(no subject)

[ellarien]

I am not exactly functioning on all cylinders at the moment. I've had worse jetlag, but I'm still at the annoying stage when I can't sleep through the night and there isn't any time of day when I feel fully alert. This is not particularly conducive to copy editing, and certainly not to writing.

It was a good holiday, though, and Heathrow on Saturday was no more annoying than Heathrow usually is on a summer Saturday morning - possibly less so, in some ways; from spotting the monitor message designating my check-in zone to arriving on the far side of T4 security was well under an hour, maybe as little as 45 minutes, thanks to a helpful employee who pointed out that the line for bag-drop after using the self-check terminals was somewhat shorter than the one for regular check-in. (I think it was about 20 minutes; I've often stood in line to check in for going on an hour.) The other side of security was still rather low on places to sit, but I survived. The funny thing is, I flew, once, out of T4 when it was quite new, back in 1991. I'm fairly sure I remember wide open spaces, carpets, and pleasant reddish-orange decor. (It was a late-evening flight, so it may have been quieter than usual.) These days it's wall-to-wall people in the ticketing area (though not as bad on normal days as it was on the day of the 2003 baggage-handling strike) and serried ranks of rather uninviting little shops on the air side, and BA has this quaint habit of attempting to board a 747 in one swell foop rather than fiddling around with boarding groups. (Varig was doing that in '91, too, but I'm used to more organized ways of going on, these days.)


Also, I probably have enough books to be going on with for a few weeks, in so far as "enough books" is a meaningful concept. I keep seeing things that look interesting, but it may be time to exercise a little restraint, particularly if I'm going to be writing again.

Comments

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

I assume you must be able to get better flights from Heathrow or something, but we've always flown out of Manchester and it's ever so much more laid back than Heathrow. Of course that isn't difficult. :)

[ellarien]

I do use Manchester sometimes, but it means changing somewhere in the US, and usually costs a couple of hundred dollars more. (And the last couple of times I've done it, the trains from the airport haven't been running when I arrived.) The thing about Heathrow is that they have the non-stop BA flight to Phoenix, which is my only option for a non-stop US/UK flight. It used to go out of Gatwick, which was nicer but not feasible from Sheffield on the same day; for Heathrow, with the new express link, I can leave home at the crack of dawn and be there by 10.30. The extra ground travel at both ends makes it almost a wash, and it takes 24 hours door-to-door whatever I do, but when I'm in a hurry to book tickets that tends to be what I go for.