Heathrow (again...)

I am sitting in Heathrow Airport, waiting for my flight to LA to be called. I’m off to spend a week with my mate Matt. We’re hoping to write a musical together and are going to do some research and kick some ideas around.

I find airports a necessary but unsettling evil. Most of the people wandering about are experiencing negative emotions. They’re either knackered, terrified, or highly stressed.

I am all three right now. I only managed three hours’ sleep last night, I am scared of flying and am stressed because I had to jettison a load of belongings at the security gate as a result of exceeding my personal limit for toiletries, which, it turns out, is one (tiny) plastic bag.

Matt had asked me to take him some Bovril and I went to three different supermarkets last night trying to find a jar small enough to take through security. In the end I bought a 250ml jar, which was plainly never going to get through. It looked so ludicrous in a plastic bag with toothpaste and hair gel and the man spotted it right away, giving me the look that said, “nice try.”

I ran a quiz last night in Runnymede, which is where the Magna Carta was signed. The hotel where the quiz was being held is right on the river Thames, and the client arranged for my assistant Lydia and me to eat like King John himself. They have a sort of posh eat-all-you-can-eat buffet there, full of the most delicious food, which you eat while watching the river gently flowing towards central London. I have seldom eaten such wondrous tomatoes. It is hugely rare to find a tasty tomato in this country. There were amazing puddings, a brilliant pasta bar, salads of every description... Lydia and I kept going back for more, not quite believing our luck.

I adore Lydia. She’s always such fun to be around. She’s actually a taxidermist, which I think is really cool and her work is incredibly imaginative. She tells me that her freezer at home is filled to the brim with animals waiting to be stuffed because she finds it very hard to turn the offer of a dead animal down!

Speaking of stuffed animals, Nathan and I spent the whole of Monday up in the loft, sorting through boxes and throwing bin liner after bin liner away.

There’s a little corner up there where our childhood toys are kept. I wrote about Panda and Horsey in a blog a few days ago. Perhaps it’s a little tragic, but, when we moved in, we sat them all on a little crocheted rug so they’d be nice and comfortable. What neither of us expected was that some awful parasitic creature would get at all the natural fibres in the toys and essentially wreck them. Some were alright. Panda, Horsey and Jemima escaped relatively unscathed, but a little woollen hedgehog which my Grandmother used to keep on the floor in her hallway, had almost turned to dust.

It was Nathan’s toys which were really badly affected. I don’t think I will ever forget the deep pang of pain which surged through my body, as I heard him whimpering, “oh no. Belinda! Belinda!” I turned to see him lovingly cradling a threadbare rabbit. We spent the next ten minutes crying bitter tears which weren’t just about our childhood toys being destroyed, but about being adults in a frightening world.