waiting . . .waiting . . . waiting . . .

I am reliably informed it is Monday 28th December (I have long since lost any concept of time). We fly out on January 3rd. So here we are stuck in the interminable week between the Dreadful Christmas and the equally Dreaded New Year. Not that I have any respect for the whole month of December anyway, as anyone who knows me will happily confirm. It turns friends and neighbours – nay! half the bloody planet – into insane people. Take one example: all through the year the television has been exhorting us to turn off our hi-fi and tv standby lights because it uses a trickle of electricity and because we need to monitor our carbon footprint to save the planet for our grandchildren and because, and I know this must come as a shock to many, we are in a very bad Recession. So what happens throughout the month of December? One walks out of one’s house to be greeted with glittering neon insanity! Flashing Santa Clauses and cartoon reindeer on otherwise humble brick dwellings radiate their nonsense into the depths of intra-solar space, no doubt to be puzzled over by bewildered crystal life forms on Ganymede or newly resurrected Xmas Time Lords. A friend told me recently that the red and white logo of the commercial pagan god Santa Clause was actually a creation of Coke Cola in the ‘50s. Haven’t checked that out yet. Bet it’s true!


So now I am bored and fed up. Almost a week to go. I’ve chosen, packed, re-chosen and re-packed my sci-fi books to read on a beach (“There will be a beach!”, he cries) a half dozen times. Those nice people at blogspot have allowed me to decorate this year's blog with my own pictures I took from our last tour. So I've had a play with that (scroll down if you can't see 'em). (Memo to Self: must meet up with the nice lady I met at last year’s Boxing Day party in Bangkok – she told me how to develop digital pictures using decent software; just for a change I’m quite pleased with the results.) What to do next? Go to the pub!

*sigh* now its Tuesday the 29th. I am still boredboredbored. Now only less than a week before we face the evils of 21st century life: travel in a country that cannot handle an overnight drop in temperature; insane Nigerians who want to set themselves alight in religious flames; cabin crews and their trade unions who hate their customers; political party activists dressed in yellow who feel the need to occupy any major airport hubs for weeks at a time; airport bureaucracies who apply the “one size fits all” solution to terrorism; the misery of travellers who wait for hours to filter their simple cabin baggage through dubious security checkpoints; dreary Arab State airports who forbid alcoholic atheists from enjoying the stopover; hellishly cramped air journeys that the pilots of old Mercury spaceflights would find spookily familiar; and finally, yes, finally, having to queue in line at the end of another eternal flight a mere half way around the globe to wait in a long, long line for ANOTHER BLOODY CIVIL SERVANT to check a passport the details of which could be electronically verified for all time and backed up with a bit of 50 year old DNA which I would cheerfully slice from my own scrotum!!! Forget what the mystics say: it is definitely not the journey that counts in life, it’s the getting there.

*sigh* only another 5 days to go. I need a holiday . . . .