The Day of the Drone - Gatwick Misery

The Day of the Drone - Gatwick Misery

In terms of Europe, there aren’t many places further east than where I live in Bulgaria. Just beyond my house there’s the Black Sea, at the other side of which lie Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia who all claim to be European but I’d argue that they’re Asian. We’ve reached a compromise by agreeing that they straddle two continents, though I still mutter about it during moments of solitude. Taking this into account, I’m reminded that a very important scene in the nativity story is the bit where wise men arrive from the East. Although I’d never claim to be wise, I’d say that relatives living on that distant island at the other side of la Manche would struggle to find someone Easter than me at Christmas. Exclusion of the Middle East and the Far East from my theory was deliberate; I like them very much but they would have messed it up.

So way back in the spring of 2018 I fired up my internet machine to buy myself a place on a Sofia to London Gatwick aeroplane scheduled to appear in the sky just a few days before the star of Bethlehem. This was part of my cunning plan to surprise family and friends with an unannounced visit. I didn’t tell anyone about this except my sister, Beverley. I needed just one collaborator in Britain to make the adventure possible and to alleviate any fears I had of being met by all that ‘no room at the inn’ malarkey upon my arrival. She lives in Hampshire, which is why I chose Gatwick, but the rest of my family live in and around Manchester. Under normal circumstances I would have taken a ticket for Manchester; it’s a much easier journey.

Keeping details of the scheme under our hats for seven months turned out to be torturous for both of us. It was particularly tricky for my sister who lived very near to our elderly mother (who sadly passed away just a few months later) so they had almost daily contact and chattering. It was going to be a big surprise for her too, but if she had found out then the whole of England, Ireland and parts of Australia would have known. However, in the days immediately prior to my departure, that agony was made practically unbearable by unforeseen complications that would have had even Mary and Joseph thinking about putting the donkey into reverse and heading home.

Three times during the week that I was due to travel, obstacles appeared that made me think that my journey would be impossible. Obstacle number one was finding someone who would look after the smallest of my cats. At the tender age of seven months he wasn’t very well in the number two toilet department and due to legal technicalities, he wasn’t able to stay at the cattery where I always used to take my two adult cats while I was away. Also, because of the explosive nature of his little feline bottom and the terrible state that any wall or floor within a metre of his litter tray might find itself in, it wasn’t a good idea to leave him with friends who had cats of their own or nicely decorated walls or lush carpets.

So, after a trip to the vet to learn the gravity of the prognosis, I spent a miserable couple of days feeling that I was well and truly stuck and I would have to cancel my trip. Fortunately, some friends nearby suggested I contact some other friends who ran a dog rescue centre about an hour’s drive from where I live, and who weren’t afraid of getting a bit of raw sewage on them. I gave them a call and they agreed to take the little fella on as an in-patient, despite the fact that he wasn’t a dog and had already been rescued.

My calmed nerves didn’t stay that way for long as less than forty-eight hours before I was due to venture away to foreign lands a deluge of winteriness hit the Balkans. Our huge falls of snow that are sometimes known to continue round the clock for days are beautiful to watch from a seat midway between a stoked up wood burner and a bottle of rich red Mavrud, but they’re no fun at all if you need to get yourself to the other side of a continental landmass. Road conditions became mega-treacherous and raised doubts in my mind about whether or not I would be able to distribute members of my cat community (at that point I had three) amongst the various establishments that had agreed to accommodate them.

My dear friend Anne-Marie helped me out with the job of dropping off the sick cat, demonstrating the deftness of her navigational skills as we wound along the icy roads to our destination remote village in the Stara Planina mountain range, steadying me with words of support when the going got tough. She’s Scottish so she was experienced in such matters. Fourteen of her words of support were ‘Will we go for a nice hot cuppa and a cake when we’re done?’ So on the way back we visited a little old café in the town of Dryanovo, staying there long enough for darkness to fall, the temperature to plummet and any soft snow to freeze hard, making the road into a long ribbon-like mirror on which the midwinter moon reflected beautifully. Had it not been for the possibility of death, it would have been quite romantic.

