Airport Antics
15:00
I think it was between 15:00 and 15:30...I was asleep the entire trip. Luton airport is small and boring, check in starts in about an hour. I shave the best shave of my life and find the line where my check in should be. I find a small queue. I decide that it is best not to join the queue at his point. Nobody wants to go to where I’m going, Västerås, an airport which Ryan Air was touting around as Stockholm. There was also another airport in Stockholm, Skavsta, which I could choose from. Skavsta is a 2.5 hour bus ride to Stockholm, Västerås, a mere 1.5 hour ride. I dunno who was responsible for this outrageous labelling, probably the same guy who labelled Luton airport as in London. Only 2 airlines goto Västerås and this airport is so small that it actually closes at about 23:00. I was pleased to find online that the last bus out of the airport left before our plane had landed meaning that if you had no lift in a car you were stranded.Stranded in a snow storm. I was sort of sure I had a lift in Lla's dad's car.....I felt more sure that no one else in this airport would have made such a series of idiotic boobs.
More and more people kept arriving, annoying me. Now there were two queues, both really backed up.
17:00
Balls.
More people and you have to check in by 18:00 at the latest.
Actually, this is gonna be a really tight call.
I’ve done it again. My entire time in the line is going to be spent knowing that I’m probably only just going to make it. Even though I arrived an hour before check in commenced.
I join the queue and initiate phase one of my cunning plan. I open my first suitcase in the line. It consists of:
*20 or so vinyls, all but 2 are 12” and packed in bubble wrap, wrapped in a towel
*Panda Lloyd
*An oxford advance learners dictionary.
*Teach yourself swedish book.
*‘Dharma bums’ by Jack Kerouac
*A very heavy “You can remember” pack by Bruno Furst. A heavy folder containing 12 booklets about how to improve your memory through image association.
*A blank purple book
*3 notebooks
People behind me are a little peturbed as I take everything out and start to repack. I place all the vinyls into plastic bags whilst intermittently kicking the rest of my luggage to catch up with the moving queue. This is going to be my hand luggage. This takes me a while as I have to be very careful with my precious vinyl.
I close this suitcase and initiate stage 2.
I open the second suitcase, take off my jacket and lay it on the floor so I am wearing only a t-shirt. I then take out my small, black sleeveless shirt and put it on. I then take out the next biggest t-shirt I own and put that over the top. Slowly but surely I am wearing one shirt,5 t-shirts and my surgeon's top.
I then take out my four long-sleeved shirts and start to put them on, one after the other, unbuttoned. Everyone around me is suffering from amusement and bemusement, engaged in whispers with each other. Everyone is looking but trying not to look. If I make eye contact we both smile. I decide to avoid all eye contact and focus on the task at hand. Queueing to check in is boring and frustrating. Here I am trying to implement a deadly serious, pre-planned operation, but have become a figure of amusement for my fellow passengers.
Now for the jackets.
The orange Adidas jacket, the two jackets from Asda, the Boc Baker jacket and finally the inside fleece from a German army jacket.
5 jackets.
I’m really, really, really, incredibly pleased with myself at this point. I had dreamed up this scheme maybe one week before I arrived and had told a couple of people about my intentions. I don’t know whether they thought it wouldn’t work or if I wouldn’t do it... I received no positive encouragement anyway. I didn’t care. All I knew was that if there was any item of clothing that I wanted to take with me then I was going to take it with me. If I wanted to take 20 heavy vinyls with me then I was going to. I knew I would be over the 15 kg limit and there was no way on God’s green earth that I was gonna pay extra for it. Especially not after the Västerås scandal that kept growing ever more scandalous the more you researched it. I would have gaffa taped vinyls, properly protected, to my chest if necessary. My scheme was glaringly obvious and of course, other people surely must have done this in the past and I can't claim to have invented it. However, I will point out that the idea came from my own brain, independently and uninfluenced(!)
