Angerportia

Having recently written about discovering new words, I would now like to make one up - angerportia - the hatred of airports, and I suffer from an extremely acute dose of it! So how delighted I am today on arrival at one of Britain’s most miserable hotspots in the airline world, Bristol airport, to hear those immortal words ‘your plane is delayed’! For two fucking hours!

So far I have been here for two minutes, having got soaked on the way from the hire-car return depot, which is situated somewhere near Cornwall, and already I am a screaming psychopath whom every one gives a wide birth to. Why do airport security staff have to be so belligerently unfriendly? What is it about the job application that attracts the most unpleasant people in the land to apply? These failed traffic wardens seem not only out to make your airport experience as unbearable as possible with their barked orders and scowls that would curdle milk, but I am sure they go out of their way to make grown adults cry with fear or rise to the occasion with reactive aggression just to get their kicks. Oh how I would love to have delivered one of those!

In a bid to further inconvenience travelers, I note that this airport, along with a few more in England, have recently seen the need to charge for baggage trolleys. Now this I would understand, were it a returnable fee to encourage users to return them as they do in some supermarkets, but they don’t. This is a non-refundable fee of one pound or - get this - 2 euros! Yes, yet another wonderful display of discrimination against anyone non-British. No wonder the rest of the European economy is in such a mess with exchange rates like that? But then I got around to some smart thinking to brighten my otherwise miserable day. If I have paid for this trolley, that means they don’t want it back - SO I CAN TAKE IT HOME! Well I can’t today as I am flying to France and the old wobbly three wheeler wont fit in my hand luggage. But I will next time I am here. In fact I might buy quite a few. At a quid each I could get perhaps 50 if I save my pennies, and then fasten them all together and tow them home back up the M5. To research my cunning plan yet further I find that I could probably get a fiver each for them on ebay, which is an even bigger profit than the airport is making on exchanging one pound for 2 euros! Another idea would be to flog them to Tescos, or Lidls. Or perhaps other airports who don’t have enough. Watch the NASTAC index for trolleydeals.com to make it into the Footsie 100, very soon.

Anyway, back to the indoors of this godforsaken hellhole. I now need a seat for 2 hours, but there are none - save a few wooden church pews that would cause your coccyx to disintegrate were you to sit on them for more than 30 seconds. Not only that but there are no tables either; well, unless you want to sit amongst the debris that the last 8 fat families have troughed from, while their kids write graffiti in ketchup all over the Formica using words I am quite glad I don’t understand. At the bar I ask the bored 12 year old barman if they are short staffed, as his 3 colleagues watch me suspiciously. No, he says, looking round at his buddies. When I suggested that that may like to clear the tables he looked at me as though I had 3 heads, and then smirked. I must admit, I didn’t hold out much hope for a positive reply and was awaiting the excuse that he wasn’t qualified to do such highly skilled jobs, or maybe he hadn’t time as he had some homework to finish. However, it appears that someone was already allocated to the task, a lonely woman, but she was on her break. After an hour I did the job myself, just so that we could sit down. This got me a telling off from said lady, because I wasn’t qualified, obviously. ‘You trying to get me fired?’ she asked. ‘No Mamn, if I had anything to do with your employment, you wouldn’t have gotten the job in the first place, as I would have trained your bar-monkeys to do it in their spare time!’

Next I get chance to use their free internet wifi, except that, before I can get online, I now have to register all my details on their database so they can sell it to every marketing company in the world in exchange for a whopping 30 minutes free use of their service, after which I will be charged £75 per minute. So blessed am I with this free time so I can check my emails and post on Facebook to people I have never met about how much I hate Bristol, England, UK and possibly the whole of planet earth. This inevitably gets me into heated arguments with some bearded man from Temple Meads who swears at me using symbols and acronyms that I unable to decipher. Just when it is getting meaningful I have to log off, for fear of spending my life savings in this futility.

Ok, so only one and a half hours left. What to do? I wonder around the glitzy duty free shops which are more expensive than Fortnum and Masons, as smiley staff grin at me with perfect teeth, and call me sir. I can’t help thinking that maybe they should apply a little role exchange in this place, putting these glamorous supermodels in charge of the security where they could be pleasant to people who need it. Then the power-crazed hideous aggressive bastards from security could take their jobs in the shops and nobody would buy anything and be ripped off! A win-win all round, I say. Maybe I will write a letter to someone and suggest it. Or perhaps post it in Facebook and see what my bearded Bristolian friend thinks.

Finally I take to reading the newspaper which is filed with a thousand pages about how wonderful Maggie Thatcher was, and that we should all pin pictures of her on front doors as a mark of respect.  Except that when our doorbell went ding-dong we would all be arrested for taking the piss! The witch IS dead, long live the witch.

Well, old iron knickers, although I will admit I was a fan of yours at the time and do have some respect for the way you stood up and stamped on socialism, I have to say that it is you I blame now, for allowing the masses to sell their Dad’s council houses and fritter the profits away on foreign holidays, thus cluttering up our airports with their screaming tattoed children and designer luggage - when all I want to do is sit in silence!