The hysterical passengers at Larnaca airport were screaming and crying uncontrollably.
‘There’s a Wizz Air flight to Luton tomorrow!’ shouted one girl next to me, looking fit to pop out of her pink skin. ‘What?’ I said, appalled. I don’t know much, but I do know I never want to get a Wizz Air flight to Luton, unless in a full-blown wartime evacuation, and this wasn’t that.
When I tried to scan my boarding pass and it said ‘Flight cancelled’, I just thought ‘Good.’ As the hordes of panicking chavs bombarded the easyJet counter, I turned on my heels and began pulling my wheelie case back towards the exit.
I’m a big fan of budget airlines and hotels. Luxury frightens me and too much choice gives me panic attacks. But there are limits. A Wizz Air flight to Luton? I don’t think so.
Maybe I could just live here in this tiny room, I thought, as I set out all my books and toiletries and clothes again
I marched to the taxi point, calling the driver. ‘Come back,’ I said to Ersin. ‘What happen?’ ‘Flight cancelled.’ ‘Flight cancel?’
‘Where you go?’ he shouted as I walked towards him. He was now hysterical for no good reason, except I think the IVF clinic pays him to look after me, so if I don’t get home safely he may be in trouble.
I climbed back into his people-carrier with disco lights on the ceiling. I looked at the panicking sunburnt chavs stampeding from the terminal to get taxis to take them to the nearest hotels and said: ‘I’m coming back to Lefkosha with you.’ For ever, if I can arrange it.
Ersin didn’t look happy and after a long queue for the border into the Turkish republic, he barked at me for a hundred euros as he offloaded me outside the Hotel Sun. But I had the cash and he was then all smiles and insisted on pulling my case to reception.
While in the taxi I had managed to crack the enigma code of the easyJet rebooking to get the next flight they could offer me. It was six days later. All the screaming pink chavs were on their iPhones prodding the rebooking options.
So I had six more days stuck in northern Cyprus. The hotel checked me back in – €260 for six nights, cheaper than living at home in Ireland for a week. I couldn’t do anything in West Cork for that. I asked for my old room back – 527 please.
Maybe I could just live here in this tiny room, I thought, as I set out all my books and toiletries and clothes again.
The next day easyJet offered to pay me €450 not to get the rebooked flight, because they didn’t really have the planes for everyone they’d said they had. It was tempting.
I had left the BB with two bookings. An Italian couple that night and a French couple checking in the night after that. He was texting me updates in real time. When the French arrived, he said they asked him, ‘When do you think the rain is going to stop?’ ‘Nine months’ time,’ he replied. Then they started lecturing him about climate change, and he told them what he thought of that.
I blocked the rest of the days off on Airbnb so he wouldn’t clash with anyone else. Still I was toying with the idea of never returning, or not returning for a long time.
I had my thyroid pills and my hormone pills to take. I had two months to try to get my numbers perfect after the last blood test.
My cardio was tip-top, according to the surgeon who listened to my heart. My kidney function was slightly down, but I wasn’t surprised given the amount of drowsy anti-histamine I guzzle with Lemsip every night to try to knock myself out because I’m frightened of sleeping pills.
I stopped dosing myself up for insomnia, and had six more days lying by the pool listening to country and western music. Then I reluctantly called Ersin to come and pick me up.
At Larnaca airport, I managed to get my case pulled to pieces as the Greeks looked for a tube of Aussie hair miracle I’d forgotten was in there.
When I got out at the other end, I had to check into one of those £160-a-night sleeping kennels at Gatwick and, after that, as they didn’t have a connecting flight to Cork for days, I set off for my friend’s flat in Pimlico. Re-entry to the world of mindless pettiness then began in earnest.
On the packed train to Victoria the doors opened to reveal a few people on the platform at East Croydon and a voice squawked: ‘Move down – selfish!’ A twenty-something blonde girl with a voice like she’d inhaled helium was trying to get on.
‘Sel-fish!’ she squeaked, as though she also wanted to shout ‘Raaacist!’ and ‘Sexist!’ and ‘Just stop oil!’
Old ladies tried to move up by flattening themselves and bending in two, so I shouted: ‘Listen Karl Marx, before you start spouting The Communist Manifesto, maybe consider it’s you who’s being selfish trying to squeeze onto a packed train when you should wait for the next one!’ I should have called her Karla Marx, of course, but I didn’t think of that until just now.
Back at Gatwick a few days later to get my Cork flight, the Ryanair woman wouldn’t let my carry-on through. She measured it in that stupid holder thing, then made me repack the front pouches into my handbag, so I boarded the plane with an overflowing display of bikinis and knickers. She then waved through a girl with a camping pack on her back half the size of her, virtually with pots and pans hanging off it, and various bulging bumbags strapped to her waist, followed by two very large men with long pink hair wearing dresses, pulling cases larger than mine and snogging each other.
My neat carry-on had been unpacked and repacked twice by fools, and the result was that when I got back to Ireland, I couldn’t find my treasured new, freshly re-read holiday copy of Tender Is The Night, complete with turned-down pages at the bits that made me cry.
If it weren’t for the thought of all the medication I’ve got to remember to wake up and take each day, I’d pull the covers over my head indefinitely.
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