Tuesday 21st. and Wednesday 22nd. December 2010 – Dublin

Recovered from jet lag after the USA trip, and visited all the family and friends over the last week.  Still very cold, snow on the ground, grey and sticky, occasional snow showers. 

Tuesday 21^st – the shortest day on the calendar but a very long day for me as it turned out.  A business meeting in Dublin, Ireland, flight at 8am.  I arrive at the airport early and the plane is late – apparently it took an hour to chip the ice off it in Dublin before it could get to Glasgow.  As we land, the sky is a brooding dark grey, heavy with snow, which soon starts to fall.  Donal (my colleague) and I drive through thick white flakes to his office - sleek glass walls, a central foyer of cream terrazzo resplendent with Christmas trees.  Through the smoked glass windows I see the flakes still falling, faster and faster, like a huge pillow fight somewhere above.  We decide to return early to the airport.  The central concourse is completely packed with people, hardly able to move.  My flight is delayed by two hours, the huge yellow and black screen announces.  I roam about, squeezing past people with immense piles of luggage towering on trolleys.  The metallic voice announces that the airport is now closed – no flights out or in.  It tells people whose flights have been cancelled to ‘leave the airport and rebook online’.  I’m sitting with a young woman from Germany, with a two year old child asleep in a pushchair.  She’s blond, with pretty black earrings and lines of worry on her face.  She’s trying to get to Madrid via Frankfurt.  The last I hear is that the earliest she can fly there is five days from now.  She doesn’t know where she will stay the night.  Still they keep telling people to leave the airport and rebook online.  How is this to happen if you have nowhere to go, no internet access and in some cases don’t know Dublin at all and don’t even speak English? And it’s still snowing...

Finally they send me to the departure gate, but I can see the snow is a blinding white curtain constantly falling.  I see yellow lights flashing as vehicles try to clear the taxiways and runways, but they are covered again almost at once.  After the crowded chaos of the foyer, the departure gate is cold, empty and even a bit eery.  Silver aluminium chairs, a screen and a glass wall showing the ever falling snow made orange by the airport lights.  We wait, the few who have been sent here.  Then suddenly our flight information disappears from the screen.  No details.  At the Aer Lingus desk, an uninterested young man shrugs ‘Didn’t you know the airport is closed for the night now?’ ‘So where do I stay now?’ He shrugs.  ‘Make your own arrangements and rebook online’. ‘How?  I have no internet access’  ‘There’s free access in the concourse.’  He turns away.  At this point for the first time I feel very alone.  The internet access turns out to be about eight screens, with huge queues at each.  The main Aer Lingus desk has a queue so long that they have taped it off and stopped more people joining it.  Somehow I am floored by this turn of events.  All day I have obeyed orders – put up your seat backs and trays, listen to the safety announcement, stand in this queue, take liquids out of your hand luggage, take your shoes off, wait at the gate....  Now when I’m unable to think for myself they’ve washed their hands of me.  It is scarily apparent that the entire airport is a bit out of control.

A text arrives.  The another and another.  Thank goodness for the mobile phone and friends and family with internet, albeit snowed in in various parts of Ireland and far away in Scottish Lennoxtown.   ‘Wait in the taxi queue – I’ll get a B&B for you and rebook your flight’.  I wait.  The queue is long and jumbled – trolleys piled high with immense bags, toddler car seats, push chairs, musical instruments.  The family in front are French.  Only one of them speaks English.  They’re travelling from Chicago to Paris.  They’ve been on the road four days.  They ask if I know any hotels in Dublin.  I don’t.  The young couple behind are going home to Copenhagen.  They have no accommodation for the night either and no idea how to get any.  Another family had been going to Boston for Christmas.  They decide to sleep in the airport and so leave the queue.  It’s only about 6pm but it feels like the middle of the night.  Suddenly the queue begins to move.  It seems they put out an appeal on the radio for taxi drivers and they have come, one after the other, lights stabbing the snowy darkness.  We move outside.  Snow is falling in great lumps from the sloping glass roof above.  A baby is crying bitterly.  Eventually I get to the front of the queue.  My driver, an Afro Carribean Dubiner, has dropped everything when he heard the radio appeal.  He finds another man going the same way as me and we all set off, slowly but steadily into Dublin.  Here and there we pass snippets of city life. An elderly man in a red baseball cap shovelling snow angrily from the front of his shop.  A door opens and a man wearing reindeer antlers goes in.  A glimpse of the hall reveals a glittering Christmas tree as laughing people welcome him.   The B&B lady is waiting.  A large Victorian brick house, comfortable room.  At last a refuge.

And in the morning, 8am, it’s back to the airport.  As if no time has passed, we queue again chaotically, struggling past each other’s luggage.  It occurs to me that people are remaining really polite in the face of all this.  In the check in queue, I encounter an orchestra on its way to Glasgow Concert Hall for a Carols by Candlelight concert tonight.   Odd shapes luggage, some recognisable as violins.  They assure me we’ll get through. ‘Stick with us. We’ll get there. We always do!’   And so it goes on, but now the sun is shining and planes are roaring into the sky, so maybe, just maybe, I’ll get home for Christmas!

But it’s not that easy.  By 1.30, there is still no plane and no definite time for one.  I decide I’ve been too long as a dependent zombie, so I pick up my bags, stride out of the airport, and take a taxi to Connolly station.  If you can’t fly, you can still go by train and boat.  I'm in control again, a human being, no longer a parcel in transit.  The station is cold and busy, but the train is on time, and packed with people.  I sit beside a pleasant young lady who it turns out is a TV presenter or Irish television.  She apologises profusely on behalf of all Ireland for my bad experience at the airport.  We glide out of the station, past snow covered houses and gardens.  A round plastic garden table and chairs echoes summer meals al fresco, a red checked table cloth peeping out from beneath the snow. 

It’s dark in Belfast, and the queue shiver as we wait for infrequent taxis to careen through the ice towards us.  My driver is a friendly and loquacious Moroccan, who first came to Belfast twenty years ago as a trapeze artist.  He fell in love and now is a Belfast family man.  The ferry terminal is all but empty – I’ve got so used to crushes of bodies that it comes as quite a shock to find the huge ferry all but empty too.  We glide across moonlit seas and then there is Corsewall Lighthouse, scene of happy weekends for Bill and me at the unique and lovely lighthouse hotel.  Those lights speak of home.  And then Stranraer and Bill waiting outside in the freezing dark.  

Ferry arriving at Stranraer



So I do get home for Christmas after all.