Heading home

I’d like to start with an apology. I was wandering around Copenhagen airport on Monday, eagerly awaiting my flight home when the departures board, instead of offering me a gate number, flashed ‘delayed’ in my face. The setback was four solid hours and, added to the fact I had arrived early at the airport, I had six to kill.

If you have six hours in any airport in the world, you will eventually stumble into a WH Smith. I don’t know how it happens, but they’re everywhere. I did. I needed something to burn the hours away. I looked at the newspapers, but wasn’t in the mood for last Wednesday’s half-chewed copy of The Daily Mail: so I headed to the book section.

This is my apology. Charlotte Bronte, I am sorry for my actions. For, under the dung heap of John Grishams, Dan Browns and ‘Obama: My Path to the Tops’, I found your sacred Jane Eyre. Just two copies; tucked away behind the dross of sparkly authors and embossed titles.

In purchasing your wonderful novel under such conditions Charlotte, I degraded your book from one of the great works of English literature, to a ‘travel companion’. A juicy piece of trash full of sex, gore and adventure. Sentences that don’t make. Opinions that offend entire cultures. Pink, spangly lettering on the inside cover. A semi-erotic silhouette of the author on the back cover. ‘PHWAR, WHAT A READ – The Sun’ tattooed on the front. This is what your book became when I picked it off the shelf Charlotte, and I am so sorry for it.

Well, after six hours I was a third of the way through it. I’d also ransacked every shop in the airport. The gadget shop: with its random assortment of laptops and cameras. I’m pretty sure no one actually buys the expensive items; the shop probably keeps afloat on flogging UK/EU socket adapters alone. There’s always an entire wall of funky phone cases and colourful ipod socks, just to please the kids.

The souvenir shop is also a must. Every souvenir shop around the world must order from the same factory, but just changes the figurine inside the snow globe. I observed Copenhagen’s Mermaid, who no doubt has sat on that dusty shelf longer than the old girl on her rock this year. (She went to Shanghai and forgot all about us). T-shirts, keyrings, Carlsberg bottle openers. All generic with some mild pretence to Denmark stamped on them.

There’s a fine fish bar in the centre of the departures lounge too. No one was eating there except three bald, ageing blokes in suits. Clearly you had to have earned a healthy amount over a good period of time to oblige yourself with dining at that place. I moved on, and found a comfy place to read and eat my prepared sandwiches in peace.

When I flew to Paris in October and my flight was delayed, I was pissed off. I was pissed off because the French had realised they’d been working without interruption for about two whole months, and so a strike was in order. This delayed my flight, and I suppose I became a stereotypical Englishman that day. I can’t stand the French.

In contrast, on Monday I wasn’t pissed off. Even though my flight was delayed, no one can predict extreme bad weather. You just have to accept it. You don’t have to accept a load of whingeing lazy layabouts demanding extra cheese with their lunch portions or whatever it was they were complaining about.

My flight, which eventually took off, was not one that will stay in the memory for long. Sat in the middle of a chubby Dane reading Dan Brown and a gaunt boy I kept my head down with madam Bronte, happy in the knowledge I was going home.

Oh, and at customs I said ‘tak’ to the guy who handed back my passport, and ‘undskyld’ when I whacked my rucksack into someone’s arse in Sainsbury’s. Evidently old habits won’t die.