Ginger Jock Mckluskey drove me to Glasgow airport, over the rugged Highland edges lined by frolicking streams and splattering cataracts, sheep in every nook and cranny, fleeces buffeted by gale force winds.
After ten minutes I’d heard Ginger Jock Mckluskey’s life story. He relaxed in the driver’s seat then pointed nonchalantly at a craggy hillside, “Dropped in by parachute just over there.”
“Oh yeah? Which war would that have been? Scotland-England?”
He laughed at that and carried on with stories of broken ribs and vertebrae, bullet holes and grazes, escape and evasion exercises, animals shot and barbecued in Africa. He could have talked war from Glasgow to Gothenberg, having served in Northern Ireland (“I cannae go back – they know my face”), Bosnia and the Falklands, spending 35 years in total in the British Army. You could tell that, just by his demeanor. He now lives in Crieff, Ewan Macgregor’s hometown, and (high bullshit potential) reckons he bodyguarded and drove Princess Di and other nobs around.
This plebian enjoyed the Spring-green landscape and let the old soldier drone on, passing straight across Glasgow on an elevated road looking down on soot-caked, red-brick buildings, some absolutely enormous, casting dense shadow on gritty streets below.
Before long I got out at a small airport bathed in glaring sunlight and driven rain, shaking Jock’s hand, under a half-blue/ half-black sky, striped by a rainbow.
The flight was a blurred light sleep. Landing was great.
Of all the airports I’ve ever visited, I cannot remember one that has a smoking lounge at baggage reclaim, just beyond passport control. That Czechishness made me smile and I cheerfully entered the glass booth, cadging a light from a uniformed policeman, flight regulations meant my lighter was left in Scotland. He smiled and winked, and his colleague came in shouting “Hi!” to the multi-national group of puffers. Back to Bohemia.
Waiting for the bus, my mind turned to a trip from London to Beijing, China, along with a big group of British tourists. Not only had the flight been delayed for 4 hours at Heathrow (no smoking:anywhere), but a while after we had taken off, an announcement was made asking if there was a doctor onboard.
‘For sure, it’s one of mine’, I’d thought, chewing on an in-flight meal.
There was a kerfuffle of anxious activity to the rear and then another muffled announcement mentioning my name, asking if I was onboard ... Bloody hell.
They’d found a very pleasant and efficient English lady doctor, who had diagnosed a possible stroke. The bloke – indeed a member of my group - was laid out on four back seats, stone cold grey face, sweat pouring off him. Calming down his wife, a bundle of nerves, tears and angst at 10,000 feet, was my biggest problem. She was acting uppity with the Chinese stewardesses. One of the hallmarks of a boneheaded British traveler is that when the locals don’t understand what’s being said, he or she will simply start shouting very slowly and very loudly in English, patronizing poor Johnny Foreigner into the dust.
The China Airlines pilot had decided that Moscow’s Sherevmentyo airfield was the best bet and we landed there half an hour later. The bloke was stretchered off as myself and his wife and the Russian police had a lucid argument, interspersed with bursts of angry hysterics from the wife. She didn’t have a visa and so the cops were refusing to let her accompany her husband, who had gained entry as an emergency case. Eventually they conceded and she shuffled away into Moscow mist.
I sorted stuff out with the unruffled stewardesses, signed some paperwork, and went back to my seat. Five hours later, I woke up thinking that we must be near Beijing by now, looked out of the window to see that we were still sitting on the same stretch of Moscow bloody runway! Taking off about an hour later (there is a no-fly-zone across Russian airspace during the night) and continuing another seven hours onto the Chinese capital, we staggered off at night. I still had to check the group into a hotel, sort out the luggage, feed 48 of them and deal with 101 extra problems such as ‘not being able to sleep on the 3rd floor or above as you have vertigo’. Contemplating this day from hell, the first cigarette that I’d smoked for almost 24 hours, tasted like hell’s armpit.
Back to the present, in Prague, equally unpleasant fag smoked, a bus took me to a spanking brand new station that I’d never heard of, on a northern extension of the green metro line. One day it will reach the airport.
The train rattled all the way under the city to George of Podebrad’s Square where I sat to take in church bells at dusk. Down at Shotgun I got chatting to Boyka, a Czech with a story longer than Ginger Jock Mckluskey the taxi driver’s.
A Czech, solidly bohemian, who in 1968 had legged it over the West German border when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. He managed to get a German then a Canadian passport and spent the next few decades smuggling money and cocaine around South America and the USA, marrying a Columbian and having kids on the way. Bojka on the road. He was half-pissed on Plzen beer and swaying around in front of my first-joint-for- months gaze. It was getting a bit too much, and when a Kenyan machete massacre that he had somehow got involved in came up, I took off, grabbing a coffee at Bar Nonstop before hitting the sack, a train to the forest the next day.
The little railway station was almost asleep when I climbed off at eight, moonless night fully fallen, not a soul in sight, and in air, crisp and fresh after rain, I trudged down the track home, embracing the apartment’s familiarity before sleeping like a log ‘til gone dawn.
