This weekend I flew down to Bath for the Literary Festival. Having woken at 6am on Saturday morning to drive through to Edinburgh Airport, I was a bit miffed to discover that my flight had been delayed by 2 hours. Easyjet, as is so often the case with them, claimed this was due to a mechanical problem with the plane. An engine had fallen off, or rusted solid, or something. I suppose their fleet must be getting on a bit now. If you've ever struggled to keep an old banger on the road, you'll know how this feels. Really, I sympathise.
Normally I don't mind waiting around, reading a book or whatever, but this weekend I had the worst toothache I've ever had in my life. One of my wisdom teeth has been pushing through at a mad, crooked angle, wreaking havoc by colliding with another molar and causing pain which has varied from constant skull-splitting agony to something much, much worse. In any case, it put me in a bad mood at the start of the journey, a mood which deteriorated over the weekend.
The festival organisers arranged for me to be picked up at the airport, for which I'm hugely grateful. Liz Williams and myself were interviewed by broadcaster Christopher Cook. Very professional chap. Those who know me know how frightened I am of public speaking. I clam up. I freeze. My mind goes blank. I gibber. I mutter. I stumble over words. That's on a good day, when my brain is functioning normally, when I'm fresh and my thoughts are reasonably lucid.
On this particular day, my head felt like a working stone quarry. The toothache had crept around my skull, and was shrilling in my ears, so I took a bunch of codeine tablets. My subsequent time in Bath Guildhall, including the interview, passed the way I imagine time passes in a coma. Perhaps that was a good thing. Still, I was pleasantly surprised to find that a few folks bought copies of SN and asked me to sign them. Cheers, guys -- it's much appreciated.
My brother, Neil, and his partner Sian had travelled up from Brighton. We all went to the pub afterwards with Liz and a couple of her friends, and Cheryl Morgan, who had come along to watch the interview. Here I learned a lesson I will not soon forget. Don't mix large doses of painkillers with Somerset organic ale. Not even with the smallest amount of ale. I chatted with (at?) Cheryl for a while about books, or our favourite destinations within the USA... I think. For a short while the sensation of "woolly-headedness masking bone-deep agony" was replaced by a feeling of giddiness, of woozy confusion accompanied vague flickers of light at the edges of my vision. Voices sounded muffled, yet painful, as though everyone was speaking into a pipe organ implanted in my head. Although that might have been entirely due to the organic ale.
Back in the hotel, I showered, collapsed, woke up an hour later, head still reeling, jaw creaking as the pressure in my skull squeezed it into unusual shapes. I gargled ethanol and took more painkillers. Iain Banks was signing copies of his new book back at the Guildhall, and I wasn't about to miss that. I've never felt very comfortable with a lot of attention, and I'm much happier to be on the fan side of the table than the author side. Especially when I'm a huge fan of the author, as in this case.
Many thanks to everyone at the Bath Festival of Literature for inviting me, and for looking after me. I hope I didn't seem too grumpy -- I regret not feeling myself that weekend because I would have liked to have had a proper chat with everyone without the troop of monkeys banging rocks and pans against the inside of my cranium.
Beautiful town, Bath, even in the rain, even seen through a codeine haze. On Saturday night we watched a lunar eclipse. Sunday was grey and wet. Neil, Sian and I wandered between bookshops, cafes and pubs in search of a comfy sofa and soft music. We bought comics and coffees and talked about the evils of the world. In Waterstones, Neil moved a copy of SN to a more obvious place on the shelf, a tactic which embarrassed me. I swallowed more pills whenever the toothache became intolerable.
At Bristol airport the pain came on like a squall. My flight home was delayed an hour, of course. Airport Security would not let me take a bottle of orange juice through to the departure lounge.
"Drink it or bin it," they growled.
This pissed me off. One, because I had a nuclear headache by now; two, because our idiotic government put us in this position in the first place. (The "War on Terror" was always going to fuel a new and dangerous age of terrorism. Why couldn't they see that? Surely they had other motives? We learned to distrust them.) And, three, because this ban on liquids will not make the slightest difference to a fundamentalist nut-job who is determined to blow up a plane -- unless they are genuinely as thick as the ministers who thought up this ridiculous precaution. If I was the sort of whacko who wanted to take explosives on to a plane, I can imagine several ways to do so without relying on "Tropicana Florida 100% Pure Squeezed Orange Juice (with extra juicy bits)", or any other type of liquid. I won't expound in case some lunatic gets ideas.
Anyway, I was irritated. Given airport security's reaction to my orange juice, I decided to keep my bottle of ethanol well hidden. If they were going to get so agitated about squeezed fruit, I figured they'd burst a vein if they discovered something as flammable as a near-pure alcohol solution. I considered ditching it, but my tooth was hurting too much. They didn't search me.
By now my left eye had begun to twitch from the constant pain. The airport lights blazed overhead, painfully bright. My skull felt like it was being crushed under the tracks of a JCB. Klaxons were going off behind my left ear. Every word from the airport loudspeakers felt like a blow from a shovel. My plane was expected to leave an hour late. All Easyjet flights were delayed. All other airline's flights were on time. It was too hot, too loud, too crowded. There weren't enough seats. I gulped more painkillers and gargled ethanol solution in the departure lounge toilets and squeezed the bridge of my nose. I wanted a dark, quiet corner to lie down in, but there wasn't one -- just perpetual noise, heat, jostling crowds, kids screaming, searing lights, the singsong nasal loudspeaker voice: "Would Eeeeesyjet passengers who have purchased speeedeeee boarding pleeeease board now at gate threeeee." What's the point of "speedy boarding" when your flight is an hour late? I felt like I was going to faint.
If anyone had said a single word to me then, I think I would have snapped and turned on them like a rabid dog. Instead, I just vented my pain-fuelled frustration at Bristol airport and Easyjet in texts to my friend, Euan. Eventually I found a seat, hurled myself down into it, and scowled at the guy who was sitting opposite me reading Harry Potter. He got up and left. Then I screwed my eyes shut and tried to sleep.
Re-reading this just now, it doesn't sound like I had much fun. But that's not true. I enjoyed my time at the festival. I really liked Bath and everyone I met there, even if I was a grumpy sod.
