Airborne

While I won’t be able to publish this post until I land, I nonetheless write from the flukey luxury of the emergency exit seat of my flight to Moscow. Week two of this particular glut of travel has begun, where I take one step further toward reluctantly becoming carbon-footprintesse; racking up the airmiles faster than you can say ‘the Amazon is shrinking’. Actually, that last bit is a lie – from the unglamourous world of discount economy, the points don’t accrue quite as fast as one would hope. But as usual I digress.

A mildly depressing by-product of the travel (which don’t for a moment, think I don’t enjoy) is that the novelty wears off. Not that long ago, entering airports still gave me that slight nervous feeling in the bottom of my tummy; packing the night before was exciting, sitting in the confines of an aeroplane cabin was cool and not irritating and the window seat was a coveted prize.
Alas, it’s not as glamorous as it sounds. The ugly underbelly of the whole thing (apart from the increasing disconnexion with your life at home) is that your skin dries out like an old boot, your diet is thrown into disarray by time differences & hotel breakfasts, and the wonderful efficiencies of such airborne conveniences as ‘BA’s own handwash/airfreshener’ wreak havoc on a gal’s physiology.

All of my closest friends know of my tendency to spontaneously break out in bizarre red rashes & flushes – probably an unfortunate inheritance of rosacea from my mother-dearest. This somewhat unpredictable condition seems to be exacerbated by the ‘less than 1%’ humidity environment of the plane (I just read that in the in-flight magazine) and the chemical innovations that British Air obviously considers time and space savers. (If every poor sod to use the loo washes their hands with that awful 2 in 1 stuff, I don’t suppose it matters how smelly the darned facility gets). Increasingly I understand the carefully selected array of cosmetics available on board in the duty free catalogue – 8 hour Cream to quench my skin’s equivalent of a rollicking hangover, and various eye potions to smooth the wrinkly depressions that develop around my squinting peepers.

I’m not for a moment trying to sound brattish and hoity-toity about all of this. Landing in Kyiv on a Tuesday only to fly to Vienna on a Thursday and Moscow the following Monday is the randomest, most brilliant thing to do in the name of work that I can currently imagine. What’s even more fortunate is that I actually enjoy what I do at either end of the journey.

This current travel glut more exciting than usual for a couple of reasons. This week I am in Moscow for nearly 4 whole days, innocently timed to coincide with the Chelsea v Manchester United match on Wednesday night. The atmosphere in Moscow promises to be as electric as the prods holstered in the utility belts of the riot police, as they jab all the unsuspecting footy yobs (who are about to get the shock of their lives in Moscow) in their parochial backsides.

The second cause for excitement is that Mama Neary is currently here, and we are flying together to Spain (Benahavis to be precise) on Friday after I touch back down in Londres for a whole 12 hours. All I know about Benahavis is that I am staying in a spa hotel, there are a lot of very very good restaurants around, and that there is a high probability of a high proportion of sun. B-E-A-utiful.

Anyway, given my good fortune in being allocated a seat with expansive and luxurious leg room, it would seem almost sinful not to at least stretch out and lap it up. This is virtually impossible to do with my laptop propped on my lap, so das vitanya. Or however they say it in Moskva.