State of Alarm - day Ninety

I woke up after a comfortable night's sleep, prayed, ate my breakfast sandwiches, and was paying my bill dead on time to take a taxi to the airport at ten to nine. The vast area of check-in desks at Terminal One was almost deserted, just one slim queue visible for a Vueling internal flight. I had to hunt to find the British Airways check-in desk, having been waved roughly in the right direction by one of many masked officers, either Proteccion Civile or Policia. The desk wasn't yet open but one check-in clerk was briefing another about the flight, as I arrived, second in the queue.

Then three cops arrived with a big burly middle aged Brit and a lady, who might have been a spouse or an interpreter. This party jumped the queue, and the guy who was the centre of attention produced a sheaf of papers which he handed over to the check-in clerk. After a few minutes they were handed back to him with what looked like a couple of tickets. At a guess, I suspect he was under arrest, due to appear in court, and would miss his flight unless he could change his ticket. By a quarter to ten, I had been checked in an given a paper ticket. The clerk wasn't interested in in the boarding pass that I displayed on the BA smartphone app, especially installed. With so few customers, there was no need for modern smart solutions to old ticketing requirements.

This time I was ready to pass through security and did so smoothly. I had an hour to wait for the flight boarding gate to be announced, and spent the time walking the vast length and breadth of the almost deserted wings of Terminal One Sector D, and taking photos of this uniquely empty place. You can see them here.  Today's flight destination board showed fifteen flights scheduled instead of a daily total of over seven hundred. Six of these were internal flights and nine international. 

Today the suspension of the Schengen open borders policy is lifted, though I suspect it will take some time to be implemented on every means of transport. Looking at the people waiting to board our flight to Heathrow, travellers seemed to be mainly domestic rather than business users - people like me wanting to get back to their families after lock-down. If any holidaymakers were travelling, it's more likely they'd be people stuck in Spain an now returning, than people going on leave. 

For the moment, despite the media talking up the prospects of summer holiday travel, nervousness is more likely to inhibit all but the ignorant and the daredevil from leisure travel at the moment. The one exception is perhaps those who have holiday homes in another country, and the traffic for those who can afford it, is two way. I suspect it will be a while longer before things really start to get really busy again at airports around the world. More and more people are wondering - is my journey really necessary?

As I board the 'plane, I wonder how long it will be before I get to visit Spain again. A country that I've so much grown to love in the past twenty years. My long locum days are probably over, as I'm now more conscious of the risk of being away on my own, and can't expect Clare to put her life and work on hold for an extended period to suit me. So who knows what the future will hold?

We arrived ten minutes early in Heathrow Terminal Five. It's a long walk to baggage reclaim, made more difficult to know where your baggage carousel is, as there are so few travellers in this vast public area. Normally you just follow the herd of people you vaguely recall as being on your flight to find the place. I missed it altogether and had to back track to find it.

After a long walk to the arrivals gate, and then another walk in the car park, Kath and I met in level three, which was 5-10% occupied by vehicles. By a quarter past four we were in Meadow Street back in Cardiff, after a smooth journey home. We were both struck by the amount of speed limited roadworks on the M4 as far as Reading. In addition to road widening, new new digital infrastructure is being install to control the heavy commuter traffic flows into London from a 50 mile radius. What we don't yet know is what impact this pandemic will have on this state of affairs. It seems that the lock-down is demonstrating the benefits of working from home to new people, who may well decide this offers a better quality of life than driving to an office every day. We shall see!

After a cup or tea and some cake, Kath headed off for Kenilworth. I spent the evening adjusting to life in our attic bedroom under lock-down. I'm unused to such a limited space, and unpacking was a nightmare. Where to put everything in my suitcase? And now I have to bring my one miserable Windows 10 computer up to day, which will take many hours and hog internet connectivity until it has done its thing.

Apart from that, and the on-going battle to overcome Covid-19, all manner of things are well in my small world. I have been blessed by a smooth well organised three stage journey home, surrounded by the good-will and prayers of so many people in Spain, Britain and elsewhere. It'll take me quite a while to digest all I have learned. Thank you friends everywhere!

