When the bartender at the airport bar says “are you still here?”  You know something has gone badly wrong with your holiday…

As I write this, I should be walking the streets of historic Venice, lapping up the culture, the sights, the architecture (and the booze).

Instead I’m sat in my dingy office at home bemoaning the state of the world. It goes something like this;

We arrive at Bristol International Airport full of that optimistic buzz you always get when you are about to go on holiday. We line up with all the other various folks either skipping and twittering, happy that they are off to sunnier and more relaxing climes – or trudging and dragging a case knowing they are going home.

Our turn at the check-in and the sloping foreheaded drone behind the counter cheerfully informs us our flight is delayed 3 hours. I refrain from speaking my mind at this point. It can’t be the weather, because when we arrived it looked like this;

5 hours pass in a haze of bad bad takeaway food, and ludicrously expensive beer and wine. For a time the weather turns towards the worrying – snowstorms hit.

But departs as quickly as it arrives. Finally we are called to our gate for boarding. Where we wait.

And wait….

And are told to wait just 15 minutes more for an announcement.

It’s hard not to notice the conspicuous arrival of airport police at the gate, just a short moment prior to the announcement. Expecting trouble are we?

So there it is, the squawking tannoy voice informs us that the flight has been canceled, because easyjet can’t find a crew for the plane. Did you look down the back of the sofa for one? Did you not realise the plane would need a crew before you called us to the gate, after making us wait FIVE HOURS? You total, total arseholes.

“Please proceed to the easyjet helpdesk for more information, and a brain aneurysm bought on through pure distilled airport rage.”

Airport rage is (thankfully) unique in that it’s on the whole utterly impotent, and pointless. The monosyllabic and infuriatingly un-apologetic cretin behind the counter doesn’t care about you – and can’t help you by virtue of being at the bottom of both the easyjet food ladder, and apparently also the gene pool.

So we find ourselves at home, and having been refunded for our entire holiday without any undue fuss or hassle, and without me needing to “express myself” on the phone to the queasyjet helpliner. We’ve re-booked and actually saved money on the re-booking. These are small, but welcome mercies.

Now I’m off to unpack my suitcase.

…here we go! My good buddy Andy Hoskins recently got through to the final six in a competition to DJ at the closing party on the Terrace at Space in Ibiza. Anyone who knows anything at all about dance music will know this is a huge deal. And I mean huge. Go Andy!!! Woo!!

Andy is “old skool” which means he plays actual vinyl records on record players with needles and tonearms and all that malarky. Once upon a time I tried to be a superstar DJ and failed, becoming at best a modestlyoknotastar DJ.

It’s nice then for me to see my number one bum chum Andy achieving success, although he’s a dad now which begs the question how can he be a cool big time DJ and be a dad, when dads are not cool. Except for “daddy cool” who Boney M did a song about. He was cool.

You can listen to his winning mix here Andy Hoskins @ We Love.

Good luck Andy, don’t forget me when you are fame-arse!

The sharp eyed reader will notice some subtle changes to these pages. I’ll explain what’s happened;

I’ve moved this blog from it’s previous location, onto another server, so that I could use WordPress, which is a tool for creating blogs. This makes it easier to manage and keeps the page size down by archiving older posts off automatically.

Also my wonderful beautiful readers can now leave comments, telling me how great I am, and how much they love me. This is good, I did it all for you. L eave a comment or two, why not, who does it hurt eh? Don’t make me beg.

As the new server is faster and on a better connection, it should speed things up as well, which *thud*

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz……

Sorry, I bored myself to sleep there.

Nothing more to see here.