After a month away, what better reintroduction to England than Luton airport with a hangover. Actually, I could think of many better introductions. Having fish and chips fired at you with a leaf blower at a refugee camp in Dover would be an improvement, as would being immersed in a seven foot deep pukka pie. Luton airport is grimness itself. There’s even a song about it by Cats UK, which mocked a Lorraine Chase Campari advert. Campari and Luton airport – a depressing combination.
What cheered me up slightly was my new found ability to get roughly what I wanted from shopkeepers, having spent the last month ordering stale bread and ham made of pig snout from sadistic storeowners in Spain and Italy. What cheered me up further was the readiness of the coach drivers to jape and joke about with people who didn’t understand English. One Italian made the mistake of ripping his own ticket counterfoil off in front of the coach driver. The coach driver then protested between life-saving drags on his roll-up that he could no longer accept the document – that it was destroyed. A word not apparently in the Italian’s dictionary. A French lady presented her ticket, but this too was unacceptable, as her delayed flight had made her miss it. The driver helpfully informed her that he could not change the ticket time, but that the distant ticket desk should be able to do this for her. No doubt the grateful French lady expected the coach driver to be waiting for her return with the rebooked ticket.
The driver made a few jokes about him only accepting duty free in exchange for tickets to me. The coach company does actually not allow drivers to sell tickets – an absurdly backward idea from a company that can’t adequately manage bookings. I knew this. The driver knew this. The assorted Europeans on the bus did not. I gave him a tenner. He went through the motions of pretending to write out a ticket for the benefit of the other full price passengers. He kept the tenner. I got a cheap ride home. The technologically challenged coach company lost out. The French lady is probably still at Luton airport.