Flying Home for Christmas

...is precisely what I didn't do this year. Weddings cost money, don'tcherknow; so a Dhaka Christmas it was.

My brother will go down in the annals of brilliance yet more permanently, however, for using up all of his holidays to come and visit me. A good, if unconventional, Christmas has been had, with sunshine and green coconuts and nonsense and coral islands and beaches and other things profoundly unwinterish.

In this, a rare moment of connectivity before we disappear to the south coast (think less 'riviera' and more 'storm-damaged community visit'), I'm posting something I wrote after my journey to the UK last Christmas, in the waxy-mouthed grip of insomniac jetlag, and promptly forgot about.

Vive la difference, I suppose. Hope you enjoy it.

Wake. Wheeze. Shiver. Rise. Look at clock. Mutter darkly. Return to bed. Wheeze further. Give up unequal struggle between sleep and cold. Collect bags. Leave home. Marvel at that rarest of precious findings: quiet in Dhaka. Reflect pensively that, though possessed of a filigree fragility which is quite touching, the stillness comes necessarily low on taxis. Hear low-grade buzzing in middle distance; conclude (correctly) that for once pessimism and public transport have not gone together. Flag down taxi. Negotiate price down from the upper reaches of fantastical larceny into the realm of the merely unaffordable.

Shiver in the breeze blowing across Airport Road. It’s 10 degrees. Ponder nervously what my metabolism will do to me when faced with -5 in London. Give metabolism a stern talking-to. Metabolism still asleep; leave a message for it with my volition, which is surly but conscious, functioning on a skeleton staff.

Arrive at airport; attempt irony when driver asks for a tip on top of the fat fare previously agreed to. Dial down from irony to sarcasm. Dial down from sarcasm to plain sentences. Abandon sentences, smile and say ‘no’.

Feel the thrill of communication.

Security guard astonished at my ability to exchange pleasantries in Bangla; for the first of several times today, I explain that I have been in Bangladesh for a year, that (to even greater surprise) I will be returning shortly, and that no, my wife is not Bengali.

Walk through security barrier; find announcements screen. Walk further, and find working announcements screen. No desk yet. Find trolley, sit, read Wodehouse.

Desk is open. Check in. Check in has been suspended for my flight. Fog has prevented the aircraft from arriving in fewer than 9 pieces. Will miss connection. Jet Airways sportingly decide to allow me to get home anyway on an Emirates flight. There are 4 of us bumped in such a manner; they give us one, magic piece of paper to get us all on a plane in Dubai. Warily accept responsibility for this precious document.

Bags are (supposedly) transferred to our plane. Henning (a Norwegian) has responsibility for the paperwork which will indicate this, and will ensure that our bags don’t get sent to Delhi. He and his father have been visiting, deciding whether to move their garments business from China to Bangladesh. Consider, as they are talking to me, the possibility that I am talking to 21st century equivalent of slavers; since Henning is large and Viking and his father (easily 65) is even more so, and both could take me in a fight, I decide not to argue the point until I’ve got my bags back in London.

Our fourth is a Bangladeshi named Mahmoud; we thus make up the oddest school-trip crocodile you’ve ever seen. We don’t hold hands though.

Wait. Join a queue. Wait. Discover it is the wrong queue. Wait further. Check in. Call girlfriend. She is confused that I am not on a plane; touched by her naïveté, I remind her gently that this is Dhaka. Board plane.

Minority Report, The IT Crowd, Get Shorty, cheesy biscuits, complementary wine, chicken biryani. And, glory in the highest, emergency-exit-row seats. Very impressed.

Land. The scramble for hand-luggage begins at the ‘scr’ of the screech as the tires hit the tarmac, because this is Bangladesh. Even though it’s Dubai. Air hostess deals with this with a magnificent display of reception-class classroom control, all stomping feet and indignant demands for order and the resumption of seats. Works, too.

Deplane (a horrible word for a routinely cattleish experience). Negotiate airport. Forget to place MP3 player in security-scanner tray; ask the gent behind if I can put it on his. ‘As long as it’s not a bomb’. I assure him that it is not. Standing behind him in the queue, a representative of that beleaguered but heroic order, Americans Without Stereotypes, mocks him quietly to me. Smile appreciatively.

Mahmud and I get to the next flight, joining our Nordic Cousins. I hand over The Precious Paper, but unfortunately Mahmud has been stopped for travelling whilst Bengali (since this is Dubai, he looks too much like a slave who couldn’t possibly afford the ticket in his hand). After some bureaucratically rigorous examination of the gold lettering on the front of his passport, the man on the desk seems reluctant to admit the validity of that orthography and the document it adorns; then, seeing that Mahmud is travelling with 3 white guys, the nice Emirates man allows his misgivings to evaporate like labour rights in the dry desert breeze.

Strewth.

Replane. Father Ted, Daniel Kitson, David Crowder Band, more wine, chicken with potatoes of some kind.

Land. ‘Welcome to Heathrow Airport, where the temperature is minus 5 degrees’. Hurriedly unpack and assume emergency layers.

Mahmoud is way ahead of me, in a t-shirt, a jumper, a thin hoody, a thick jumper, a leather jacket, a coat, a beanie and an overcoat. On the escalator to immigration, he is shivering.

Lose my companions as I go to the orderly, unimaginably long queue for British citizens as they go to the Queues For Foreigners. My queue snakes around a boxed-off area which joyously declares that they are improving Heathrow for my convenience. Ponder the many appropriate applications, and the tragic public neglect, of the word ‘eventually’.

Reflect that this sort of low-level internal bitterness is entirely too British; and that lionise it as I may, there are as many undesirable things about ‘home’ as there are quiet glories. Play ‘Politicians’ by Switchfoot to underline the point to myself. ‘I pledge allegiance to a country without borders, without politicians’, wherein I am part of something whose primary expression of itself is not self-righteous corrosion of the soul.

Collect bags. Wave goodbye to the multilingual crocodile. Get on tube. Go to my sister’s house. Wake up to torrential snow and the news that Heathrow have neglected to buy antifreeze this year (twenty quid says it was a moneysaver in this age of austerity). My flight was probably one of the last to land (which it did, incidentally, with absolutely no histrionics whatsoever).

Complaining seems to be a habit I must try harder to break. Snow helps.

The girlfriend has not been so fortunate, and is stuck in Doha until someone boils the kettle at Heathrow. A sinking feeling in my stomach tells me that I’ll be back....