Sal and I popped up to Southport this weekend to spend a quiet, relaxing couple of days staying with my parents.
Well, it was a relaxing weekend, just as soon as we managed to get there: We’d taken the environmentally dubious decision to avoid Richard Branson’s Train Hell, and instead take advantage of the short flights now being offered by the small Belgian airline VLM between London City airport and Liverpool’s recently renamed (and I’m sure there’s a bespectacled scouser turning in his grave somewhere over it) John Lennon airport. London City Airport’s website suggests that travellers to the airport head for Canning Town station and hop on their overpriced shuttle bus, but being the canny chap that I am, I’d looked at the map, and spotted that there is a much closer station to the airport on the Silverlink line that we would be on anyway (Silvertown), so it seemed rather more sensible to just head there and walk. Well, that would have been a good idea, were it not for the fact that what the map doesn’t show you is that there is half a building site between the station and the airport (the initial work for the new DLR extension that will serve the airport directly from next year), and you can’t actually walk what looks like a simple short distance. Cue 15 minutes or so of us running around a dodgy, almost deserted part of East London in panic (at one point finding ourselves no more than 20 feet away from the entrance to the terminal building, but with two 8 foot metal fences and a half built train station between us and it) before flagging down a black cab that miraculously appeared from thin air and making it to the check in with minutes to spare. Phew.
I’m not sure Sal was actually that happy that we had caught the plane in the end, because we were turbulently bumped around for the full hour journey. Which is not exactly what you want when you are already concerned about the safety aspects of flying on a plane small enough to have propellers (especially when all your boyfriend can do to assuage your doubts is to make crass jokes about flying on a little Fokker).
Back in the big city, this week promises to be a busy one: off to the theatre tonight, Pete’s birthday on Thursday, and we’re seeing some dodgy Aussie band on Friday.