Homeward Bound

Woken at 5 am this morning by the people in the room above clomping around – so I take the opportunity to listen to the Yes album “Tales From Topographic Oceans” in its entirety - which eventually gets me back to sleep.

For the last breakfast, fried eggs are on the menu again. After breakfast we pack our bags then go up to the weekly flea market. It’s amazing what people will try and sell at these things but there’s a buyer out there for anything it seems – check the success of e-bay.

We return to the hotel and sit by the pool with a Coke and I write up this journal. After taking no photos yesterday because of the weather, it’s once again hot and sunny today and so I take a couple of the hotel and a lone fisherman on the nearby point.

We head up to the Balcon de Europa for the last time. All the cats are mostly lying sleeping in the flowerbeds arounds the square which is now crowded with tourists and locals who’ve just come out of the church having celebrated Palm Sunday in their Sunday best.

We’d talked about going to the “all you can eat” buffet lunch at one of the two Indian restaurants in the town and I have to say that when I awoke this morning I was up for giving it a miss after last night. However, despite the hearty breakfast, by 11.45 I’m ready for the buffet and so is Anne. A bit risky perhaps with a long journey ahead but what the hell…

We arrive at the place at 12….to find it doesn’t open till 1, so we head down to the beach for a seat in relative silence. At 1, we’re back at the Indian – no pakoras but a very lively beast crawling on top of the Tarka Daal is less than inviting. When I call the waitress’s attention to it, by the time she takes a look it’s lying prone on the surface – she insists it’s just a spice! I’m sure I saw her furtively remove it later on…

After three or four platefuls of everything except the Tarka Daal, we head back out into the sun and walk down to the hotel for the last time. We sit out at the pool as two powered hangliders float noisily past…

At 4 the minibus arrives to take us on the hour-long trip to Malaga airport and I listen to the jukebox while Anne reads. By 5 we’re in the check-in queue – once again managing to choose the slowest moving one. It’s a non-smoking airport and I confront a Glaswegian smoking moron behind me in the queue much to his delight….

After 30 minutes we’re finally checked in and have asked to be as close to the front as possible – we get row 2 and hope we’ll be far from the drunken arses who accompanied us so delightfully on the flight out…

Anne buys a big white funky watch in duty free for fifteen euros and though I’m sorely tempted by a 2CD set entitled “Dali – Music to Inspire a Genius” I manage to abstain. It’s mostly classical and I’ve probably got all the tracks on it already – as with many CD purchase decisions these days, I’m starting to listen to that little voice in my head saying “you’ll never listen to it, you fat tube”.

I grab a couple of bottles of still water to try and counteract the mild heartburn starting to emanate from the direction of the lunch-time curry, find a quiet seat and jukebox it again while Anne tries to determine which gate we’ll be departing from.

Another good selection, the first 15 minutes features Roxy Music, Richard Shindell and Mogwai – my own little radio shows in my head – I hardly ever have to “flick on”. 75 minutes to take off.

At 8.45, some 130 minutes later, we’ve been standing on the bus on the tarmac for 30 minutes when we’re instructed to go back to the gate as the planer has a technical fault. To make matters worse, the now even more drunken Glaswegians are smoking where they sit, ignoring the non-smoking status of the gate and the small and embarrassing smoking area which has been set up for the pariahs amongst us…but I can’t be arsed confronting anyone anymore and so I move to the point furthest from them.

The fault is fixed and we board the plane around 2 hours after our scheduled departure time, only to find that one passenger is missing. After a further 30 minutes, the mysterious Mrs Hannah appears up the gangway, looking very glamorous but attracting the seething hate of 179 other people. Apparently she’d become engrossed in filling out a questionnaire somewhere in the airport and missed the call to board. Idiot!!

On the flight I watch the video without the £2.50 headphones, listening instead to a concert by Tangerine Dream at the Royal Albert Hall at their peak in 1975. I don’t know what the film was called but it was quite interesting - although I did spend the entire 90 minutes waiting for John Travolta to appear, having misheard at the outset that he was one of the stars……

We arrive in Glasgow at midnight, a full 9 hours after leaving the hotel – we’re first off the plane but to no avail – there’s a delay in getting the luggage off the plane during which everyone stands around the motionless belt looking longingly at the big rubber doors like so many pathetic contestants on the Generation Game – and the drunks are smoking again – morons.

It’s another hour before we’re able to board another minibus to take us to the car-park and even then we sit for an extra 10 minutes waiting for yet another non-existent passenger to arrive.

We finally hit the M8 back to Edinburgh at around 1.30 am and I decide to keep to a steady 60 mph just in case I fall asleep - it’ll be a lot less sore for us if we’re going a bit more slowly…

By 2.30 we’re home and we’ve not been burgled – I check the post – a new Rheostatics CD has arrived from Canada – what a great homecoming present – I pop it in the walkman and head for bed….quite a day.