Remember when I said I was so relieved to be able to go on holiday despite the best efforts of the ash cloud, that I wasn’t even feeling a smidgen of my usual fear of flying?
That was before I read this:
[Source: warning, this link is to the Daily Mail, proceed with caution!]
(And oh hey, remember when I said I’d never read the Daily Mail ever again? Wish I’d kept THAT promise…)
You see that, people? That “terrifying mid-air drama”? That “plunge” from the sky? That “hitting severe turbulence”? That right there would kill me. I would die. And I don’t mean I’d die because I didn’t have my seat belt on (I ALWAYS have my seat belt on…) and I got thrown around the cabin like a rag doll, I mean I’d die because of THE FEAR. Actually, I’m pretty sure I’ve come very close to dying of THE FEAR on previous flights, and those were ones with only very mild turbulence. Some of them were flights with no turbulence at all, and I still almost died of THE FEAR.
(Two days after 9/11, Terry and I flew back from Spain, where we’d been during the attacks. Naturally, I was terrified, and this was intensified by the fact that the airlines at the time weren’t allowing passengers to bring anything into the cabin at all, so I was denied my usual coping mechanisms of book and music. At one point during the flight I got up to go to the bathroom, which was at the very front of the plane, right in front of the cockpit. As I stood there awaiting my turn, the door to the cockpit opened, and a young woman came out. Seriously, she looked about… twelve, maybe? She looked at me. I looked at her. We both looked at the locked door of the bathroom. “I have to go before you,” the woman suddenly announced, glaring at me. “Because I am the pilot.” I nodded dumbly, and let her go first. Then I stood braced in the doorway of that cockpit, knowing that the only thing standing between a planeload of people and a fiery death at the hands of the maniacs who were almost certainly on board, was… me. I am glad to report that I rose to the occasion. I did not shirk my duty. I protected that cockpit as if my life depended on it – which it basically did, as far as I was concerned – and it was only as I walked back to my seat afterwards that I realised there must’ve been a co-pilot in there anyway, and my fears of the woman never coming out of the bathroom, and me having to guide the plane to safety, guided only by a small team of people on the ground and my sketchy knowledge of Microsoft Flight Simulator were, um, ridiculous. I remained in a state of constant vigilance and total and utter panic for the rest of the flight, though. I’m still in that state now, actually.)
So, readers, please give a warm, Forever Amber welcome to: THE FEAR! It’s back, and it’s bigger than ever! One terrifying mid-air drama, coming right up!*
(*There’s almost almost a terrifing mid-air drama when I fly. Unfortunately, the drama is normally provided by me…)
1. Worked on my novel. Remember my novel? Huh. Me neither, apparently.
Wordcount when I started working on my novel this week: 13,175 words
Wordcount as of rightthisveryminute: 11,752. (Although some of those don’t actually count because they say things like “Chapter One” and “Chapter 2″ and stuff. )
So. Obviously something went way the hell wrong there. I mean, I realise I’m no expert, but, you know, pretty sure the wordcount isn’t supposed to go down with each new writing session. The problem is… well, it’s me. I’m very… edit-y. And I know! I know editing-as-you-go is EXACTLY the thing They tell you not to do. I know that! I’ve read the same “How to Write a Novel” books They have. But I just can’t help myself. If I’m not happy with something at the start of the book, I can’t write any more until I’ve gone back and fixed it (trust me, I’ve tried. Can’t.). So that’s what I did, which is why I ended up a couple of thousand words down. I thought up some more words while I was in the shower this morning, though, so I will add them in soon and I will have even MORE words. Some of which I may even like!
2. Worried a lot about my upcoming flight to Florida
Yes. Two weeks today, people. And I thought I was OK with it this time. I mean, OK, I’d woken up in a cold sweat a couple of times thinking, “OMG, I’m not going to Florida AT ALL, am I? I’m going to my fiery, or perhaps watery, death!” but I was mostly OK with it. “Planes are very safe,” I told myself. “They hardly ever crash!” And then this happened. And since then, it’s been pretty much all I can think about: we’re talking nightmares, freak-outs, the lot. I know it’s irrational, so no one needs to give me the whole “It’s the safest form of travel!” thing (Seriously, I don’t think I know ANY scaredy fliers who are actually ever comforted by that statistic anyway. Especially not right after a major air disaster.) but knowing it’s an irrational fear doesn’t make it any easier to stop myself worrying about it, so, yeah, fun times! Especially for Terry and my parents.
