UK Trip Post-Mortem, Part 5

[khaosworks]

On the afternoon of 16 February I'm back at Hyde Park, but not for any peace rally, although the detritus of yesterday's demonstrations are scattered here and there. Park cleaners pick up discarded coffee cups, signs, posters, but the park itself is back to normal, with soccer games and people walking around. I'm here just to indulge my final fanboy fantasies and do, "Star Trek: The Adventure".

Frankly, I am disappointed. Much of it is a exhibition of props and behind-the-scene videos I've already seen. The so called "Voyager" ride is a typical roller-coaster virtual ride you can get anywhere (and the violence of the ride made me mutter, "So much for interial dampers" when I staggered out). The final tour of the Enterprise-D bridge is also pretty much a non-event, with not even beaming you aboard - having an overlong and tedious turbolift episode instead, and the ushers all tell you to stay behind the tactical station horseshoe. No chance of sitting on the center seat and taking a photo, even. The souvenir shop is a rip-off, with overpriced apparel, no uniforms on sale (I've been looking for a pattern for the current "First Contact" era uniform for years), and sad looking tribbles.

I take a bus down to the British Museum, but by this time it's already about 5 pm and there's not really any time to dicker about there, not in the short time left to me. Instead I elect to go to Gosh!, the comic store across the street which I used to frequent in my undergrad days. I get a few trade paperbacks - most notable of which is Joe Sacco's Palestine, collecting his nine-part comic series based on his travels in the region. After yesterday's demonstration and seeing the keffiyehs and Palestinian flags waving around, I realize that apart from reading the Thomas Friedman's "From Beruit To Jerusalem" a decade ago, I've not really absorbed much of the Middle East situation since then. Reading Sacco's book that evening, I realize that I've read and understood very little of the conflict from the Palestinian point of view, and I decide that is something I need to remedy when I get home. Besides, my memory of "From Beruit..." has long since faded and it's probably time for a refresher on the entire political and social situation in the Middle East, since this Wannabe War is going to have serious political ramifications on that.

I get back to Courcy Road in time for dinner with Aunt Jane, and spend the rest of the evening trying to perform, as I normally describe it, the Miracle of Feeding the Five Thousand in Reverse, by trying to stuff all of the crap I've bought back into my decidedly un-TARDIS like luggage. What I wouldn't give for dimensionally transcendent baggage now.

The next morning the minicab arrives at 7pm. Aunt Jane comes along to see me to the airport, and we suffer through a traffic jam on the way to Heathrow. It is 17 February, C-Day, the day when the Congestion Charge takes hold in Central London. Basically, it's Ken Livingston, the Mayor, deciding to cut down on traffic by charging people 5 quid to enter the designated zone of streets. It's not a new idea - Singapore had the Restricted Zone for years before it switched to an electronic toll system, but it's new to London, and people are of course whining about it. And it also means that today, many cars are circling London instead of cutting through it, leading to more congestion around the outskirts than usual.

Still, we reach Heathrow in time for me to check in, and thankfully, no drone gives me any problems about Lilith (which I was fearing). There is a moment of panic, though, as I face an incredibly long queue of what seems like nearly a hundred people, but then I realize that's the Emirates queue, and the Malaysian Airlines check-in queue is much shorter. Before I enter the departure lounge, I spot this newspaper print-on-demand machine which offers international newspapers. I print out, for fun, a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution for the exorbitant price of US$4.54. It turns out to be Friday's newspaper. Bugger. Still... time to catch up a bit on the Georgia scene, and there's some more news about what caused the Columbia tragedy which I haven't read about yet.

I won't recount the flight home - it's the usual horror. What really caps off the final pain of using Malaysian Airlines happens when I take the shuttle back from Kuala Lumpur to Singapore - when we touch down, the captain informs us that an electrical fault or some other technobabble has occured and we have to sit on the runway for about half an hour waiting for a tow truck to drag us into the disembarkation area. This is not helped by the fact that they shut off the electrics and the air-conditioning while this is being done and also by a crying baby who is understandably pissed off about the whole situation. Of course crying babies are annoying. They are designed to be, so you have an incentive to find out why they're crying and solve the problem to stop them. Who'd bother to answer a distress call which is a satisfied purr?

So I'm back, riding the taxi back home. Oddly enough, this time around there's no sense of the ennui I usually feel when I return from overseas. Usually I'm kind of depressed that the holiday is over, but this time, I'm feeling a better sense of gladness at being home. I think it is partly the horror of the flights, and I think it's partly that this time around, London didn't feel as welcoming - the ending of the con brought out more sadness in me because the people weren't around anymore. The week after that in London, because of various circumstances, meant that I spent time alone with the City without anyone else, and that probably accentuates the sense of loneliness and decompression so much so that getting home this time around is a relief.

I let myself in, since Mom isn't back from school yet and Dad is in Bangkok on business. I drag my luggage into my room, my cat Ugly sniffing curiously at my heels as I strip off to my underpants, turn on the air-conditioner, plug in Cassandra, and collapse into bed.

Ugly loses interest and leaves the room. 409 e-mails come streaming in. I may be some time. I'm back. I'm back. I'm back.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

One of the cooler things I've gotten to do was back in '96 when I was in LA for Worldcon at a time when I knew two people working on Deep Space 9. Got to visit the set (which was initially confusing, since they were filming the Tribbles episode and the first cast member I saw was Avery Brooks riding a bicycle down the lot...but dressed in a Classic Trek uniform. Huh?). When we hit the Ops set, there was a prop guy working on some stuff. Realizing I was a visitor, he told me to wait five seconds and then yell "Red alert!". I did, and all the various lights and alarms went off.

--Tom Galloway