London Gatwick 2022 (Easyjet); well this was awkward. For the last year or so I’d been carefully planning all my travel, very much aware that flight number 200 was on the horizon and keen to ensure that it fell on a suitably grand occasion when it happened. And by the time my flights had reached the 180’s during the summer and I had multiple trips booked for the months ahead, I was confident that I had engineered just that. But then my employer decided to fly me to work for a few weeks, throwing the schedule into chaos and ruining all my careful planning. And as exotic as it sounds to be getting flown to work at someone else’s expense, a couple of returns from Edinburgh to Gatwick with Easyjet was hardly what most people would associate with the jetset lifestyle. But should I even count these flights at all? After all, they weren’t really what I would describe as travel. After much time spent considering the pros and cons of whether or not to include them in the tally, I decided on a compromise; they would get a mention, but would not be part of the total. Since I hadn’t paid for them, I didn’t feel they weren’t really my flights anyway.
But a flight’s a flight, so here’s a brief overview. The first flight down was straightforward enough, although I had forgotten what a bizarre layout Gatwick had from my one previous visit nine years ago. The return was a little more fraught, with the National Express service between Heathrow, (where I was actually working), and Gatwick being over an hour late. But I managed to get there just on time, and fortunately security was very quiet. There was also quite an amusing altercation between a mother and, well, almost everyone, as she screamed hysterically that she should be allowed to board first because she had a pram. God help whoever got to sit next to her, even if it was for just over an hour. The second flight down was a little less routine, as just before arrival we began circling over the south coast for an uncomfortably long time, before finally starting our descent. I spent most of the delay going through all the catastrophic reasons why an aircraft wouldn’t just simply land and wishing I didn’t know enough about flying to know these things. No explanation was forthcoming from the flight deck sadly, but all was well on arrival and at least I could say I’d seen Brighton a couple of times. For the subsequent return, the coach service was again delayed slightly, and a schoolboy error in reading the boarding passes led us to believe we had rather more time for a pint in departures than we thought. Wouldn’t have happened if I’d actually booked the bloody flight. And given what the pint cost, it would have been nice to have enjoyed it at a rate of more than a pound a minute. But the aircraft was pleasantly quiet on boarding, and the blueberry muffin I had gotten at Pure was very tasty, making up for the slightly disappointing chicken curry I had bought it with.
Gill 9A 