Well, a chance comment by Peter in a different thread triggered an amusing memory for me.
I spent many a happy hour during my stays in London trawling through charity shops such as Oxfam and the like, (which seemed ubiquitous), (fairly) indiscriminately buying cheap books. And wandering the tiny dingy 2nd hand book stores, tucked away in side streets, where the carpet-slippered proprietor would grunt at you over the top of his cloth-bound copy of Lamb's Tales, and probably his half-moon spectacles, as you picked your way gingerly between towering stacks of books, never knowing what you might find. Great times for a voracious reader, but with the concomitant problem for the semi-hoarder 10,000km from home, that they take up a lot of space, and are heavy.
(Any savings such cheap books provided were probably eaten up in the long run, when after my 3rd stay in that country, I was forced to sea-freight several cases of books back to SA.
)
This particular tale however, concerns my first such sojourn, and by the time I was about to leave, I had filled this weird expanding travelling kitbag I had, (think of a small square kitbag on wheels, about a foot to a side, that when unzipped sufficiently, would accordion up to about waist high) (it was burgundy, with a yellow chevron. *shrug*
) with about 30kg of books, already exceeding my luggage allowance before even
thinking about my actual suitcase etc.
This only became apparent the night before my departure of course, (because that's when I packed) (of course), and was quickly swept from thought by the traditional going-away party.
Everybody attended. We were a true cross-section of the stereotypical London melting pot, gutter-snipes and old money, immigrants, graduates and school leavers...brought together in a way probably only made possible by the democratising influence of moderate to considerable amounts of recreational drugs.
Among others, there was the giant public school boy with a heart of gold, the grimly black-humoured workaholic Polish immigrant, the gaunt Cornish chef, who worked 18 hour days and lived in a bedsit in Earl's Court, (and in whose parents stately manor home I'd stayed while spending 2 idyllic weeks wandering the Cornish countryside, high out of my mind
). There was the tiny mad cockney geezer, whose salary was garnisheed by the boss every month to cover his inevitable disappearances for 3-day benders on the company money, and the taciturn chap from the Costwolds, (oldest of us all at 30 or so), who never went anywhere (even in the square mile) without a border collie trotting at his heels. (He was inevitably called "Shep" (I never knew his actual name) and it transpired one day that the inconspicuous gold signet he wore was the crest of his family, who owned a fifth of Gloucestershire or something ridiculous.
)
Suffice it to say, that by 6am the next morning when I was bundled into the van for the drive to Heathrow, I had only the vaguest idea of what an aeroplane was, let alone what I was supposed to be doing with it, and why I was dragging 30kg of books around with me.
Arriving at the check-in desk in the nick of time, (though things were much more relaxed in those days, as we're about to see), I had the great good fortune of doing so even as a couple of planes on the runway were involved in a minor collision. Nothing serious, one lost a wheel as I recollect, and in the confusion, I was pointed in the direction of my boarding gate without the proper procedure.
I duly arrived on the trot at the gate, only to be asked why the hell I still had all my luggage.
Barely compos, I managed to say that they'd just told me to hustle in this direction, and clearly annoyed, the airline guy told me to chuck my bags through one of those holes in the wall that are curtained with old conveyor belts, and get myself onto the plane.
It didn't occur to me to question this, and disguising as much as possible the toll that hoisting my book bag through a chest-high hole in the wall exerted on me in my delicate state, I consigned my luggage to the system, unchecked, un-x-rayed, and
crucially, unweighed.
(And if you think you know where this is going, it's already gone...everything arrived in perfect order on the other side with me, and I have most of those books to this day.
)
--A