After ten minutes I’d heard Ginger Jock Mckluskey’s life story. He relaxed in the driver’s seat then pointed nonchalantly at a craggy hillside, “Dropped in by parachute just over there.”
“Oh yeah? Which war would that have been? Scotland-England?”
He laughed at that and carried on with stories of broken ribs and vertebrae, bullet holes and grazes, escape and evasion exercises, animals shot and barbecued in Africa. He could have talked war from Glasgow to Gothenberg, having served in Northern Ireland (“I cannae go back – they know my face”), Bosnia and the Falklands, spending 35 years in total in the British Army. You could tell that, just by his demeanor. He now lives in Crieff, Ewan Macgregor’s hometown, and (high bullshit potential) reckons he bodyguarded and drove Princess Di and other nobs around.
This plebian enjoyed the Spring-green landscape and let the old soldier drone on, passing straight across Glasgow on an elevated road looking down on soot-caked, red-brick buildings, some absolutely enormous, casting dense shadow on gritty streets below.
Before long I got out at a small airport bathed in glaring sunlight and driven rain, shaking Jock’s hand, under a half-blue/ half-black sky, striped by a rainbow.
The flight was a blurred light sleep. Landing was great.
Of all the airports I’ve ever visited, I cannot remember one that has a smoking lounge at baggage reclaim, just beyond passport control. That Czechishness made me smile and I cheerfully entered the glass booth, cadging a light from a uniformed policeman, flight regulations meant my lighter was left in Scotland. He smiled and winked, and his colleague came in shouting “Hi!” to the multi-national group of puffers. Back to Bohemia.
Waiting for the bus, my mind turned to a trip from London to Beijing, China, along with a big group of British tourists. Not only had the flight been delayed for 4 hours at Heathrow (no smoking:anywhere), but a while after we had taken off, an announcement was made asking if there was a doctor onboard.
‘For sure, it’s one of mine’, I’d thought, chewing on an in-flight meal.
There was a kerfuffle of anxious activity to the rear and then another muffled announcement mentioning my name, asking if I was onboard ... Bloody hell.
They’d found a very pleasant and efficient English lady doctor, who had diagnosed a possible stroke. The bloke – indeed a member of my group - was laid out on four back seats, stone cold grey face, sweat pouring off him. Calming down his wife, a bundle of nerves, tears and angst at 10,000 feet, was my biggest problem. She was acting uppity with the Chinese stewardesses. One of the hallmarks of a boneheaded British traveler is that when the locals don’t understand what’s being said, he or she will simply start shouting very slowly and very loudly in English, patronizing poor Johnny Foreigner into the dust.
The China Airlines pilot had decided that Moscow’s Sherevmentyo airfield was the best bet and we landed there half an hour later. The bloke was stretchered off as myself and his wife and the Russian police had a lucid argument, interspersed with bursts of angry hysterics from the wife. She didn’t have a visa and so the cops were refusing to let her accompany her husband, who had gained entry as an emergency case. Eventually they conceded and she shuffled away into Moscow mist.
I sorted stuff out with the unruffled stewardesses, signed some paperwork, and went back to my seat. Five hours later, I woke up thinking that we must be near Beijing by now, looked out of the window to see that we were still sitting on the same stretch of Moscow bloody runway! Taking off about an hour later (there is a no-fly-zone across Russian airspace during the night) and continuing another seven hours onto the Chinese capital, we staggered off at night. I still had to check the group into a hotel, sort out the luggage, feed 48 of them and deal with 101 extra problems such as ‘not being able to sleep on the 3rd floor or above as you have vertigo’. Contemplating this day from hell, the first cigarette that I’d smoked for almost 24 hours, tasted like hell’s armpit.
Back to the present, in Prague, equally unpleasant fag smoked, a bus took me to a spanking brand new station that I’d never heard of, on a northern extension of the green metro line. One day it will reach the airport.
The train rattled all the way under the city to George of Podebrad’s Square where I sat to take in church bells at dusk. Down at Shotgun I got chatting to Boyka, a Czech with a story longer than Ginger Jock Mckluskey the taxi driver’s.
A Czech, solidly bohemian, who in 1968 had legged it over the West German border when the Russians invaded Czechoslovakia. He managed to get a German then a Canadian passport and spent the next few decades smuggling money and cocaine around South America and the USA, marrying a Columbian and having kids on the way. Bojka on the road. He was half-pissed on Plzen beer and swaying around in front of my first-joint-for- months gaze. It was getting a bit too much, and when a Kenyan machete massacre that he had somehow got involved in came up, I took off, grabbing a coffee at Bar Nonstop before hitting the sack, a train to the forest the next day.
The little railway station was almost asleep when I climbed off at eight, moonless night fully fallen, not a soul in sight, and in air, crisp and fresh after rain, I trudged down the track home, embracing the apartment’s familiarity before sleeping like a log ‘til gone dawn.