My journey to Ukraine began at the godless hour of three A.M. when I woke in Glasgow after two hours sleep, the shattered husk of a man. I ate a quick breakfast and left my hotel room. Deciding that I probably wasn't up to anything as mind-bogglingly complex and potentially lethal as stairs I took the lift down to the foyer where I handed in my keys and tried my best to ask for directions to the airport. “Which terminal are you flying from?” “Dunno; one of them. Where are they all?” In the early morning Glasgow's outskirts were utterly dark and silent but for the harsh strip-illumination of street lamps and the coursing, throbbing motorway. Fortunately, the first terminal I tried turned out to be the right one and I arrived for my six o'clock flight.
My first flight, from Glasgow to Amsterdam, arrived in plenty of time for me to wait for four hours for my second. This is the first time I have been in the Netherlands and departures has done very little to sell the country to me. For one thing, most of the horizontal escalators have been turned off. For me, these are one of the few highlights of airports and, in my fragile condition, I found their inactivity very distressing.
All flight paths lead to Amsterdam so it's surprising that there is only one shop in departures which mostly sold t-shirts. Amsterdam is doubtless a city of many and varied charms but one would be hard pressed to guess this from these which almost all concerned weed and hookers. I can sort of understand the rationale for a person buying a t-shirt as a memento of that golden summer long ago when, flush in the blossom of youth, they sacrificed time and money to travel to a country with relaxed narcotics legislation in order to consume soft drugs legally rather than risk a caution back home; maybe a scrupulous respect for the letter of British common law? Well, at least it's a story for the grandchildren. However, I am genuinely baffled why anybody would want to wear a t-shirt indicating that they have paid for sex.
When my plane did eventually take off it was into a clear blue sky. Across Europe, we soared above and below the cloud line until a dense fog enveloped our plane outside Kyiv. The winds, which had been calm, began to buffet us to and fro as the lights went down in the cabin. All I could see through the fog was a red flickering from the wings. We sailed down until our descent was interrupted by a sudden lurch upwards as our first landing was aborted. After circling the airport for twenty minutes the pilot decided to make another attempt and this time the plane ran aground to the sound of passengers clapping.
