Home, home on the pond

We have been home since about half three this afternoon.  We are all clean.  We are unpacked. Things are put away and we are waiting for the emergency plumber.

Yes. This is what we like to do after five weeks of holiday and twenty four hours of light travelling.  We like to find out after much ripping out of kick boards and the like, that a major water pipe into the property has a leak.  Because it is a major pipe it is also nice to know that no matter which tap in the house we turn on the kitchen floor will still flood.  Thank god for the fact that Jason had paid extra on the insurance for such things, or we would be really screwed.  It is bank holiday weekend.  Chances of getting a plumber who hasn’t been forced at knifepoint to come out to you? Nil.

Luckily we had all had showers by the time we found out about the pipe.  Unluckily I hadn’t got any washing done.  And again I thank my lucky stars that we had a property with a washer and a dryer.  There is only a small amount of stinky washing assaulting my nose.

In other news, I cannot blog about any of the other things I had written about because all my photos are on the other p.c. and I have not had time to transfer them across.  The lawn is knee high in grass and dandelions.  It looks pretty but it will be a bugger to mow.  We have shut the curtains.  It’s the only way.

Our journey was uneventful until we got to Sea-Tac.  Our cases were all slightly over the limit weight wise and we had to go into a corner and do some judicious weight redistribution.  This was after the lady on the desk offered Jason an upgrade for silly money. He said: ‘Business Class?’ she said: ‘Yes’.  He snapped her hand off and then she booked him into World Traveller something or other, which is about half a step up from economy and not worth all the fuss.  She did it twice by mistake, at which point he got quite annoyed and said: ‘Just put us back in economy please’, when she confessed that it would be the usual big moolah to go to business class.  When she tried to book us into our old seats they had been taken.  Then she had to go and rearrange everything so we could all sit together.  This took a long time.  Then came the overweight luggage saga.

In the end, because the children were about to mutiny and I wasn’t feeling too chipper myself, the lady who had caused all the delays came to help us and found a cunning way for us not to pay any excess baggage at all.  I decided not to stab her with a hat pin after all.

Then.  Then.

We finally got on the plane to find that the girls and I were sharing a row of seats with a woman who was either dead drunk or dead mental or both.  She laughed and shouted in a Tourettish kind of way, and flapped her hands and crunkled her water bottle until we were all rather alarmed.  I think she was drunk, because as the flight wore on she got progressively less flappy and shouty.  This was a huge relief as I had resorted to sitting on top of the children to save them in case she was a terrorist, and Jason kept leaning over the seat backs and glaring at her.

The flight was a night flight in which we were encouraged to sleep, in much the same way they do in hospitals, by waking you up every forty five minutes to shine bright lights in your face and ask you to eat noxious substances which invariably make you ill.  The family in front of me reclined their seats fully leaving us about a micro millimetre of room and with the television screens touching our noses.  The girl in the seat in front of me was a hefty teenager who flounced somewhat and was prone to bouncing.  I kicked the back of the seat a few times when she nearly had my eye out.  Paddington Bear hard stares were passed around on arrival at Heathrow.

The girls did doze, but the baby in the adjoining row didn’t.  It howled, shrieked, threw things and generally had the biggest paddy of its entire life.  That and the woman next to us shouting ‘Stupid’ into the ether and wringing her hands meant that I got approximately nil by sleep.  I did get to watch some terrible romantic bollocks with Meryl Streep and Alex Baldwin.  I love rom coms. I like their mindlessness. I also like Meryl as an actress.  Unfortunately I have developed a deep loating for Alex Baldwin and decided that Meryl had clearly only signed up for that film because a particularly large gas bill had plonked on her door mat the same day the script did.  I also watched the excellent Andy Serkis being the excellent Ian Dury in the excellent Sex and Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll.  I think Meryl would have done better to sign up for that one on balance.

Anyway. It is all done now.  The holiday has been put in a drawer and will be dusted off by me for the purposes of blogging and the act of remembering that I did actually go on holiday for quite a long time, and have not, as it seems right now, just been here all along, hacking at the coal face of life.

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