Corsica trip
Quarter to Four! Quarter to bloody four was when I was rudely awakened by a panicking mother. ‘Come on Jonathan! The taxi’s coming at half past!’ I knew the taxi was coming then because the previous night I’d heard several times ‘Your Dad has booked the taxi for half four’ or ‘We need to be up early as the taxi’s coming at half four.’ Then my small ape-like brother would reply with something like ‘I hope it comes in the morning this time!’ remembering a time when the taxi came in the evening, instead of in the morning one day when my Mum had to go on a business trip to London. This story had been told many times by my Mum, who used the exact same decriptive words everytime. I can probably recite it off by heart by now...
Anyway, I got up, dressed, washed and went down to have breakfast only to be told I wasn’t allowed my usual bowl overflowingly large portion of cornflakes. I like having this much because then I can crush them and it’s like having the end of the packet every morning. It’s great. But of course it does make getting to the end of the packet itself a lot less exciting then it normally would be. The reason for me not being allowed many was beacuse we only had one pint of milk. I’m up at quarter to four in the morning sat in a freezing cold conservatory because no-one put the automatic setting on so it would come on by itself in the morning, with no milk for my cornflakes and a glass of grapefruit juice with a glass that tasted of dirty dishwasher.... The day was going well!
I have two guinea pigs. I would have described them as little if I could to try and get you to imagine how adorable they are, but sadly they are not little. They are fat. Well Betsy is. The other one, Dougal, just looks fat because of her long hair. When we go away we always leave the guinea pigs in the caring hands of our neighbours. They are very good to them. We also care for their rabbit maisie. To say this rabbit has problems is an understatement. It has serious issues! To begin with when they bought it they were told it was couple of weeks. It wasn’t it was about two years old. They took it to the vets for a check up and found it had a tooth problem. It’s little teeth were growing too fast. I’ve heard this is quite common in rabbits actually. The vet then clipped it’s teeth hoping it would stop the speed of the growth. It didn’t! The teeth kept growing and they were clipped several more times until the descision was made to have them removed. The rabbit has one front tooth now. Also ‘Maisie’ is a boy with no company except for two netballs. This may not seem much but when a frustrated rabbit is left alone with two balls then something may happen. Something in the region of the rabbit getting excited and enjoying himself. If you know what I mean. If you don’t I suggest you go to see your local GP and ask him where babies come from. The rabbit also has one final issue. It cannot, because of it’s dental issues, effectivley clean it’s rear. This means that all the matter excreted remains where it was excreted from, causing a rather smelly and messy blockage. Not the most pleasant thing I know, but it has to be dealt with... Anyway we had to feed this rabbit! It’s quite sweet really....
After leaving the guinea pigs at my neighbour’s house, and feeding their rabbit. The taxi arrived. It was an odd contraption. Like a minibus and london taxi cross because you could sit opposite one another if you wanted. Another weird addition was the fact that the driver had a screen of glass between him and the passengers. I have seen this before, but the strangest part was there was like an intercom type system so whatever he said could be heard in the back! I was sat right next to the speaker and heard the conversation between him and my Dad about the way the sunrise gets later and later at this time of year. What joy!
When we got to terminal three at the airport we joined the queue to put our suitcases in the hold. It is always at this point in the trip that you see people that you will end up seeing for the rest of the trip! Also at Airports you see many strange people. There are for some reason quite a lot of people with big noses walking around the airports, most of the time carrying a cup of coffee and a briefcase. These people are all doing well in life because when they get on the plane, they can turn left at the top of the stairs. We on the other hand are in economy. We got upgraded to business class once... It was amazing! I’m just waiting/hoping it will happen again.
When we got onto the plane we sat in some seats. This is normal stuff for when you get in a plane, otherwise there may be ome health and safety issues. Speaking of health and safety there is always a wonderfully rehearsed speech done by the flight attendants which describes what to do in the event of emergencies. On this flight we had three attendants, a nice lady with glasses, another nice lady called wendy and another man who was abviously weraring make-up. And not just a little bit of foundation I mean like the whole texture of his face was smooth and a light brown colour. It was really odd, because there was no shine to his face it just looked flat and odd.. Anyway enough of him, we had been shown the emergency exits (here, here and here) and the seat belt sign had lit up. We were setting off.
The plane was ascendimng into the sky so I popped a rasberry fox’s glacier fruit into my mouth and got ready. I always seem to get affected more by planes than other people. I still don’t know why. I think is connected to my sinueses. I seem to have permant phlegmn and a constantly blocked nose. It’s not fun. I finaly found a way on this holiday to try and reduce all the bad affects of flying by realising that I can just keep swallowing. It looks a bit dodgy, but it works!
Then the seatbelt sign went and thrust upon me was a cardboard box with a label on it. The label read “Bacon chiabatta, dried fruit, yogurt and Flapjack’ I thought ‘Oooh exciting’ I like bacon and flapjack and the yoghurt may also be to my enjoyment. Obviously not. I just ended up eating some bread. The bacon was cold, the flapjack contained some more dried fruit and the yogurt was a weird toffee/fudge flavour which I wasn’t keen on trying a couple of thousand feet up in the air.
Then I got my laptop out and starting writing this abomination of literature hoping that someone may be interested in reading it. If you are indeed up to this point then I presume you’re either taking pity on me for being so bored on the plane I have to start writing this, or you are actually interested in whcih case I think this is a start of a long and happy relationship. We will grow old together. What a scary thought! In fact the thought of being old is quite a weird one isn’t it. Will I still be able to get my leg behind my head when I need to use a zimmer frame? But as far as old people actually go I have nothing against them in fact during drama classes I do always tend to be old people. Most of the time women too...
Anyway let’s back to the point. The plane had just settled down at Calvi airport. We left the plane to some 30 degree heat! Much better than the grotty 11 degrees it was when we left Oldham. We soted out our luggage and went to meet the woman from our holiday company. She was very nice and gave us a leaflet about what there was to do in Corsica. My Mum had already bought a guide fom Waterstones and to be honest we never ever head the last of it. It was always ‘the guide says it’s supposed to be gorgeous’ or ‘This beach is reccommended by the guidebook.’ We then got onto our coach and it drove us to our hotel!
It was a vey nice hotel, there was a pool (piscine) and breakfast! The people were also very very nice. Well that was until we broke the toilet. Then the sink.... I just hope that if we broke anything else it goes un-noticed!
Calvi itself is very beautiful. There is a wonderful town centre that climbs up the hillside and a citadelle that looks over the bay. There are lots of boats docked in the harbour and we were all very nosy looking into people’s personal yachts. Some even had servants with name badges! I’m sure one was called terry... Anyway I'll post more when I get time to writing it. I'm back now and have to organise my time well hehe
