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"If you wake up at a different time, in a different place, could you wake up as a different person?" --- Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk.
Qantas (my courier over a couple of thousand miles) insist on starting their safety videos with an introduction from Billy Bob Thornton (or someone resembling him) wearing a pilot's uniform; and I thought, the last thing Billy Bob Thornton should be trusted with is a safety briefing to a plane full of people. And there was me, cramped into a centre aisle seat on a twenty-two hour flight from London to Sydney. On my right, Crocodile Dundee, complete with hat, obstructing the path to the aisle and with it the commode and well-rehearsed DVT exercises. On my left, a Frenchman who had been living in Glasgow for the past nine years, an unfortunate occurrence which had resulted calamitously in an accent that sounded very much like an Irishman talking through a mouthful of cheese. When artificial darkness engulfed the cabin three hours in, both neighbours leaned in towards me and fell asleep, permitting my movements to little more than an inch in any direction. Consequentially, I didn't sleep. And you think of what you’ve eaten on the flight. Twenty-two hours of being boxed into the same seat, and you would eat shit if they put it in front of you. And I worried, for Billy Bob Thornton said nothing about food poisoning in the safety video. After a few hours of flight insomnia, I could feel the clots forming and breaking off in my legs, and I cursed Crocodile Dundee for blocking my route to the causeway. And you think for a long time about the limited distance of fuselage separating you from nothing in any direction - and therefore, how useful would a trapdoor under Crocodile Dundee's seat be? Things were made worse by reading Fight Club - a book in which the main character fantasises narcissistically about mid-air collisions and blowing things up with napalm made from orange juice concentrate. Pleasant and relevant in-flight entertainment.
There was a one-hour stop over in Bangkok, after which the Frenchman disappeared. Crocodile Dundee returned to the flight smelling strongly of weed - he had only spent one hour in Thailand, so one must assume that he is resourceful as well as irritatingly obstructive. Alas, with the extra space on my left and cannabis fumes wafting in my nostrils, I still couldn't sleep. Walking through Sydney airport 8 hours later with little more than an hour's shuteye under my belt, I felt strangely ethereal - disconnected. So I watched myself get my baggage checked by customs, walk to my connecting flight and sit in a departure lounge before returning into my body. It was a weird and nauseating experience.
One flight later and I was in Auckland, where I met Nick, who is my father’s uncle’s fourth cousin twice removed or something like that - I’m skeptical if we’re actually related. However, he very kindly gave me a room in his house for the night in Auckland. Before I knew it I was drinking beer in a pub, eating the finest joint of lamb and freezing my ass off. It was colder than I was anticipating (its winter in New Zealand at this time of year), and the half an hour walk back through the freezer from the pub to the house coupled with alcohol-corrected dehydration gave my detrusor muscle considerable exercise. Needless to say I was exhausted, and on reaching the comfort of a nice warm bed I was out like a light.
The next day, I found myself in Auckland airport once again for the final leg of the trip: a flight down to Napier. We were ushered out onto the runway and into a plane the size of my little finger - it was an old-fashioned aircraft with propellers and the landing gear attached to the turbines. So looking out of my window I could see the wheels leave the ground as we ascended into the cold, clear New Zealand sky. The view was nothing short of sensational. One our later and the plane landed in Napier, Hawke’s Bay, in the early evening (the airport was basically a glorified cattle shed). And then a taxi ride to the accommodation in Hastings, just south of Napier.
There is very little to see and do in Hastings. The vineyards of Hawke’s Bay surround the town and Napier to the north, and there is allegedly an opera house and an amusement park, but I have yet to find either. There is also a race course a stone’s throw away from our “villa”, a very grand and misleading name for a bungalow. Most of the buildings have only one story, owing to their hasty reconstruction following an earthquake in 1931. The particular villa I stayed in used to be a doctor’s surgery, and I was sleeping in what was blatantly intended as a storage room; my feet were supported on a shelf as my body was too long for my freezing, single bed. The first thing I purchased was an electric blanket. Until recently, insulation and double glazing and other things of that nature were considered witchcraft, and an average Kiwi’s house is consequentially adorned with a woodburner. The woodburners are relatively discrete until one day you walk home from hospital and you can barely breathe because of the fumes from the surrounding houses. Thankfully, our villa did not have a woodburner. Instead, there was a gas contraption in the common room and a shitty electric heater for each bedroom. It became cold very quickly.
On the morning of the 24th of June, I started work in the emergency department (ED). On any one shift, there is one consultant, five doctors and about ten nurses bustling about 20 cubicles. The set-up is pretty similar to that in the UK, except that everything is computerised so that the status of each patient is updated electronically on screens around the ED for ease of monitoring. The day I started wasn’t particularly busy - the first patient I clerked had classic appendicitis, and I examined another patient with a left-sided hemiparesis and neglect. On the CT scan of the latter was the largest cerebral haemorrhage I have ever seen in my life. The rest of the week in the ED wasn’t particularly eventful - by the end of it I could cannulate and tell the difference between a right and a left hand, so at least I was making progress.
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Nige
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D'ya drink piss mate?
What kind of soft, southern, shandy drinking airline were you flying mate? "Undercarrage attached to propellers"???!! the last time i flew transit from Aus' they sat us in a large catapult at the end of the runway, completed some 'back of a fag packet' elevation calculations, adjusted for windage, pulled back and hoped. After the third attempt there were only two windows left intact on the control tower and it began to occur to them that spending cut backs gleaned from Ryan Air might prove to be false economies and that an aircraft of some sort might be in order. Still, i'm not bitter, apart from the limp, the twitch and the reoccuring nightmare about sliding down the outside of airport terminal buildings i saw the whole episode as a positive experience.