Laugh! Well actually no, we didn’t.
Needless to say we made the flight. The unmitigated thrill of queuing for tickets, queuing for boarding passes, queuing to check in our bags and queuing to enter the boarding area was behind us. H had been frisked and though I stood around half hoping that I too might be manhandled, I was passed over by an extremely dismissive Heathrow employee. I took it as a personal sleight.
“I hope they don’t lose my suitcase,” H repeated her fear that had slipped into every conversation since the first signpost pointing to Heathrow and a fair few before that. By now she had finally been passed as not being a terrorist with a stash of C4 in her jeans and was pulling on her travel socks in the boarding area.
I adopted a weary smile. H was one of only a select few that I allow to get close enough to call friend, a hangover from a relationship that didn’t tolerate any form of independence or exterior criticism. Wrong, I know, but some conditioning dies hard. Tall, elegantly slender, blonde, single and a control freak with fatalistic tendencies, we are the very definition of an odd couple. I am dark haired, awkward, overweight, incredibly stubborn, about a decade older than H and have a pathological hatred of my reflection, but for some reason we get on, always have.