Hmm - when I wake up tomorrow, my life will no longer be governed by Spain's declared 'State of Alarm'. The UK government's general crisis management seems dangerously sloppy in contrast to Spain and other EU nations. What have I come home to? How do I entitle my blog from tomorrow? I'll have to sleep on it.

  

A difficult home journey

I was up early, running a load of washing, taking out the rubbish, cleaning the kitchen, as soon as I'd had breakfast and prepared a picnic to take with me. At eleven, Peter and Charlotte came around for the handover of house keys, and then take me to the station for the Barcelona train. It's an enjoyable journey as the line runs close to the sea along several sections. There was a delay of fifteen minutes at Salou, but I had plenty of time in hand to get the airport train. I'd quite forgotten, arriving at Terminal Two, that no Vueling flights leave from there. The company have an information booth but it was closed and flight indicator panels displayed no evidence of the airline's existence. 

I began to wonder if they'd gone bust and I'd not picked up on the news. I tried Googling on my Blackberry, but it was on strike, refusing to connect to a network, because the roaming contract extension expired yesterday night, so I sailed close to panicking. I asked a man with an official badge, and realised I'd forgotten about Terminal One being the base for Vueling flights. I quickly took the shuttle bus for the ten minute ride, and found a four hundred metre queue of people checking bags in at a row of twenty Vueling desks. Thankfully I still had time in hand before check-in was meant to start for the Cardiff flight. I showed my ticket to the queue manager and was allowed to join it. With almost all of the check-in desks running, the queue moved quickly. As I moved, it built up behind me again. Going through security was even quicker, and then I had a full two hours to wait for the flight to be called.

Terminal One has a vast roof and glass outer walls giving views of the airport in each direction, and this encloses half a dozen boarding areas, misleadingly called 'gates'. Each 'gate' has a score of actual boarding access points. In the middle of this is huge shopping mall. Straight after security, there's passport control, then you're led down an escalator into the shopping mall. You walk through this to get to 'gates' A B and C, but D and E gate signage is less frequent and more obscure. I had to walk around the entire mall and re-check, before realising access to D and E 'gates' was obtained by going back up the escalator and walking to a separate corridor a kilometre long, containing fifteen boarding access points in a row. The terminal was designed with high passenger capacity in mind, and although it's clearly busy with summer traffic, while I was waiting it seemed quite empty most of the time. 

The flight left on time and arrived five minutes early. Once we crossed the Pyrenees there was cloud all the way, unbroken until the plane was on its landing run. Aberthaw power station as the first thing visible in an hour and half of flying. It had been raining hard for two hours, Ashley reported, when he rang me in  baggage reclaim. My case arrived soaking wet, suggesting that no protective cover had been used on the short journey from plane to conveyor belt. Thankfully, I had rainwear tucked away in my rucksack, where its sole purpose to date has been as a cushion to protect my laptop.

On the airport shuttle was a Spanish family, coming for a short holiday in Cardiff, trying to decipher their computer generated itinerary. I plucked up my courage and spoke to them in Spanish. I too had trouble with their itinerary, which suggested they take a bus from outside the Philharmonic (now closed) to get to the Travelodge at the Friary in Greyfriars Road, fine except that the itinerary didn't say "Take any bus", but mentioned only the fact that this was the T4 bus stop - destination Newtown, and not about the appear on the bus indicator board any time before tomorrow. I took them to the stop once we'd been dropped off in Custom House Street, and the next bus heading for the Kingsway was fifteen minutes away, and the weary kids were beginning to complain, so I proposed a taxi, took them around to the station, explained to a driver what they wanted, and then made my way back to Westgate Street, where I didn't have to wait long for a 64. Needless to say, given the puddle strewn pavements, my case was very wet by the time I reached home, and dampness was penetrating clothes, though fortunately not any of my books. What a welcome back to Wet Wales!