Nixta Sinks

Ramit Indar

When you're milling around the airport it's great fun to watch people and judge.

Seldom will you see such a mix. The plebs sit around trying to stay away from the plebs with screaming children. There must be something about airports that makes otherwise well-behaved children scream. I suppose it must be rookie traveller's booking styles, trying to cram as many stressful flights into one big shuffle across the globe as is possible. Sometimes more.

Then you get me. The slightly better-ticketed pleb. I look down on the crappy plebs with their crappy seats and their crappy children and crappy shoes looking nervously at each even vaguely Middle-Eastern man walking past. There's a sense of desperation and distrust that's made all the more stark by the constant noise of chatter, screaming and unintelligible announcements combined with so many pairs of groincrumpled trousers. It's great. Every so often a seasoned, rested traveller from business or first class will race from the executive lounge, across the melee to the gate, and be ushered through a special door while everyone watches them beady eyed, secretly hoping they're actually just egomaniacal fools naively trying to talk their way through, but who'll be sent back whence they came.

Then you get this chump.

He looks well dressed, and comfortable with travelling, yet he's somehow decided to take the Cathay Pacific "Is Your Overhead Luggage OK?" machine and use it as his own personal trolley. I've decided he must be an academic or car-salesman from Kazakhstan. I got a few looks (again) as I brazenly followed him around taking photos, trying to get one that showed the trolley well enough. He turned around just after this one was taken, walked past me and disappeared into the crowd. I can't quite tell if it's weighing his bags at the time but he had thoroughly rammed them in for safety. Hopefully the overhead bins weren't taxed to greatly as a result.

We shall overcomehereyoubastard

This picture blog stuff will save me some typing. Let's get going.

I'll start with a picture of a newspaper cutting that was so glaringly offensive that I chased it down the street (Harley Street, no less) to take this photo of the headline. I got some strange looks, not only whilst chasing the newspaper but when I then picked it up and nosed it some more (I wasn't sure if my eyes were deceiving me so I doubtless inspected it more carefully than strictly necessary). Not strange looks from any of the cross-eyed drooling doctors who tend to walk from Rolls to Rolls in their full lunatic garb of blood-spattered overall and cracked monocle of course, but rather from the Q8ies strewn across the pavement outside the Kuwait Health Ministry's office on Devonshire Street, smoking packs of 10 in packs of 10.

Flickr
It's also probably time I started to use Flickr more, so with that in mind I've hacked their Javascript plugin thing, and modified it to actually format correctly and have stuck it on the right. I hope to add shit phone photos from time to time, and of course the photos I have to post here, such as the bullshit editing above.

We can refuse him entry on the way back. Oh, how wonderful that would be.