Sun’s out, it’s hot … why bother with the hassle of going abroad?
I’D seen photographs of the queues at Heathrow and heard reports that British Airways were cancelling flights willy nilly, but I had tickets for the Chelsea match in Madrid on Tuesday, so I decided to grin and bear it.
Fearful that Heathrow would be more chaotic than a Ukrainian refugee centre on the Polish border, I set my alarm for crikey o’clock, even though I knew I’d have a post-birthday hangover. Which turned out to be the case.
So, with a terrible headache and a tremendous sense of self loathing, I arrived three hours before my flight was scheduled to depart, only to find that the terminal was full of nothing but tumbleweed.
I’ve been to busier libraries.
I therefore had time to order a bacon sandwich which I hoped would mop up some of the sick in my stomach. It didn’t.
Which meant that once I’d completed the eight-mile walk to the gate, I was sweating beer.
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The cabin crew said I had to wear a mask.
I’m not sure whether this is because of Covid or because my breath smelled like a brewery.
But whatever, we landed in Madrid and after another eight-mile walk, I reached the back of the queue for passports. It was long. Really long.
And moving so slowly that tectonic drift was moving me gradually away from the front of it.
But after 90 minutes of cursing Brexit, I was through and in another queue for the Covid check.
And then another for the train to the main terminal.
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And then another for a taxi, which then spent 90 minutes sitting in a traffic jam.
After a hurried lunch in the rain, wishing I’d thought to bring a jacket of some sort, I joined a queue for the football match and after 90 minutes, I found my seat, which was at the exact same altitude as the International Space Station.
I then spent two hours, in the rain, watching some insect men running about playing what could have been football, during which time, a fellow Chelsea supporter celebrated a goal by headbutting me.
This meant I was so cross-eyed that for the rest of the match, I was watching two lots of insect men running about. Until eventually, Chelsea won. Which meant we lost.
We were then told to remain in our seats until the Spanish supporters had left the stadium, gone home, gone to work, had children, retired and died.
And then, at way past midnight, having had about no minutes’ sleep the night before, we were funnelled down 450,000 flights of stairs back to sea level where we were herded like sheep by some of the most fearsome-looking riot police on God’s green earth.
Well, they would have been fearsome except for the fact that they were all on horses that were only 3ft tall. It’s strange.
You can dress a man up in full body armour and you can give him a helmet and a gun and a can of Mace but if you put him on a pony, he becomes as terrifying as a spaniel.
RIOT POLICE
After we’d laughed at them for a couple of hours, we found a taxi and then at nearly three in the morning, still suffering from the night before, we got back to the hotel.
Three hours later, I was up again so that I could queue in a taxi to get to the airport and then queue to show someone my passport.
And then we cruised home at a slightly lower altitude than my seat, so that I could stand in another queue at passport control at Heathrow.
I’m home now though, and the sun is shining and it’s warm and I’m seriously wondering if I’ll ever go abroad again.
It’s nice over there.
But these days, it’s just not worth the bother.
Why they’re lucky stars to be handled by Liz
LIZ HURLEY posed this week in a bikini while carrying a couple of starfish and immediately everyone in the increasingly mad world of social media went mental, saying that if you pick up a starfish, it will die in screaming agony.
This was then picked up by the newspapers, who basically said that Liz is a star f***er.
There’s one small problem with the story though. It’s not true.
Starfish don’t die if you pick them up.
There’s even a fish-fondling farm in the woke world of Northern California where visiting children, after they’ve toured the non-gender-specific lavatories, are invited to do just that.
So if you want to pick on a celebrity who has been photographed while handling an animal of some sort, why not have a go at Barack Obama?
He was snapped cuddling a koala.
And if you do that, it will immediately catch chlamydia.
Sanna a Finn pin-up
FINLAND has announced it wants to join Nato and as a result, Putin has moved a significant chunk of his military to the 800-mile border.
Naturally, this caused the Finnish prime minister, Sanna Marin, to utter some strong words but I’m afraid I have no clue what they were, for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, every time she speaks, I lose the ability to concentrate for some reason, and secondly, Finnish is the most impossible language of them all.
They even have a single word for someone who is lounging around in their house, drinking, with no intention of going out.
A new board game
WE learned this week that if a migrant arrives on a Kent beach in a small rubber dinghy, he will no longer be given a house in Oldham.
Instead, he will be taken directly to the nearest airport and flown to Rwanda.
Which means the migrant crisis has become like a giant game of snakes and ladders.
You wake up one morning in Africa and decide that you’d like to live in a country with free health care.
So you roll the dice and off you go. Across the Mediterranean. Past the Italian border guards.
All the way through the continent to Calais and then on a small inflatable to the beach in Kent, where you land on a snake and slither all the way back to where you started.
It’s not the end of the world though.
I’ve been to Rwanda and it’s extremely pretty.
Certainly, I’d rather live there than in the damp basement of a Lancashire terraced house, which is where most migrants end up.
Sober enough to drive
WE were all treated this week to photographs of the young Beckham leaving his wedding in a classic Jaguar and his dad going home at the wheel of a cool Maserati.
And all I thought was: “Can’t have been much of a fun party if everyone was sober enough afterwards to drive.”
It's One lousy show
A LEFTY actor of some sort went on the endlessly annoying The One Show this week and made a feeble joke comparing Boris Johnson to Richard Nixon, the disgraced and now dead ex-US President.
As a result of this . . . nothing happened.
Whereas when I went on The One Show and made a feeble joke about executing strikers, all hell broke loose.
I was on the front pages.
People demanded an apology and I’ve never been asked back.
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Elon's empire
SO now Elon Musk wants to buy Twitter, which means that one man will have full control of the cars we use to move about on earth, what we do in space and what we say to one another online.
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He says he will protect our freedom of speech.
Which, in his case, means protecting his right to call the man who saved all those kids in a Thai cave “a pedo”.