I was really pleased because I didn’t know for sure that everything would fit without stretching or complication and it did. Because of my skinny size I didn’t even look wrong.
I needed the toilet and couldn't understand why I had been contemplating not shitting before I got on the plane, risking a complex, messy and stenchy deposit on a confined, crowded plane. I decided to kill two birds with one stone, putting my pants on in the toilet, asking the couple behind me to guard my now clotheless suitcases. I decided to sack putting on underwear and socks. I didn't want to risk every pair of my kecks smelling of sweaty cock and I also didn't want to put unecessary pressure on the lads and their cannon. This can lead to cancer. People who wear briefs, trapping and pushing in their precious jewels are fools.
My black trousers, my skate pants, my scally pants, my tighter jeans, my loose jeans
Again, perfect. The company can’t have a “weight limit” for passengers for fear of causing embarrassment to those heiffer type specimen of human that you see working in a Texas McDonald’s. Ha, all I had to do was wear everything until the plane, then stash it in the overhead compartment. If I thought that what I had done was outrageous or clever in anyway I'd go back and count all the items of clothing I had on and then boast. It was neither of these things.
If I was Tony Hawkes or Dave Gorman, I would have put on as many pairs of socks and underwear until I couldn't even bend my feet without breaking a toe and my schlong had gone numb from the intense pressure. I would have spent time at home practising clothes runs, cramming on as much as possible so that I could cite a hilariously, outrageous number in one of my hilarious books. This stunt would be one of the highlights in another of my daft and whacky capers. The only way I could hold my nerve to do such a naughty, daring and dastardly deed was the promise of a book release, filled with cash, that I needed to fill with "madcap", "hare-brained" schemes so that everyone would go:
"Core, blimey! Get a load of this guy, he's crackers!"
Another story that I can regale their middle-class friends with at dinner parties.
(Tony Hawkes writes books where people conveniently make bets with him so he can write a book about it. His first one was "Round Ireland with a fridge" where someone bet him he couldn't hitchhike round Ireland with a fridge. It's one of those books where the idea behind the book is the most entertaining thing about the entire book. Nothing funny happens. Apart from him reminding you of how he'd gone on a wild bet. He then pushes his luck and releases books about trying to beat the entire Moldovan football team at tennis.
Dave Gorman did a better book trying to meet 50 odd people who shared his strange name and he wrote it with another guy. It turns into a kind of cult and the book has its moments. The reason I attack Gorman is he got cocky and thought he was an actual writer. He tried to write a serious book, failed completely, and so released a complete cop out, pathetic second release called "Google whack." This time he finds a person who google whacked him, then hilariously challenges them to googlewhack people so he can.......yes....go and meet those people. Aha! Genius.
It doesn't even sound funny.
I saw Gorman do book reading from one of 'Google Whacks' trite chapters. Dave had met a sinister Texan. A gun wielding maverick cowboy who had kidnapped Dave and was forcing him to go on a drugs mission with him to Mexico to do a cocaine run. Dave is naturally terrified.
He ends the bookreading leaving the listener on hooks wondering what the fuck went down there and if the rest of the book was on the run from the police or on the run from this crazy cowboy. And of course, he also reminds the listeners that they can buy his book right now!
Upon reading this pathetic travesty, I discover that the cowboy was one of the friendliest men Dave had ever met. After repeated pesterings, he had graciously allowed Dave into his car for athe road trip of a lifetime. He carried a gun because....all Texans do....Dave was scared because the cowboy asked if he wanted to touch the gun, after Dave drew attention to it. The drugs run to Mexico was in fact a leisurely drive to collect Coca Cola. The Mexicans make it better, apparenty.
Well done, Dave.
Your cliff hanger serves as to provide the dictionary definition of "Anti-Climax" there. It really made me warm to you, the clever way you'd played on the word coke, tricking all your fans -I was no fan. Everyone else had free tickets to a ticket only event. I happened to be in the book shop at the time, sneaking in with my friend, Jenny- into thinking something momentously entertaining was going to happen, when in fact nothing did.
