Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
I'm no musician, so I couldn't pin it down, but it was wind definitely - a tuba maybe - or a
trombone? Something heavy anyway, this was no delicate flute, and by God it was tuneless!
It was coming from the woods about half a kilometre from the back of the house; there's a
kind of summer house there on the edge of a lake and clearly - well, obviously I'm guessing
- some child, probably in the early throes of musical exploration had been banished from the
parental home and was even now balefully blowing their way through puberty and, judging
by the instrument and evident lack of talent, impending teenage solitude. I'm a parent, I've
encouraged music in my children, but here I had every sympathy with the parents, if indeed
that's what the situation was. It sounded like an elephant with a grievance, wounded and
slowly dying.
A full hour this wretched noise lasted. Occasionally there would be breaks, probably as
someone tried to wrestle the instrument from this vandal, but it would always start up again.
In the end I gave in and went to bed slightly miffed that my last evening wasn't completely
as I would have liked but happy with a week's job well done.
When Natalie returned the next day I was ready for the inspection. She walked slowly around
the place, spent too long talking to Junior for my comfort, checked her roses, looked under
rugs and in time-honoured fashion dragged her finger along sideboards. She nodded in my
direction and seemed about to offer some praise that everything was apparently up to scratch.
Then, her eyes went past me to her prized orchid; her neglected, unwatered, and now ex-
prized orchid and her expression changed.
'Got to go!' I said, and high-tailed it out of there before she realised that the orchid was only
a small part of the house plant massacre. I got a text from Natalie a few hours later and I
opened it with some trepidation, fearing more bad news, but by then I was quite stressed and
short-tempered anyway; I was back on the road.
Terminal 2E of Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris is relatively new but like most of the air-
port, it appears to have been modelled on one of the more convoluted M. C. Escher drawings
and staffed by the kind of people even the less reputable budget airlines would reject on ac-
count of them being too 'surly'. It was opened in 2008; it had originally opened in 2004 but
its roof collapsed killing four people (putting the British Airways Terminal 5 baggage fiasco
into some perspective), and I don't think the confidence of the place ever really recovered
from that early setback. When I first travelled through it just after its reopening it was quite
clear that its baggage X-ray policy had been based purely on classic Buster Keaton.
Now the French love a bit of slapstick, but having the person at the security monitor sitting
a good 25 yards from the actual X-ray equipment and with no means of communication to
the other security staff other than turning the whole thing off and running down and telling
them, was never going to last. Of course, this being France, tearing the whole plan up and
starting again would be a public admission that there was something wrong in the first place,
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