I’m sitting in my tiny seat on British Airways Flight BA830 out of Newark International Airport to London Heathrow. The cabin crew were just called to their manual demo positions, which means it’s time for us to watch them fasten a seatbelt. Listen up people, this could be new for you. I’m not kidding, the captain just said that some of the features of this aircraft may be different from anything we have encountered before. Now I’m curious.
But after listening avidly for a few minutes, it’s just stuff like high heeled shoes must be removed or they will tear the slide as we make an emergency landing over water, handily employing our underseat flotation devices. We may need to pull on a colored streamer to release our oxygen masks, he’s saying. And we need to secure our life jackets with a double bow at the side. Hold up, THAT’S new.
My seat is so cramped that my elbows are pinned to my sides as I type. This is ok because it actually makes typing faster and after seven hours of international travel already today, I have lots to say. First, it came to my attention as I stood in the security line, that acids, alkalis, wet cell batteries, and apparatus containing mercury; also deeply refrigerated, flammable, non-flammable and poisonous substances such as butane, paints, propane, firelighters, and aqualung cylinders are not allowed on my flight. I cast my mind over the contents of my luggage. Nope, pretty sure I left all my wet cell batteries and firelighters at home.
Nevertheless, after I had removed my shoes, coat, scarf, and taken out my laptop and laid it the right way in the plastic tray (not the way I had laid it, that was the wrong way) my carry-on still got flagged. I watched it get shunted onto a special little conveyor belt behind the scanner and there it sat for fifteen minutes while the woman in front of me, who was traveling alone with a baby, had every snack and sippy cup closely inspected. The TSA agents moved with glacial speed. Then they opened my bag after asking me if there was anything sharp in it. You mean the spear? I said. But I said it quietly to myself, behind my mask. Sometimes I love the pandemic.
They took out the beautifully wrapped gifts that my husband’s daughter had given me for my dad and held them up. Candles, I said, and cookies. The agent tore open the package of homemade beeswax candles, inspected them and then put the mangled package back in my suitcase, beside the torn bag of cookies she had also opened. Apparently these items posed no terrorist threat after all. It was a close call though. Whatever happened to that beeswax candle bomber?
Getting to the airport today was just the culmination of an arduous process that is part of our new world: an hour and a half last night uploading documents into British Airways’s Verifly app so I could check in online. I had to upload proof of vaccination, negative Covid test results, passenger locator forms for both the UK and Ireland, eleven years of bank statements, and a photograph of the top of my head against a plain white background. Then I couldn’t check in online. Verifly sent me to ba.com which sent me to Verifly, which sent me to ba.com. Online check-in broken. Who could have imagined?
I still love flying. We just took off. I was listening to my chosen take-off song, I’m With You by Grouplove, which is a fabulous screaming-down-the-runway song. The ghostly yellowish mist that shrouded Newark Airport gave way to the fog of low lying clouds. Our Boeing 787 lifted effortlessly off the ground and into the sky, and I sank in to the fact that instead of being evening it’s after midnight. Flight: routine and miraculous as waking up in the morning.
On the other side of the darkness is my dad, stuck in a Dublin hospital for nearly a month now, and my middle brother, who has also flown home to rescue him. We’re going to spring him from dodge, get him home for Christmas. We’re going to have a tree and dried fruit pudding and brandy butter and Christmas crackers, and I’m going to make my mum’s homemade ice-cream. Like most Irish recipes, it’s mostly cream, butter, and alcohol of some sort. Actually just boozy cream and candied peel because the butter is all needed for the brandy butter. By the end of the meal the effect is pretty much the same.
The airline beverages cart just came around. Despite my clear intentions not to dehydrate myself on this flight, I accidentally notice that when the woman in the seat in front asked for some Chardonnay, the stewardess handed her two of the little airplane bottles. Free. British Airways: every now and then in this gloomy world, there’s a little glimmer of light.
International travel may have got a lot more arduous but the principles haven’t changed. I’m flying at a ground speed of 664mph and an altitude of 39 thousand feet and in just five and a half hours I’ll steal glimpses out the oval window of my favorite London sights: the Westminster Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, the Thames and the Eye. Strangers have given me fleece blankets and a scratchy little pillow and free pretzels. I don’t like pretzels but I put them in my bag. You never know when you might have to make an emergency landing over water and need some food.
In a little while, the dinner cart will come round. I’m not one of those people who complain about airline food. I love it. Those piping hot little plastic containers with the metal lids that say Fly, making you wonder momentarily what’s in there. It doesn’t matter, someone else is cooking, and no washing up. Also, I can’t help remembering some comedian’s joke in the recent US election about people who were undecided over voting for Biden. He said they were like folks on an airplane who were offered the chicken or a plate of shit with broken glass in it, and they asked how the chicken was cooked.
After I soak up my fill of London from the air, I’ll take off again a couple of hours later and fly across the blip of the Irish sea until the east coast of Ireland comes into sight. Then there will be the sights that are part of my DNA: the Poolbeg chimneys, the spread of Dollymount, the Hill of Howth with its narrow isthmus where my dad’s house is, with water on both sides, a life informed by the sea. I’ll have that rush of strange familiarity as we land in Dublin airport and I see the double-deckers and the signs in Irish, Slí amach, ná caith tabac, and hear the accents. I’ll probably cry. An immigrant of 32 years, but you never quite get over the sight of the Poolbeg chimneys.
Have you got the right time? my dad said on the phone with me this morning. We were laughing about old Dublin sayings. His favorite is the job is oxo. I’ve never met anyone else who knows this phrase, and even my dad doesn’t really know where it came from, or what it means. But he uses it liberally, and as far as I’m concerned it’s as good a positive take on this world as any.
I may not have been permitted to bring my mercury containing apparatus with me on this trip, but I have some beeswax candles to light in our window on Christmas Eve. I’ll pull some crackers with my bro and my dad and he won’t have to spend Christmas in Beaumont eating gruel. If he asks me, I’ll give him the right time. Four hours forty-seven minutes to my destination and the job is oxo.