What a clever, crowd working boy you are.
These guys make a lot of money out of peddling such shite.)
I think I'd like Gorman though if I met him in the street. I think he probably is funny in a cute and pleasant little way. He's probably quite an amiable chap.
Unlike Tony Hawkes.
I imagine him to be a snivelling little brown nose. Pathetically trying to get the attention of his school mates by eating glue and dancing around pulling faces to get them to like him.
I hate Tony Hawkes the most. He would probably say something like this about his clothes scheme:
"I was trembling with fear at my new plan!
Could I possibly dare?!
Surely these were the desperate actions of a complete, crazy and mad person. Had I let this challenge get to me too much? Was I now pushing the borders of sanity..........had I, in accepting this bet, already done so and was now hopelessly lost in the land of the insane?
I wish I'd bought the rough guide now.
I was teeming with glee and wanted to tell my friends. Fearing they might call the men in white coats I decided against. What would all the other people in the airport think, I imagined? What could they think? Here was this man, clearly not bound by any of the usual social norms and able to operate completely outside all normality. What a total prankster. I felt sorry for the person who had to sit next to me on the plane. Someone would probably call security and everyone would be lying on the floor around me whilst the police pointed machine guns at me, and me with a red face having to explain it was just a hilarious joke.
I rang the Guinness book of records hoping that I might now hold the record for wearing the most clothes that anyone had ever bothered to ring up record breakers to report.
They said I hadn't broken anything.
I said I was writing a book.
Well, they said, I was the person who'd rung up the most times with the most failed attempts to break a record. That was a record in itself and surely that meant something, somewhere, to someone.
Success!
My friend, who happened to be present, said he bet I couldn't ride a penny farthing, dressed in Victorian period clothing, whilst wearing a flower pot on my head,all the way to the studio within the time frame of the rest of my life. Cheryl Baker was to be present, passing over the certificate to me via Roy Castle´s boney, dead, arm.
I accepted. Hmmm, I could sniff another book out of this!!!"
Wanna know something Hawkes? I stole all of your books, you greedy, comedyless little gobshite. So what if you had a bit part in Red Dwarf. I resent you for repeatedly calling yourself a comedian. I resent your existence and I don't speak such words lightly.
When I returned from the toilets, the young couple behind me in the queue started asking me about Panda Lloyd and so I told them. Panda Lloyd is a Welsh, mongoloid panda with no nose or tail.His name is Welsh, not that people from Wales are mongoloid.
They were Tomas and Joan, a French and Chinese (Hong Kong I think) married couple from London. I explained about my luggage and they were relieved because, as is the modern way, they thought everyone was being secretly filmed and I was one of Beadle's minions. My new friends made an excellent suggestion. Seeing as they were carrying so little, they were going for one weekend away, surely I could transfer over my excess luggage to them? It sounded very reasonable and perfectly logical. Alas, I was once again bitten by bureaucratic bullshit. That wasn’t allowed, company policy. I put my cases on the scale. One suitcase alone weighted 16kg, 1 kg over and in total I was about 5 kg over. I can’t remember whether it was £4 per kg or £24 per kg, but it wasn’t happening eitherway. I moved to the side for a rethink. Damn Bruno Furst and his concrete guide to memory! Joan and Tomas checked in and told me to wait at the side whilst they wandered off.
My saviours! They came back with a Tie rack bag with a zip that I could put my hand luggage inside instead of plastic bags. They also said I could take the majority of my clothes off and they would carry it through as hand luggage. The cases were now under weight.
I sat on the ground “Get your pants off!” Joan was shouting and then started ripping my layers of pants off. Tomas was good natured about this and was the first to make a joke about his wife’s comments and how they could have been construed. It was nearly 18:00, we had to hurry in case it was too late to go through passport control etc.
It wasn't.The plane was delayed by 2 hours. We remained together, talking and the time passed quickly.
