Planes, trains, automobiles, buses, tubes, another bus...

If you’ve been following Facebook you will know that I have more reasons to be more excited than an excited person who has just won first prize in a being excited competition.

                                                   

                                                   This is a bad picture of a lovely bit of London, pretty colours on the

                                          buildings, blue in the sky. 

Others have blagged and blogged about the event but I have been sworn to silence and not an utterance will pass my lips apart from the following blog that tells you nothing about it whatsoever.

It was an early start for the intrepid Scots; 4.45 rise, drove to the airport (10 minutes for us that time in the morning). Then it started to go wrong. We all got on a plane (Alan wants you to know it was an Airbus A319), a wing fell off and so we had to deplane as the Americans would say, or and get on another plane – would that be replane?  Alan wants you to know that the plane had an issue with the hydraulics of one of the ventral flap zzzzzzz.  So we were delayed a little taking off once all the baggage had all been moved around. But in true budget airline style, they had bing bonged the delay would be 3 hours so we were delighted when it was only 2.

This cut into our natural history time. The landing at Stansted was bouncy but safe. It didn’t do us much good there were no trains from Stansted into London at ‘all due’ to a ‘trespass incident’. This was some person who had neatly decided to end it all and was standing on a bridge over the train line and threatening to jump, so they cut the trains and the electricity. It caused about 6 hours of chaos for thousands of people. With folk talking on mobiles, we were very aware of missed meetings, missed birthdays, a missed wedding and a few missed connections. Clever folk gave up and arranged to Skype the meeting. I am sure, some of you might know for a fact, that a man threatening to commit suicide on Sydney Harbour Bridge was eventually pushed off the bridge by a man who had been sitting in his  car in the traffic jam for hours and just lost it.

                                        

                                                Ahhh, I am on the right street!

It seemed 47000 people were queuing for the National Express coaches. Their ticket machines ran out of paper. While it was disorganised, it was a swarm of polite confusion; the British are very good at queuing, we have a natural herding instinct unlike another nationality (that I could mention but won’t in case another MIE blogger beats me up) who stuck one person at the front of the queue and when the bus came, they simply texted their 43 friends who were in Starbucks and they thought that they could legitimately jump the queue as they were ‘with her’. Unfortunately for them amongst that huge crowd was an Airbus from Belfast, an Airbus from Dublin and an Airbus from Glasgow so some Celtic bond created a force of nature there. There was also a plane from Edinburgh but they were sitting off to the side in brogues with an early morning gin and tonic reading the Scotsman. Let’s just say the invasion from Starbucks was politely, forcibly and verbosely rebuffed.

                                           

                                                   Ready for  my close up, the morning of filming after the thing I can't tell you about..

Eventually a man came, a quiet man, from the back of the queue – a bit like Chamberlain saying ‘I have in my hand a piece of paper that the replacement bus service will be here in a minute, so form an orderly queue somewhere else’. Those guys from Dublin were fast on their feet, they were at those bus doors quicker than a Dubliner in a post BREXIT passport queue. But Celtic connections again pulled through and the Scots got on the bus for a tour round the bad lands of Essex to be dropped off at a mainline train station beyond the ‘trespass incident’ where we had to wait on a train that didn’t come as it had nowhere to come from because the train line further up was blocked by aforesaid incident. So we waited until they got a train out of storage, dusted it down and then it arrived at the platform nobody was standing at. Eventually many hours too late we arrived in London resembling those trains in India that look like a linear swarm of humanoids.

  

                                    

                                             A lovely breakfast shared with my editor the morning after

                                        we had been filming all morning. One take Ramsay

And then we come to a gender difference. The world has gone a bit nuts about toilets for this gender and toilets for that gender.

One gender gets of a plane, has a pint and wanders into the event.

The other has to redo hair, some make-up, change shoes because the good trousers are too long for walking around London in! (It was very posh and I do suffer from that Glaswegian thing that I always look slightly the worse for wear, as if there was a derailment and I had to walk through a forest to get back to civilisation).  Fortunately, the PR person walked in after me and was doing exactly the same thing.

This was like a posh version of  the business I own.

My has a bullet hole in the glass.

This gold writing desk  was in an antique shop across the road.

And Blackthorn is sloe, as in sloe gin, so I smuggled this back in my 200ml or less.

Yes, a separate PR company person.

A PR company with a budget behind the venture.

An afternoon tea in a five star hotel.

A no pressure meet and greet with a lot of good news to follow.

A chat and a drink with good mates.

I am a very lucky and very excited little Scottus Criminalis.

Caro  Excited Person Ramsay 15 02 2019