A story for your viewing pleasure/alternative to terrible Xmas TV

This is a story to entertain you on Xmas Day and help you avoid your weird uncle who keeps throwing mince pies at you. It is quite long, but also quite hilarious, and completely true.

This is the new comedy of errors, except without the comedy.

Waking up at 4am is never the most hilarious of occasions, especially when it occurs to you that this is often your bedtime. However, it is sometimes necessary to do so for a holiday and the joys in store get you through the groggy opening process, dragging yourself out of bed, down the stairs and into the cab driven by a man far too chirpy for that time of night/morning.

We were going to Israel, and for the sake of funding/getting some nice pasta we were having a 3 hour stopover at Milan airport. On arrival to the airport, we were greeted with a few hundred Alitalia passengers waiting, and for a moment I thought there might be a celebrity about to enter, but alas it was just that their flight was cancelled. We were told that our flight was ‘suspended’, although it wasn’t clear whether this was the same as cancelled, different to cancelled, or a heady synonym designed to make us confused so as to take our mind off the ‘suspension’. After some nervous finger-wringing, they hurried us to the front of the queue, informing us that the Rome flight was the one ‘suspended’, our flight was just a tiny bit late, and so we checked in and left the mournful glances of those passengers for Rome who could only escape their unfortunate fate by pondering the meaning of ‘suspension’.

The flight was fine, thanks.

Then the seatbelt signs popped on for descent, but after half an hour of non-music listening with my tray table folded and my seat in the upright position, it became apparent that landing wasn’t on the pilot’s agenda, and after another 10 minutes it was announced that it was ‘too foggy’ to land. In fairness, I would rather have an extra hour in the air over certain death, so this was fine, until they decided to drop us off at a different airport.

So off we dropped to the Other airport in Milan, situated not in Milan itself but rather charmingly in a small forest clearing a few miles out. The charm was lost by the fact that we weren’t meant to be there, but it was fine, we could cope. Then, in possibly the only good news of the whole day, we found out that our flight to Israel was now actually due to leave from the Fairytale Kingdom airport, and we were already there! I smiled for the first and last time that day. If I had known what was in store, I might have let the smile linger, even enjoyed the smile, but as it was I just got it done and over with and continued looking tired again.

Off came one of our cases from the conveyor belt. Off came lots of other people’s cases from the conveyor belt. Off came a pram or two. Off came a small dwarf who had obviously got lost in the baggage handling system some months ago and had only just managed to find his way through the labyrinth system to pop out at belt 7. But soon enough there was just air coming off, and we were still waiting for a case. My case.

Now, I fly quite a lot, and in fact on one particularly boring gap year flight (Eleanor must have been asleep or talking about something boring) I decided to work out how many flights I had ever been on, and came out at almost 100. that’s quite a lot of flights, and this was the first time that they had lost my baggage. The point of this is that I don’t understand why they couldn’t have just waited until I had reached 100. THEN that would have been a story. Now it’s just an almost and nobody cares. I should just stop now. But I won’t, because I’m me, and I like talking, too much.

The lost and found section of the airport only managed to live up to the first half of its name, and with time running out before our flight to Israel, it looked like we would just have to fill in some forms and hope that some day in the future I would finally be reunited with all my clothes/chargers/my favourite toothbrush. As we were about to leave, however, their computer beeped and up flashed the receipt number of my bag! It had been located. Now, this may seem like a good thing, but you may recall that earlier on, I identified the only good moment of the day, and the reason for this is that although it had been located, it hadn’t been located anywhere good. It had inexplicably found itself a place on a plane destined to a different Milan airport and was nearly there, but we had to get our flight to Israel, and the complex part is that there are no flights to Israel from the Milan airport in which my poor, lonely bag was about to take up residence. We asked how they were going to solve the problem, but after a succession of shrugs resembling some kind of drunken shoulder shuffle, we just left them our details and power walked to the check-in for our next flight.

As we walked, we discussed the other people at the lost luggage area. We had heard all manner of relatively similar and boring stories (because the punch line was always that they lost their baggage, and we knew that already because of where we were standing) including one where two ladies had checked in smoothly, slid almost poetically through passport control, proceeded to the boarding gate and queued to get on the plane, only for their flight to be cancelled at the last minute. ‘Poor ladies’, we thought to ourselves as we checked in smoothly and slid almost poetically through passport control, ‘its lucky that kind of thing never happens to us’, and we proceeded to the boarding gate and queued to get on the plane, only for our flight to be cancelled at the last minute.

