This Is This

“Do you want romance?”

I turned to face a woman way out of my league. I was at the airport, which is always a wierd environment and one where such requests don’t seem as out of place as they should.

I looked puzzled for a second, then realised where I had seen her before. Two minutes prior to that I had been talking to her about a perfume that I couldn’t decide whether to buy for my wife. A perfum called, that’s right, Romance.

I realised I may be one of those “dumb guys” guys because I didn’t realise immediately what she was on about.

Comedy answers run through my head, fuelled by cheap airport coffee:

We’d both end up hurt
Yes, but at what cost?
Romance is dead, sweetheart. Romance is dead.

But then I remembered Rule Number Two Of Being Me:

Don’t try to be funny to people who are just doing their jobs.

“No thank you,” I said and paid for my whiskey.

Rule Number One Of Being Me had come up a few minutes earlier when I paid for my cheap airport coffee and is of course:

Use this (points to head) before opening this (points to mouth).

In other words, when the lady handed me my change and said “Have a nice flight,” I should not have replied: “You too.”

I knew she was just being friendly and I should have considered that she probably wouldn’t be flying home after her shift.

When I realised what I just said, I kind of stared at my change, pretending to add it up casually, when in fact my head was going:

“You too?! You fucking idiot! Listen to yourself sometimes. And don’t tell me you don’t think, OK, because I know you’re thinking this now. Turn it on, fucko.”

These two incidents reminded me what an adventure it can be flying on my own.

I went and sat down and saw some cool Bose noise cancelling headphones that I had been dying to try out. This is Terminal One of Heathrow Airport - the busiest part of one of the busiest airports in the world. God alone knows how many different people from around the globe had tried those headphones on. How much caution would have been thrown to the four winds by the huddled masses as they, like me, wanted to experience electronically-induced silence.

I resisted the urge and consoled myself that there are people dumber than me. Like the guy in the wooly hat (indoors) with the t-shirt that says “And God made grass” on it above a big weed motif. I would love for him to get the full cavity search and have to hobble to meet his smug parents when he arrived at his destination.

I tried the headphones on anyway. I may be a close second in the dumb stakes, behind stoner beany man. A shitwit, perhaps. My head is still here and I am back home with only one adverse effect.

My language is very bad today, probably because I didn’t get much sleep while I was away. I am sorry.

International travel and sleep deprivation are very hard on my etiquette.

I said hard on.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, September 3rd, 2006 at 11:03 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed, or you can skip to the end and leave a comment yourself.