of seats to sell, so it's legitimate to rook people an extra few hundred pounds because, hey, if you don't pay it, someone else will. This makes me feel herded and bullied, and is, I also guess, why newer airlines do so well just on word-of-mouth advertising. But as we line up at the boarding gate, I still have this suspicion that we're going to be fired across the Atlantic by a tightly-wound catapult. If it was good enough in World War Two, it might still work. Happily, it turns out modern technology is involved, and there is in fact an actual tangible plane:
The chairs are comfortable, the legroom is plenty adequate, and it feels like this might actually not be the ten-hour flight from hell that the price forebode.
As we take off, I manage to overcome my usual afraid-of-flying-but-looking-unafraid state of mind, and I take a look out of the window as we circle upwards from Gatwick.
And all I can think through my tears is, "My country looks so beautiful..."
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