I.A.M. Musing About…

Early early early leaving. Alarm at 5:45… ow. One had only barely got used to the time zone and now I’m up at an un-godly hour? Brrrrrgggggg…

Dress, shove the last things in the cases, descend to lobby and do the “rapid check-out” by tossing my key and form in a slot in the front desk, and I’m out the door to locate a taxi… which immediately presents itself. Huzzah!

On the way to Paddington Station [not the one on the left, that’s St. Pancras], we discuss the much over-discussed Economic Situation and the need to stick it out. He’s been driving a taxi for 24 years, and worked through the last recession; now he’s married 16 years and is continuing to continue as before, with the benefit of experience to show the way again. This ought to be good, and the thought in one’s mind is that perhaps it’ll be of assistance to one’s own business is tenuously accepted.

We agree that it’s best to try not to obsess about the whole matter, while still being well-informed about the events at the same time. A difficult, yet important balance. I tip £5 on a £10 fare, telling him to “weather it well”. He seems to be a sound feller.

Train, terminal, check-in (with security confirming I’m not some other guy yet again), locate æroport gate which isn’t open… ‘daft buggers!’, think I; and so I sit on a six-inch-deep ledge covered in some sort of fine plaster dust, and listen to the tiny lap-top with noise-cancelling headphones eliminating the hum of the “Air Conditioning System” and some bizarre drilling being done somewhere which is altogether inconvenient. All but a remaining 15% of those both are gone when the switch is “on”. The women prattling to my right about sweet nothing at all, however, comes through loud and clear. Damn.

The return flight comes complete with Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (aka: “Indy IV”; a daft, un-necessary corollary to tie-up some loose ends which didn’t need fretting over in the first place, and along the way provide more trivial inside references than any film warrants at the best of times, but ultimately benign with solid production values and editing), the meals are okay, and there is turbulence over Greenland as seems to be usual.

I am tired, so very tired.

One suspects that this was the correct time to have left, albeit with un-resolved questions regarding others’ degree of dedication and timely effort regarding various matters left in their hands. Having not actually checked e-mail before leaving Heathrow, it’s quite possible there’s more encouragement to be had than appears just now. One hopes so. Have those individual boxes left yet to various people who’ve paid for their books months ago? Have a couple of boxes left headed my way? Do we have a rough inventory of stock on hand at the moment? What of… oh, a gazillion things, really…

While it’s tempting to conclude the whole thing as a corporation and rinse ourselves of so many heavy debts — to say nothing of the fact the President & C.E.O. (Acting) doesn’t live on the right continent — the effort to wrap-up a company in the UK is an insane amount of paperwork and shit, so we’re stuck with this structure, it would seem. Lord knows how we’re going to sort that, though. Damn it, we need to sell a shit-load of books and then pay bills… and then sort some way to make some decent money to get the next lot printed… and so on.

Grumble…

Need sleep.

So, in conclusion:

Once again I leave the UK with the sense that the place is crawling with things almost the way they ought to be done, to wit:

• pubs are plentiful and convenient
• people are able to speak to complete strangers without being thought about to begin proselytise for Dianetics or something
• art and culture are considered ‘parts of life’ and not “something them fucking book-worms’ do ’cause they’re not real peoples”
• traffic is grudgingly accommodated, but walking about in areas un-trammelled by motor-vehicles is far easier than one might think
• mass transit is seen as a requirement
• buildings which aren’t fresher than yesterday’s milk aren’t immediately ripped-up and replaced with big ugly blocks of concrete (well, mostly)

Essentially, things there are as I wish them to be.

Well, except for the bits that cost money. That’s a pity, but ubiquitous the world-over, damn and blast.

Too Bloody Early; Terminal 3, Heathrow, England

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 12:12 am and is filed under BLOG-O-RAMA, LIT-O-RAMA, THINKINESS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.