I think it was between 15:00 and 15:30...I was asleep the entire trip. Luton airport is small and boring, check in starts in about an hour. I shave the best shave of my life and find the line where my check in should be. I find a small queue. I decide that it is best not to join the queue at his point. Nobody wants to go to where I’m going, Västerås, an airport which Ryan Air was touting around as Stockholm. There was also another airport in Stockholm, Skavsta, which I could choose from. Skavsta is a 2.5 hour bus ride to Stockholm, Västerås, a mere 1.5 hour ride. I dunno who was responsible for this outrageous labelling, probably the same guy who labelled Luton airport as in London. Only 2 airlines goto Västerås and this airport is so small that it actually closes at about 23:00. I was pleased to find online that the last bus out of the airport left before our plane had landed meaning that if you had no lift in a car you were stranded.Stranded in a snow storm. I was sort of sure I had a lift in Lla's dad's car.....I felt more sure that no one else in this airport would have made such a series of idiotic boobs.
More and more people kept arriving, annoying me. Now there were two queues, both really backed up.
17:00
Balls.
More people and you have to check in by 18:00 at the latest.
Actually, this is gonna be a really tight call.
I’ve done it again. My entire time in the line is going to be spent knowing that I’m probably only just going to make it. Even though I arrived an hour before check in commenced.
I join the queue and initiate phase one of my cunning plan. I open my first suitcase in the line. It consists of:
*20 or so vinyls, all but 2 are 12” and packed in bubble wrap, wrapped in a towel
*Panda Lloyd
*An oxford advance learners dictionary.
*Teach yourself swedish book.
*‘Dharma bums’ by Jack Kerouac
*A very heavy “You can remember” pack by Bruno Furst. A heavy folder containing 12 booklets about how to improve your memory through image association.
*A blank purple book
*3 notebooks
People behind me are a little peturbed as I take everything out and start to repack. I place all the vinyls into plastic bags whilst intermittently kicking the rest of my luggage to catch up with the moving queue. This is going to be my hand luggage. This takes me a while as I have to be very careful with my precious vinyl.
I close this suitcase and initiate stage 2.
I open the second suitcase, take off my jacket and lay it on the floor so I am wearing only a t-shirt. I then take out my small, black sleeveless shirt and put it on. I then take out the next biggest t-shirt I own and put that over the top. Slowly but surely I am wearing one shirt,5 t-shirts and my surgeon's top.
I then take out my four long-sleeved shirts and start to put them on, one after the other, unbuttoned. Everyone around me is suffering from amusement and bemusement, engaged in whispers with each other. Everyone is looking but trying not to look. If I make eye contact we both smile. I decide to avoid all eye contact and focus on the task at hand. Queueing to check in is boring and frustrating. Here I am trying to implement a deadly serious, pre-planned operation, but have become a figure of amusement for my fellow passengers.
Now for the jackets.
The orange Adidas jacket, the two jackets from Asda, the Boc Baker jacket and finally the inside fleece from a German army jacket.
5 jackets.
I’m really, really, really, incredibly pleased with myself at this point. I had dreamed up this scheme maybe one week before I arrived and had told a couple of people about my intentions. I don’t know whether they thought it wouldn’t work or if I wouldn’t do it... I received no positive encouragement anyway. I didn’t care. All I knew was that if there was any item of clothing that I wanted to take with me then I was going to take it with me. If I wanted to take 20 heavy vinyls with me then I was going to. I knew I would be over the 15 kg limit and there was no way on God’s green earth that I was gonna pay extra for it. Especially not after the Västerås scandal that kept growing ever more scandalous the more you researched it. I would have gaffa taped vinyls, properly protected, to my chest if necessary. My scheme was glaringly obvious and of course, other people surely must have done this in the past and I can't claim to have invented it. However, I will point out that the idea came from my own brain, independently and uninfluenced(!)
I was really pleased because I didn’t know for sure that everything would fit without stretching or complication and it did. Because of my skinny size I didn’t even look wrong.
