Suzanne Harrington: Travel after lockdown - I'm finally on a plane and I'm over the moon
I’m in a huge building with glass walls on one side and a wide flat road outside with giant metal bird-shaped things parked in a sideways row. It all looks familiar but it’s been so long that I’ve gone blank. Oh wait. Heathrow.
It's been an exciting morning. Buying an overpriced train ticket, followed by an overpriced coffee, mentally reminding myself that after a year of making oat lattes at home for (almost) nothing and carrying them around in a flask like an old person, I am not about to restart paying three-fifty a go. No.
Flasks are the new normal. It’s exciting though, buying a coffee in a train station. I feel caffeinated before I even take the lid off.
In my bag next to my passport, which needed careful dusting off with an archaeologist’s toothbrush, is my phone with a QR code from an NHS PCR test saying I am not a plague carrier. Sorry about all the initials. That’s just how it is now.
The day before I had been inside a government tent in my local park with a nice man telling me to shove an extra long cotton bud up my nose, having already made myself gag like a pregnant woman in a fish shop by stabbing myself in the tonsils with the same bud, before popping it into a test tube of red liquid and handing it to someone in a hazmat suit. Travel has never been so exciting.
At least I didn’t pay for it. Last week my sister paid £100 for an identical PCR test except done for profit in a chemist, because the information is so faulty, contradictory, inaccurate, and constantly changing. That’s a lot of oat lattes.
A well-known consumer website has been telling people NHS tests are invalid for travel – if you know any Irish people in the UK about to visit Ireland, tell them this is nonsense and to spend their money on thermal underwear instead, in readiness for all the outdoor coffees.
I find myself taking photos of the clouds from above, like someone who has never been on a plane before; I have to restrain myself from clapping when it lands. Cork Airport feels impossibly exotic. It’s not, obviously, but right now everything beyond my front gate feels impossibly exotic.
Introverts are talking to their therapists about what is being dubbed Re-entry Syndrome, and at least one person I know has gone back to work and promptly quit their job because they’ve had a year to realise how much they hated it, but right now, a fifty-minute flight feels more thrilling than a trip to Venus.
Let’s not all stampede back to how it was before, though, when we barely noticed what we were doing because we were always doing it at a million miles an hour. Let's stay slower.
