“I wish you’d forget this zeppelin crap and come on over for the coronation!” — Ruth Kobart as Hattie in The Hindenburg (1975)
1) In the pre-dawn hours — because one can never be sure — I summoned a Lyft to bring me to Terminal E at Logan. Ridesharing apps have definitely made early-morning flights easier. In my distant neighborhood taxi service was not just unreliable, it was arrogantly unreliable. Now I can get to the airport in relative calm.
1a) And one doesn’t have to be anxious about what the final cost will be. That said, when drivers only drive to the GPS, one has to wonder just what the computer is teaching them. (Translation: where the hell are we?!)
2) Easy check-in, though I did note the trainee checking my passport and boarding pass. I experienced the creative tension between wanting to express compassion for someone learning a new and complicated job vs. the frantic anxiety that any momentary delay of any kind in processing my documents might indicate I cannot board my flight. Then I faced a mostly empty terminal for an hour — bliss.
2a) That frantic anxiety returned when I could not find my passport in the appropriate pocket moments before my boarding group was called; it was in another pocket.
3) An uneventful flight of six hours found me either discovering that I had been napping because my head had fallen forward, or reading The New York Review of Books on a wide variety of subjects I wouldn’t necessarily have put in front of my eyes — mostly artists from Baya to Dave the Potter to Piranesi.
3a) They feed you rather well on BA in whatever their designation for steerage is, and the staff were all very pleasant. One of the attendants had a really marvelous baby pink manicure.
3b) Interestingly on this flight, there seemed to me several moments when half the passengers felt the need to congregate in the aisle directly behind me. Like the Swallows of Capistrano, every half hour or so someone in the row behind me had to stand up just as the flight attendant was about to pass. My shoulders notice these things.
4) I expected the usual British customs interview with someone like the nice old lady who chatted with me on my visit in 2019 — very Barbara Pym — but now it’s all machines and face recognition.
5) On my very first trip to London (Christmas, 1987 or 1988), my sister met me and we took the Tube into the city. This time I knew I needed to get a bus — but you can’t just pay on the bus, the nice man at the curb explained, you have to get your ticket from a machine in the terminal. And then the bus driver was SO NICE and dropped me right by my hotel — which I had thought was a scheduled stop on that route and wasn’t! I felt like Lucy Ricardo’s mother. “Mother, the bus doesn’t stop here!” “Well, the driver told me he would drop me here as long as I promised never to take another New York City bus again.”
5a) Yes, I tipped him.
6) No one at this hotel (the guests I mean) is at all excited about the coronation, and the only visible hoopla was a Union Jack by the front desk.
7) By this time Daddy needed some food and drink, and got squeezed into the bar at the Italian place around the corner for arancini, salmon, and green beans, and some mild rosé. No one had a British accent. They were all Italian (the staff) or American (“We watch Stanley Tucci’s show . . . We’ve been drinking all day, so we need focaccia.”)
8) The adventure really begins tomorrow, which so far is unscheduled!