I needed the toilet and couldn't understand why I had been contemplating not shitting before I got on the plane, risking a complex, messy and stenchy deposit on a confined, crowded plane. I decided to kill two birds with one stone, putting my pants on in the toilet, asking the couple behind me to guard my now clotheless suitcases. I decided to sack putting on underwear and socks. I didn't want to risk every pair of my kecks smelling of sweaty cock and I also didn't want to put unecessary pressure on the lads and their cannon. This can lead to cancer. People who wear briefs, trapping and pushing in their precious jewels are fools.
My black trousers, my skate pants, my scally pants, my tighter jeans, my loose jeans
Again, perfect. The company can’t have a “weight limit” for passengers for fear of causing embarrassment to those heiffer type specimen of human that you see working in a Texas McDonald’s. Ha, all I had to do was wear everything until the plane, then stash it in the overhead compartment. If I thought that what I had done was outrageous or clever in anyway I'd go back and count all the items of clothing I had on and then boast. It was neither of these things.
If I was Tony Hawkes or Dave Gorman, I would have put on as many pairs of socks and underwear until I couldn't even bend my feet without breaking a toe and my schlong had gone numb from the intense pressure. I would have spent time at home practising clothes runs, cramming on as much as possible so that I could cite a hilariously, outrageous number in one of my hilarious books. This stunt would be one of the highlights in another of my daft and whacky capers. The only way I could hold my nerve to do such a naughty, daring and dastardly deed was the promise of a book release, filled with cash, that I needed to fill with "madcap", "hare-brained" schemes so that everyone would go:
"Core, blimey! Get a load of this guy, he's crackers!"
Another story that I can regale their middle-class friends with at dinner parties.
(Tony Hawkes writes books where people conveniently make bets with him so he can write a book about it. His first one was "Round Ireland with a fridge" where someone bet him he couldn't hitchhike round Ireland with a fridge. It's one of those books where the idea behind the book is the most entertaining thing about the entire book. Nothing funny happens. Apart from him reminding you of how he'd gone on a wild bet. He then pushes his luck and releases books about trying to beat the entire Moldovan football team at tennis.
Dave Gorman did a better book trying to meet 50 odd people who shared his strange name and he wrote it with another guy. It turns into a kind of cult and the book has its moments. The reason I attack Gorman is he got cocky and thought he was an actual writer. He tried to write a serious book, failed completely, and so released a complete cop out, pathetic second release called "Google whack." This time he finds a person who google whacked him, then hilariously challenges them to googlewhack people so he can.......yes....go and meet those people. Aha! Genius.
It doesn't even sound funny.
I saw Gorman do book reading from one of 'Google Whacks' trite chapters. Dave had met a sinister Texan. A gun wielding maverick cowboy who had kidnapped Dave and was forcing him to go on a drugs mission with him to Mexico to do a cocaine run. Dave is naturally terrified.
He ends the bookreading leaving the listener on hooks wondering what the fuck went down there and if the rest of the book was on the run from the police or on the run from this crazy cowboy. And of course, he also reminds the listeners that they can buy his book right now!
Upon reading this pathetic travesty, I discover that the cowboy was one of the friendliest men Dave had ever met. After repeated pesterings, he had graciously allowed Dave into his car for athe road trip of a lifetime. He carried a gun because....all Texans do....Dave was scared because the cowboy asked if he wanted to touch the gun, after Dave drew attention to it. The drugs run to Mexico was in fact a leisurely drive to collect Coca Cola. The Mexicans make it better, apparenty.
Well done, Dave.
Your cliff hanger serves as to provide the dictionary definition of "Anti-Climax" there. It really made me warm to you, the clever way you'd played on the word coke, tricking all your fans -I was no fan. Everyone else had free tickets to a ticket only event. I happened to be in the book shop at the time, sneaking in with my friend, Jenny- into thinking something momentously entertaining was going to happen, when in fact nothing did.
