Sunday is possibly my favorite day of the week. A day where I never work, and get to put my life in order; a great portion of that order stems from reflection on the week passed. And there is no better reflection than honey and banana on toast, with the Formula One to watch.

Certainly, the broadcast could be better; it could be an HD transmission, and if still broadcast on the BBC, I’m sure it would be. It’d also be nice if we could see the race uninterrupted by the plethora of adverts that seem so pop up at the most inconvenient of times, such as right in the middle of pitting. But such is life.

At the end of it all, I still get to watch a race and take a chance to zone out just a little. These are the days I cherish, the days that I wish would last just that little touch longer, a sort of reversal of long dark teatime of the soul. Days like these, the cold, overcast ones, are the kind to share with people you love. And while it’s not always possible to spend it with those special people, when it happens, it’s worth it.

Long cold mornings, fresh coffee, pancakes, and those you care about around you. It’s the perfect start to the day. I hope to have that pleasure again soon.

The man in 41C yawns, and leans back in his seat. The lights are down, the display from the laptop lights his face, and blinks off the rim of his glasses. A stack of papers sits on his desk, and a scribbled note on the back of an Apple Store Repair confirmation stands out in red ink against the grey Helvetica of the Terms and Conditions.

He calls his calendar up on the screen of the computer and fiddles with the date range, and titles the event. “AA99 To Chicago” stands out as the first entry of the day. Get there for going on ten am local, and a five hour lay over at O’Hare. Not ideal, but it’s preferable to the otherwise mad sprint to the other end of the airport, And that’s not forgetting the joy of Immigration Control. 

41C checks his booking, and selects the seat for his flight out. The seat is free. And now, confirmed. Our hero adds the seating plan to his calendar and syncs. Flight booked. Tickets sorted. Passport found. 

Six weeks to go…

The man from 41C stood on the platform, and looked up at the dirty orange LED display. The wind and drizzle made a light haze of colour around the sign, and turned the reading of “18:02 to East Grinstead” resemble something more akin to “18:85 to Bast Grlnstead”. The sky grew darker, and people poured out of the Tube station after the crush on the Victoria Line an hour before. 41C tucked the end of his scarf into the top of his overcoat, and walked slowly up the platform, bundled up as though in the depths of a Midwestern winter, with the top of his head and nose peeking out of the roll top of the woolen sweater. He reaches into his pocket as he pushes the button to open the door, and pulls out his mp3 playing phone^[i], and wiggles the ends of the headphones into his ears as he walks into the carriage. He finds a seat, and kicks up his walking boot covered feet onto the hot air vent under the little table by the window. Bag by his side, he pulls out the newspaper for the day, and a bottle of water.
The train, late as always, pulls out of Victoria, and rumbles through the City and a snail’s pace, heading southwest from Victoria to Croydon and Clapham, passing the towers of Battersea. The working lights shine up the chimney stacks, and makes the dirty white paintwork burn brightly in the early evening rain. The phone bleeps softly in his ears, and he reads a message about runways and sheriffs. The man from 41C sits back and thinks of the girl on Flight AA 3676. He wonders how it’ll go, and where she’ll end up. And where, in a few months, he’ll be. 41C leans back and listens to the clatter of the carriage over the rails, and the rain on the windows. The train rolls on into the evening, and the dirty orange of the station fades away. It’s time for another journey.

1. an iPhone, but it sounds silly in the context of the story [↩]

The man from seat 41C tugged on the laces of his shoes, and straightened up. He draped his overcoat on the handle of the luggage trolly, loaded his bags, and wondered off down the corridor towards Passport Control. A smile from the lady at the AA desk welcomed him back to the UK, and he half smiled back. The girl with brown boots was somewhere behind, pulling along a little case on wheels, and the couple from row 24 fiddled with the wife’s bag, looking for the stubs of their tickets.

Mister 41C rounded the corner, and padded through the security at the other end. He stepped out into the bleak and cold afternoon of Heathrow, and looked about him. Nothing shone anymore. All he could see was cold, wet, miserable people, and a dark cloud looming overhead. He wondered how much of this weather would stay, and how much was just hanging about from the New Year. Great, he thought. Just what the doctor ordered; rain.

