Travelogue I: Writers Write

Writers Write

(written 1 July and posted when emerging from the internetless abyss)

The wise words of Ian Marchant of course. Writers also read. They must also kill their parents but we shall perhaps leave Marchant’s controversial third rule for another day.

This is my travelogue. I have just graduated from university – for the second time. I marked the first such passing by working the summer in Massachussetts. Very excellent. Vey influential. An experience that empowered me to be a writer. So empowered that I came home, pissed about for a year and then bottled it and became a lawyer. This time my grand tour will endure for even less time – I am on holiday with the family in Central America for two and a half weeks. Then I am going home and I am not going to piss about this time. I am going to bottle it immediately and take up an appointment as an in-house lawyer on 18 July. This is a subject we will skate lightly over and never speak of again. Instead you may continue to regard me as the same fun-loving criminal I ever was. By day sober-suited commercial lawyer (Group Legal Counsel is the grandiose title I have elected) by night (or evening more probably – one has to be careful at my age) thrusting writer and Renaissance man.

Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows

Sorry, too much back story there. The travelogue: dateline, July 1, 01.05 EST, place, the passenger lounge at Miami International Airport. We should be tucked up in bed in Panama City by now but instead my family slumbers uneasily around me, snatching a few Z’s between the interminable latino announcements calling Maria El Nino Parasso to the phone. For fuck’s sake Maria pick up the bloody phone, some of us are trying to sleep.

How did we come to this uncomfortable and undignified pass? The simple answer is we got here by plane, but only eventually. We had an unscheduled detour to Nassau because of severe weather here in Miami. Can I now say I’ve been to the Bahamas even though all we did was sit sweatily on the tarmac and the plane doors never so much as opened.

So my travelogue starts with people because I have spent the last twenty-four hours in undesirably unrelieved contact with my fellow man. In days of yore I travelled at the front of the plane courtesy of Sharon’s air miles but those mogul days are gone and today we have suffered  cattle class. Of course one shouldn’t complain but that’s hardly going to stop me is it. Actually the back of the plane is good for people watching as long as you don’t have to listen to them all day. There was a prize specimen tosser bore sitting behind me today. I  could hear him even with my headphones on. Remember that scene in Annie Hall when Woody Allen is plagued by overhearing a bore in a cinema queue and speaks to camera of the desire to have a large polo mallet to hand for such eventualities. Well that’s how I felt today. Thank God for the in-flight entertainment and headphones to muffle the wanker. At one point I listened to some Mozart and pictured myself beating him to a pulp with my mallet while an adoring public applauded my good taste. I’m bloody uncomfortable here, perched on a vexatiously unamenable bucket seat but I’m going to have to try to sleep. Good night dear reader. By the way I’m unable to post this in real time because I’m buggered if I’m paying Miami International Airport $10 for the privilege of using an internet feed that costs them sweet F.A.