What a clever, crowd working boy you are.
These guys make a lot of money out of peddling such shite.)
I think I'd like Gorman though if I met him in the street. I think he probably is funny in a cute and pleasant little way. He's probably quite an amiable chap.
Unlike Tony Hawkes.
I imagine him to be a snivelling little brown nose. Pathetically trying to get the attention of his school mates by eating glue and dancing around pulling faces to get them to like him.
I hate Tony Hawkes the most. He would probably say something like this about his clothes scheme:
"I was trembling with fear at my new plan!
Could I possibly dare?!
Surely these were the desperate actions of a complete, crazy and mad person. Had I let this challenge get to me too much? Was I now pushing the borders of sanity..........had I, in accepting this bet, already done so and was now hopelessly lost in the land of the insane?
I wish I'd bought the rough guide now.
I was teeming with glee and wanted to tell my friends. Fearing they might call the men in white coats I decided against. What would all the other people in the airport think, I imagined? What could they think? Here was this man, clearly not bound by any of the usual social norms and able to operate completely outside all normality. What a total prankster. I felt sorry for the person who had to sit next to me on the plane. Someone would probably call security and everyone would be lying on the floor around me whilst the police pointed machine guns at me, and me with a red face having to explain it was just a hilarious joke.
I rang the Guinness book of records hoping that I might now hold the record for wearing the most clothes that anyone had ever bothered to ring up record breakers to report.
They said I hadn't broken anything.
I said I was writing a book.
Well, they said, I was the person who'd rung up the most times with the most failed attempts to break a record. That was a record in itself and surely that meant something, somewhere, to someone.
Success!
My friend, who happened to be present, said he bet I couldn't ride a penny farthing, dressed in Victorian period clothing, whilst wearing a flower pot on my head,all the way to the studio within the time frame of the rest of my life. Cheryl Baker was to be present, passing over the certificate to me via Roy Castle´s boney, dead, arm.
I accepted. Hmmm, I could sniff another book out of this!!!"
Wanna know something Hawkes? I stole all of your books, you greedy, comedyless little gobshite. So what if you had a bit part in Red Dwarf. I resent you for repeatedly calling yourself a comedian. I resent your existence and I don't speak such words lightly.
When I returned from the toilets, the young couple behind me in the queue started asking me about Panda Lloyd and so I told them. Panda Lloyd is a Welsh, mongoloid panda with no nose or tail.His name is Welsh, not that people from Wales are mongoloid.
They were Tomas and Joan, a French and Chinese (Hong Kong I think) married couple from London. I explained about my luggage and they were relieved because, as is the modern way, they thought everyone was being secretly filmed and I was one of Beadle's minions. My new friends made an excellent suggestion. Seeing as they were carrying so little, they were going for one weekend away, surely I could transfer over my excess luggage to them? It sounded very reasonable and perfectly logical. Alas, I was once again bitten by bureaucratic bullshit. That wasn’t allowed, company policy. I put my cases on the scale. One suitcase alone weighted 16kg, 1 kg over and in total I was about 5 kg over. I can’t remember whether it was £4 per kg or £24 per kg, but it wasn’t happening eitherway. I moved to the side for a rethink. Damn Bruno Furst and his concrete guide to memory! Joan and Tomas checked in and told me to wait at the side whilst they wandered off.
My saviours! They came back with a Tie rack bag with a zip that I could put my hand luggage inside instead of plastic bags. They also said I could take the majority of my clothes off and they would carry it through as hand luggage. The cases were now under weight.
I sat on the ground “Get your pants off!” Joan was shouting and then started ripping my layers of pants off. Tomas was good natured about this and was the first to make a joke about his wife’s comments and how they could have been construed. It was nearly 18:00, we had to hurry in case it was too late to go through passport control etc.
It wasn't.The plane was delayed by 2 hours. We remained together, talking and the time passed quickly.
posted by Swedophilia at 17:28
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