13 April 2016, 8 pm
Bristol Airport is almost deserted, which is rather pleasant. I am on the Sad Person’s 21.15 flight to Edinburgh. It will be the last plane to leave, after the shops and cafés have shut, after the cleaners have gone home. Footsteps echo. Rows of empty seats grin like keyboard teeth. Starbucks® is manned by novices, who burn your fruit toast – and there is no greater crime than that. I am hoping the plane is not also going to be manned by novices, because actually, come to think of it, that might be a greater crime than spoiling fruit toast. I sit down with my fruit toast attempt #2, which unlike attempt #1, has not been torched. It is accompanied by a cup of something tastelessly frothy: this was also made by the novices, apparently out of soap suds. I open my laptop which is one-third broken, and on the remaining two-thirds I write up my Secret Diary ready for the day when I can publish and be damned. That day is only four weeks away. Though I am not especially keen on late evening flights, nevertheless I feel something approaching optimism. Later, I watch EasyJet® complete a half-hour turn-around between the flight I have just seen come in and the one I am destined to board. During this half hour, rigorous safety checks are completed by the evening shift of novice flight engineers, who wave their torches vaguely in the direction of the plane’s turbine blades. They appear worryingly disinterested in the exercise, as though aware that the novice pilot doesn’t know how to make the blades turn anyway. My optimism fades. I finally reach my hotel at 23.15. I have been upgraded to a room that looks lovely but smells like they only painted it this morning. I am concerned that I will be woken early tomorrow by an electrician wanting to finish the snagging.
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