At this point I will testify that I could literally hear karma laughing.

Trudging backwards through duty free and passport control, we collected our one remaining bag, which surprisingly had managed not to get lost even though it hadn’t left the airport, and wandered to the Alitalia desk to ask what to do. Everyone was to be put on an El Al flight at 10pm that evening, and we were handed the compensation guide to see what we would get. I calculated it as 2 free emails, a hot lunch and 250 Euros, but after handing us our hot lunch vouchers they denied the Euros claim because it was ‘out of their own hands’. Now, when it had originally been cancelled, they had blamed an ‘operational failure’, which clearly means anything But an operational failure. On asking about compensation, they blamed the weather. I directed their gaze to the blue skies, across which the silhouette of a plane taking off could be seen in front of the crisp winter sun. They congratulated on my poetry but said it was too foggy, even though there was about as much fog as there was garlic dip. Arguing soon became futile as they attempted to change the subject to an appraisal of different garnishes, and I lamented my need to use unnecessary and complex metaphors at inappropriate times.

I didn’t get my free emails either, and that really hurt.

We decided to go and harass the lost luggage department again, and it turned out I could get a bus to the other airport for ONLY 24 Euros so off I went on one of the least hilarious and most unnotable 3 hour round trips of my life, and that is all I have to say on that matter except for the positive fact that I got my suitcase back and the negative fact that it had a massive hole in it.

When I returned, it was 7pm, check-in time for the El Al flight, so at 9pm we finally got to the front of the queue only for them to make a fuss over the fact we had transferred flights and so open our bags to sift through it for bombs, of which there were obviously loads, because I look like a terrorist. An hour later I was sitting at the departure gate surrounded by 200 very, VERY nervous Israeli people who had just been told that the flight may be cancelled due to fog, of which there was now a reasonable quantity. Another hour passed, in which a flight to Lahore was cancelled due to fog, and it looked like misery for us, but finally the flight got given the go-ahead, and this made me feel nervous due to the fact that the Lahore flight had seen fit to be cancelled, but also feel content due to the alliteration opportunity it afforded. The sheer quantity of religious people on the flight also made me feel safer, because if there is a God, there was no way this plane was going down with this level of piousness onboard.

The flight actually took place without something unusual happening, except for the passing of the midnight hour and thus the occurrence of Christmas Day. Nobody on the flight celebrated Christmas so I quickly said it to myself, in my head, and then resolutely stared out of the window to try and spot Santa Claus, because this was the perfect chance. He didn’t appear but it was quite dark and at one point I saw some kind of portly shadow, but that may have just been the reflection of the fat man sitting next to me. We landed in Tel Aviv at 4am and managed to claim both our bags this time. All we needed to do now was collect our rental car, drive to my cousin’s house and sleep, and the simplicity of this task was quite clearly too good to be true.

So far, Karma had done a stellar job in destroying my life, and it wasn’t about to stop there. It had reduced me to a shell of a human and damnit, it was going to finish the job. If it had allowed the last step of our traumatising journey to be completed, it would have been akin to an Olympic hurdler approaching the last hurdle, feeling slightly bad about winning, and so picking up the hurdle and breaking it over his head causing irreparable damage. Karma wanted the patriotic accolade instead of national shame.

We reached the car rental place and after another wait of half an hour, found out that they had run out of cars. We had to pay 150 shekels for a taxi, though I wont reveal the exchange rate because it won’t sound as good. We finally arrived. I wrote this.
It is now 6.13am local time, which is 4.13am English time. I woke today at 4.15am English time, and I WILL write for 2 more minutes so that I can be awake for 24 hours, otherwise this really isn’t a story. I shall therefore conclude with a letter to Santa, since it is Xmas day.

Dear Santa,

This year, for Christmas, please can you get me a broken suitcase, minus 100 pounds, no sleep for a whole day and a bomb to send to the head office of Alitalia.

Yours, Joey (aged 5)