Buy One Take-Off, Get One Free!

I had never been to London Heathrow before. What did strike me was how little space there was between the entrance doors and the check-in desks. Perhaps it is my memory playing tricks on me but it seemed like it was about 5 yards. It was very cramped. There was hardly room to move. There were hundreds of people with mountains of luggage shuffling about and there seemed to be pillars to negotiate too. It wasn't the sort of place anyone would want to hang around and so I said my goodbyes to Brian and Emma and I checked in.

I suppose my slightly reddened eyes could have been mistaken for those of someone who had just said a tearful goodbye. My slightly hazy fazed demeanour was probably not unusual either. The fact was that I was more than slightly stoned and didn't really have a clue what was going on but no-one noticed. I checked my rucksack into the hold and took that step through passport control into the departure lounge. I didn't buy any duty free. I had enough to carry and fags were going to be cheap in Turkey anyway.

Things are very different today. All this was before the era of the mobile phone. Today I would have probably spent the last 45 minutes before boarding the plane making last minute calls to all and sundry on a tiny handset that would have replaced my Walkman and my camera. I'm sure I did make a couple of calls from a public telephone to call home and say a final goodbye but otherwise I just must have wandered around aimlessly until it was time to go to the Gate.

Of course mobile phones did exist. Who can forget the phone Michael Douglas had as Gordon Gekko in "Wall Street"?That film came out just 3 years before I set off. I don't think I could have carried anything else with me and certainly not a phone that weighed nearly 2lbs!

Everything was bigger back then. In a way the world was bigger back then too. Once I got on the plane I was unreachable except by post. I had left a list of poste restante addresses with friends and relatives so that I could get some news while I was away but that was it. The cost of international telephone calls would have been out of the question on a budget. It is not the same now with internet cafés and VOIP. I'm not sure the trip I was about to take would have been quite such an adventure today.

So I boarded the plane and it took off. About 10 minutes into the flight it became clear that the plane was flying in circles. It wasn't actually going anywhere. Eventually there was an announcement by the Captain that we were returning to Heathrow because there was a technical problem. It crossed my mind that it would be something of a tragedy for my trip to end in a plane crash at Heathrow without having been anywhere at all. It obviously didn't happen or I wouldn't be tapping this out today. After flying in a holding pattern for another 10 minutes or so the pilot got a chance to land again and about 30 minutes later the rush you get as the plane hurtles down the runway and takes off was repeated and this time we didn't turn back.