Fellow travelers and other problems


This morning I woke up early and rode down to East Coast Park for the weekly run, where I went slowly, struggling with tired legs and the consequence of eating an entire pizza the night before. It’s lucky I don’t have parenting responsibilities at present, because it took me until eleven to get home again, feet sore and legs weak. I suppose the run itself wasn’t so bad: by not going mental out of the start, I kept quite consistent pace, and even managed to sprint at the end to go up one place.

Still, that wasn’t much comfort as I rushed around, trying to get things shipshape for the family’s return. I had to buy eggs. I had to clean purple paint off the floor outside our front door, and empty the bins, hang up the laundry, check none of the decorations I’d put up in La Serpiente’s room had fallen down, and clean the toilet. What a glamourous life I lead.

With all that done, I took a taxi over to Simei to see friends who’d popped over from Hong Kong, then got another taxi (driven by a highly irascible man) to the airport. And then, as I’d not checked which terminal I was flying out of, I had to take a train, and then wander the cavernous halls of Terminal 3.

After check in, I went to the lounge. Singapore Airlines have several, and the first one I went to was not the right one, as I was told by the very dismissive member of staff there. To be fair, everyone in the world should have an encyclopedic knowledge of which part of an airport they should go to, and we should treat any requests for information with curt and brutal contempt.

When I eventually got to the gate for boarding, I thought there would be no more opportunities for offence, but this time I was offended by a fellow passenger, reduced to a series of headtossing and shoulder shrugging exhibitions of rage, when he was told he couldn’t board the flight yet … because the plane wasn’t ready to board. He was a First Class traveller (or to be correct, he had a First Class ticket; there’s nothing first class about wearing leather slip on shoes with hotpants, especially when your calf muscles are skinny and weak, deserving of concealment not advertisement) so I guess I could hold that against him.

But we’re still not done. Stay with me on this. In Business Class on Singapore Airlines, the seatbelt comes with an airbag in it, and a warning that this could injure an infant and needs to be deactivated when an infant is wearing it. Quite apart from trying to imagine scenarios where a passenger on an airplane would benefit from an airbag (rather than it just being irrelevant because you’re on a plane, and if you need an airbag you probably have much greater problems) I have no memory of ever seeing airbags on offer way back in the cheap seats. It’s almost like they think the life of a business class traveller is worth more than that of somebody in economy.

Oh. Oh well…

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