A half hour later, he was asleep in the passenger seat of a car, being carried back into London. He dreamed about the flight, about waking up late and having been sent back to the States, as if he’d bounced back the way he came, as he often did on the District Line in the summer on the way back from Sloane Square. His feigned panic for the people at Immigration, and then joy at the prospect of seeing his sweetie again. One merge onto the A308 later and he woke with a jolt. He looks out the window, peering over his glasses, and sees nothing but the grey sky, rain pouring from the clouds hung in it. He settles back into his seat, and frowns to himself. His friend in the driver’s seat asks him what’s up, but 41C just replies he’s tired. It’ll pass, he says.

“It’ll pass. “

The man in seat 41C grimaced as the light above him blinked on in a rather obnoxious shade of dirty orange. The man with the Sox cap in 42B had pushed the little “Attention” button to summon a stewardess because he couldn’t find his pillow. Take this, the stewardess coo’d at him, and passed an unused one from a seat three down, next to the girl the the brown boots.

The girl shifted in her seat and adjusted her blanket, buckling the belt over it as the captain had said to do before the flight hit the night somewhere over Newfoundland. The remnants of the lackluster in-flight meal, a small pack of grapes, sat half-eaten on the armrest beside her, but for one which had escaped the plastic confines of the cup and rolled off down the aisle to be trodden on by a heavy-set gentleman in his socks on the way to the lavatory. He sighed and shuffled along, glancing over the sleeping occupants of Economy. Somewhere in the middle of the cabin, a man with a now spent video game sprawled, all six-feet-six of him, across five seats. Everything from 38B to 38F, and half an aisle were taken up with his frame and bags, which bumped the front of the brown boot girl’s seat, which had caused the grape to roll into the path of the man in his socks from 24F.

His wife in 24G curled up as best she could in the seat, and pulled down her mask to drown out the blinking of the video game from the man in 38B-F. It wasn’t until an hour later that a steward pulled the batteries and shut the blasted thing up.

From 22A to 45A, all had been looking out their windows on take off. The pounding rain had delayed the flight by almost two hours, and as the rain turned to slush and snow, the show became all the more entrancing. Of course, as they’d fallen asleep, the windows had remained open.

Only the man in 36A had the sense to close it; a seasoned traveler, he’d sat down, pulled out his own pillow, earplugs and blanket, pulled down the window, and dozed off within a matter of minutes. He’d missed the entire show. He’d made the Chicago-London run enough times to know it by now; he didn’t care to watch.

Across and down from him, the man in 38B-F shifted, and woke groggily. He lumbered up, and sat down in 40C, reclining the chair as far as it would go, leaving his bags, and shoes, sprawled over 38B-F. Only the satisfying tinkle of metal and glass gave away the fact that he’d just sat on his own glasses that he’d stuffed into his back pocket before falling asleep across the seats. Of course, he wouldn’t notice until landing the crumbs of glass pouring from the tear in his jeans back pocket, into the shoes of the man in 41C.

The man in 41C tutted, and moved his shoes to the right of the crack in the seat, and turned onto his side, as best to avoid the crushing of the seat of the oaf in-front of him. He sighed heavily, and closed his notebook, stuffing the pencil into the spine of the binding, and putting the whole thing in his bag next to him on 42D.

He buckled his belt, and fished into an inside pocket of his bag, and pulled out a simple wooden bead Rosary. Wrapping the beads around his fingers, he pressed it all to his forehead, and said a silent prayer for the ones he’d left behind in Chicago, and wondered when he’d see them again.

The AA98 flight banked over the Eastern coast of Greenland and made for Reykjavik, though and down towards London. Daylight broke as the plane turned port-side facing the sun, and shafts of light burst through the cabin, illuminating the passengers in red and yellow tones.

The man with the Rosary tucked his legs up under his seat, and turned to face the sun and the windows. He shut his eyes and dreamed of his lover.