The sky at night.....

We got home from Denmark on Monday evening. The next day I set off for a few days with my sister in the south of France.  One good reason for coming here is her very beautiful salt-water swimming pool, which I have just been in...   But getting here was less smooth....
I’ve had a swipe at airports before…. their terrible scale, their dehumanising zig-zag queues, their sheer frantic greed… Despite the fact that this is how millions of modest families get their fortnight in the sun, and students get to see the world, and business people can swoop across the world to find new markets, yes yes, this is clear, but it’s grown and grown and now it is truly ghastly. Everything has to be paid for (of course) so the parking (or 'parkering' as they say in Denmark) is charged by the second, access to the hallowed selling space - sorry, waiting rooms - is via a disgustingly stinking (perfumed) chicane of booths or selling spaces with harpies on either side trying to flog you carry-on booze, or fantastically expensive and useless coloured grease to smear on your face, or squeaking boxes of sugar disguised as forest chocolate…. ah, my dear, it is really truly completely horrible.   And if anything goes wrong, such as a luggage-management system, whose given task is to whisk your precious suitcase crammed with knickers, medicines, t-shirts, games for the kids, whatever…. all that precious ‘stuff’ has to be trundled along (safe from vicious thieves) and get itself stowed into the belly of your particular aircraft ready for you to collect at the far end…. Well, when this goes wrong (as it did yesterday at Gatwick) then we have trouble.  For a start, no-one knows about it because it’s a responsibility of the airport… not the airlines'. The airline staff are blithely assuring people everything’s ok when seriously it is not. Thousands upon thousands of passengers take off to destinations all across Europe - Hungary, Italy, Spain, Greece, who knows where - but their cases are not there for them when they arrive.  No wedding clothes. No medicines. No clean knickers. No toys for the children.  Nada.  And the delays begin, the anger, the searching of websites, the complete lack on information, the despair…  
It turns out that Twitter, of all things, is the go-to place for information. Anecdotal, graphic, out of date or up to the minute, the tweets tell it as it feels.   I heard about this after I had left home, though Easyjet ‘could’ have alerted me to the problem if they had chosen to, or if they knew … (I’m sure they did).  But I had all my stuff in my heavy case, and a small handbag to take aboard…. I decided to extract my irreplaceable laptop from the case and carry it on board myself, along with some Juice Plus+ (my precious!!!), and some knickers, in case the case did not arrive in Toulouse with me.   
You can’t buy a cabin bag until you’ve gone through security, etc… (see above, all the anguish and boredom and barely concealed anxiety of those surely pointless manoeuvres with scanners and trays and electric archways and bossy uniforms….)   
Memo to self. Get a concession to sell luggage int the hallways BEFORE the security checks….Anyway, the choice of new carry-on cabin bags (which, incidentally, are not really checked once you’ve passed the initial bag drop area), ranges from utterly eye-watering hundreds and hundreds of pounds for a pull-along wheeled patent black or red or silly thing, down to (cheapest I found) £40 for a tote. That’s what I bought. Put my laptop in to relieve the stress on my poor handbag, and when I did eventually board - (thanks Easyjet for just a 'short' three hour delay which they blamed on the luggage problems earlier in the day) - I had my handbag with book, my tote with computer, and (safely in the hold as it turned out), my case with everything else.  
To while away the time, I ate a Lebanese meal and did a drawing of the resto. 

I will just add a reminder here.. the waiting time at the airport is in a purely plastic space, where everything is too far away, and basically hostile, and wanting money off you. MUNNEE. It's a horrible place to be, a true purgatory.... (and yes I know there are worse places in the world, but those are mostly involuntary... This is supposed to be something I chose, wanted, opted for. A process. A journey! I believe 19th century train travel was infinitely more desirable than this. I predict that it won't be long before civilian airports are repurposed - as prisons, or development sites, or nuclear dumps, or military training zones.....).
We set off finally at the time we should have been landing in France.  Not so late that I'd be entitled to compensation. They're not that stupid. The flight was fine.  I could see Paris from far away... rather sweet. Ha! I slept, a bit. My sis and bro-in-law met me at Toulouse, drove through the empty winding French countryside to their house… we got here at 2am, more or less.  That was fine.   I had met a woman waiting at Gatwick who was supposed to have been on the 8.35 flight in the morning but it had been cancelled…. so she was more than 12 hours delayed, along with her very sick husband who was in a wheelchair. My complaints subsided to NOTHING beside that.  At the house, looking up through the black black night, we could see the stars. Millions of them. The Milky Way, clear as you like… amid a million stars. I have not seen them like that for years in England.  The light from nearby airports (ie. motorways, cities, suburbs, shopping centres, roundabouts…..)  has obliterated them.