(Also: there is almost always an air disaster right before I’m due to fly. Almost always. I’m starting to think I’m some kind of Harbinger of Doom to the air travel industry…)
3. Tried to do yoga
You know what’s really boring? Yoga. Seriously.
4. Cleaned the house.
My house was really clean while the internet was down. Now? Not so much.
5. Hit the “refresh” button on my browser repeatedly while muttering “Is it back yet? How about now? NOW? I wonder if it’s back yet?” It wasn’t much fun, but hey, it passed the time.
6. Half-heartedly weeded the garden.
Like, really half-heartedly. In the sense of “I was wearing a skirt and nice shoes at the time, and I didn’t want to get them dirty”. Note to self: buy house with no garden. Or with live-in-gardener. Stupid garden.
7. Went to St. Andrews.
It looked like this:
Rubin also got a haircut that day. He looks like this now:
Then, in the evening, the internet would come back up, and I’d have to try to cram a full days work into a few short hours. Which was just as much fun as it sounds, really.
And that was my week of No Internet. Luckily for us, it seems be working again, and thank God for that, I say: I don’t think my novel would have survived another couple of days!
So, on the last day of our honeymoon we broke the house.
For once, it wasn’t my fault. No, this particular random act of stupidity was all Terry’s, and even although Terry will probably kill me when he reads this, I’m going to tell you about it anyway because it was totally NOT MY FAULT. For once.
We actually broke the house on our last night in Lanzarote. We’d spent the afternoon at the pool, and, for reasons that still escape me, Terry decided to top up the water levels in said pool while I showered and got ready to go out for dinner. After dinner we came home and drank the rest of the bottle of champagne that was in the fridge, and then we were drunk. As skunks. It was at this point that Terry went outside and discovered that he’d left the hose he’d been using to "top up" the pool running the whole time we’d been at dinner. The pool was well and truly topped up. The water tank in the house? Was not.
Because we were drunk however (and also: stupid) we totally failed to make the connection between these two events. The slow trickle of water remaining was just enough for me to remove my makeup (because you should never go to bed without removing your makeup, kids – Amber’s top tip of the day) and flush the loo once. After that we just shrugged and went to bed, hoping that it would all magically be fixed by morning.
It was not all magically fixed by morning. In fact, there was no water AT ALL by morning. Not even a trickle. We drove down to the mall in Puerto del Carmen to use their bathrooms:
It was a pretty expensive bathroom stop, I’ll tell ya. Then we came home to phone the owner of the house and tell him that, whoops, we broke it.
The owner of the house called a maintenance guy, who turned up thirty minutes later, by which point I was already in need of another bathroom trip, and Terry was hiding his wallet and hoping to God that the man would be able to fix the water.
The man was not able to fix the water. "There’s absolutely nothing I can do to fix this water," said the man, before explaining that we’d drained the tank, and would now need to wait for it to refill. The problem with that? Well, it was Sunday. The water tanks in Lanzarote don’t get refilled on a Sunday. It’s like, "on the seventh day, the water tanks rested" or something. So we were now facing an entire day without water – and given that our flight didn’t leave until 11pm, we hadn’t showered since the night before and would be spending the day in the hot n’ sweaty sun, that kind of sucked.
There was only one thing to do. We had to get the hell out of the house, so we packed our suitcases as quickly as we could (which wasn’t very quickly, really, given that I had all that Zara haul to find room for) then we hit the road, Jack. We spent the day wandering aimlessly around, from public bathroom to public bathroom, and finally ended up at the beach at Playa Honda, which is where we discovered the absolute best thing to do if you ever find yourself in Lanzarote with nothing to do. So, here it is:
1. Drive to Playa Honda.
2. Park up at the part of the beach which is right next to Arrecife airport. Don’t worry, you’re not going to be sunbathing on it.
3. Walk until you see this structure:
4. These are the landing lights for the airport runway, which is now just a few metres behind you. You should be able to smell the engine fuel and see the sand whipping up a storm every time one of the planes take off. I’m not even joking.
5. Walk some more until you are standing right at the end of the landing lights structure.
