Bad days…

In my haste to catch up, I managed to publish the two previous posts out of sequence, but it really could hardly matter less. I will get around to that post script – eventually!

October 24th does not wish to release me.

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That grey day finished with a flourish.

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A single day can provide such a variety of weather and images.

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As a young child, I was accustomed to my father’s constant complaints about the English weather, but I never paid attention. We lived in London where it seemed to be either grey and raining, or grey and coming on to rain. In my recollection, it was generally damp and not very warm, but this was preferable to me than those few sunny summer days when we visited my grandma in the Wiltshire countryside which caused my asthma to flare.

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When I was eight, my dad escaped dreary England, taking us to Southeast Asia which could scarcely have been more different and there he found other things to moan about.

Occasionally, even without air-conditioning it was chilly, certainly in the highlands of Vietnam where I later on was at boarding school, but a sweater was all you needed.

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Weather wasn’t something I thought of as such. For a few days after our arrival from England, the heat felt a little oppressive but we soon acclimatised.

Monsoon rain really impressed me. It made what happened in England seem like half-hearted drizzle. Getting thoroughly soaked in a warm tropical downpour delighted me. I loved the sight and the earthy smell as it pounded into the ground. The tall thunderheads that brought it were magnificent.

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So, even if I didn’t think of it as weather, I suppose I began paying attention to the elements at about that time. Once, at the school in Vietnam there was a very brief snow flurry that was a rare excitement for Asian children.

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Another boarding school, in Cambodia, was by the sea where sunset was regularly so stunning, we were encouraged to leave our studies to go outside and watch.

It was there too that I started noticing the Moon. As it rose behind a hill across the road, I began thinking of it as a friend. Perhaps my mother was looking up at it, far away in Thailand. It was comforting to think so. Sometimes the Moon appeared so very huge.

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What I noticed six years later, at school back in England, was how chilled I felt! That year “enjoyed” the most severe winter in decades. The pipes in my dorm room froze and so did we. Two years after that, I was sent to live with my mother’s younger sister in New York where winters were very much colder. Houses being better heated, we did not suffer.

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Only after another five years did I finally begin taking weather seriously.

Working for an airline, bad weather could seriously mess up my day, never mind the 30 mile drive back and forth to Kennedy Airport that I did for a very long time , till I moved closer.

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And of course it wasn’t just local weather that affected us. If London was fogged in, as was the case all too often during winter back then, our whole operation was disrupted.

It frequently seemed to happen around the Christmas holidays.

How often were we told: “You’ve ruined our Christmas!”

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Incomprehensibly, passengers seemed to think we had control over the weather. As it poured with snow outside, they raged at us as if we had arranged it all for the express purpose of annoying them.

We were convinced that before entering the airport, our passengers left their brains in a repository, for collection on their return.

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Travel is stressful and airports are crowded and confusing, so people are not as rational as they might normally be and a fair few who travel are not all that smart to begin with. This, I should have considered before I took employment with an airline, yet I was keen to have travel benefits and I was ignorant then of such things as oversales which were often the cause of a very bad day!

We have transitioned now through October 25th, so maybe I’ll get to that post script…

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