The following day my trusty Bulgarian taxi driver friend, who shall remain nameless in case the Bulgarian Traffic Police happen to read this, transported me to Sofia, again in Arctic conditions. He’s a very skilful man, proudly demonstrating how he could drive his car without using hands that he needed for other tasks such as texting his girlfriend, texting his friend’s girlfriend, texting his girlfriend’s friend, gesticulating wildly to emphasise important points in his incessant conversation, and propping himself up in his seat so that he could see the road through the sixteen square centimetre patch of glass that was still clean in the top left-hand corner of his windscreen. In our country the water in a windscreen wash reservoir is often made resistant to freezing by adding to it a cupful or two from substandard batches of homemade rakia. But all of the rakia that my friend’s family made had been high quality stuff and consequently they had drunk it all. A further consequence of this was that the pure tap water in the reservoir had frozen solid. One of the phrases most commonly used in Bulgarian life is neh-ra-boh-tee (не работи, meaning ‘it doesn’t work’). On that grim afternoon we had a whole conversation of neh-ra-boh-tees. I felt almost fluent.

The wintrified scenery as we travelled at tremendous speed through the mountains was spectacular but the combination of the g-force and fear prevented me from enjoying it. I was dreaming of a white knuckle Christmas. It would have been a good idea to have taken with me the cats’ litter tray in which to make myself comfortable. But somehow the Balkan Dick Dastardly got me to where I wanted to be. So that was another item on my list of great causes of concern dealt with more than adequately. I had arrived in the big city so surely nothing could go wrong from that point onwards.

Paralysed by the cold and the terror of the taxi ride, I was glad that I had arranged to stay in a Sofia guest house overnight. An hour-long recovery session in the warmth of my room was my priority. Later I enjoyed an evening walk through deserted city centre streets blocked by mounds of snow on all sides except where heavy old Communist era trams thundered and rattled. I found a small café warmed by a fiercely burning cast iron stove. There I joined a handful of diners enjoying hot soup and bread which were the only items available from the menu. Nobody had asked if I wanted rakia. it was taken for granted, and before the subject of food had been broached a small carafe and a glass were put on the table in front of me. Simple but adequate fare in a place enchanted by that east European winter atmosphere. It’s the sort of situation that confirms my love for Bulgaria.   

Well rested and breakfasted, the following morning I made the relatively short journey to the airport at a leisurely pace in another taxi with a gloriously clean windscreen. Snow ploughs had very efficiently cleared the streets during the night leaving huge walls of white running parallel to the to the pavements. I was impressed that they had cut gaps in them to make pedestrian crossings accessible, but from my low car seat I couldn’t see pedestrians, shop fronts or where the half dozen freely-wandering horses had come from.

I chatted to the driver, whose name was Emil, about the weather, football results, horses wandering loose on city streets and holidays, just as I might with any taxi driver, but in my best Bulgarian. I could tell that we were getting on well but I was a bit startled when he scribbled his phone number on a piece of paper and asked me if I would like to go on a seaside holiday. It took a lot of concentration and effort to establish that he meant he had a holiday apartment in Chernomorets (Черноморец, meaning ‘village by the Black Sea’) that I could rent cheaply from him. Obviously, I said yes to his offer but asked no further questions, just in case I had got the translation wrong and ended up on a cosy getaway weekend for two. It’s incidents such as this that inspire me to persevere and become proficient in the local tongue sooner rather than later. I never did find out where the horses came from or where they went.

As we approached the airport, the topic of conversation changed completely as we tried to locate the precise whereabouts of a big terminal building that we couldn’t see for dense fog. A new obstacle! The possibility of poor visibility preventing my London-bound plane from taking off renewed the anxiety of the last few days but I consoled myself with the knowledge that if all else failed I had Emil’s little cottage by the sea to go to as a holiday backstop.

Eventually we bumped into something solid and stopped. Having paid Emil the fare and given him a tip (the tip being, take your passengers out for a nice meal or to the cinema before suggesting a holiday together), I then had the joy of waiting in the queue to check in my travel bag. This was such a faff that I completely forgot about the fog.  And then, only minutes later, my whole head filled with fog when I read a phone message from Beverley telling me the breakfast news in England was that flights to Gatwick were suspended indefinitely because of an unidentified drone flying about over the runways and neighbouring bits of Surrey, and the possibility of collisions with Christmas aircraft.

The following twelve hours I spent seated in a busy departure lounge with fellow potentially stranded passengers, all intent on drowning their sorrows by knocking back copious amounts of red wine acquired by means of complimentary flight-delay catering vouchers generously handed out by an EasyJet airlines representative for the purpose of buying sandwiches and coffee. Conversations between strangers all centred upon speculation over the possible outcome of the problem and trying to decide who could be blamed for it. I’d never been a massive fan of the owners and management of budget airlines but on this occasion I had sympathy for EasyJet who were being called all the rudest names under the sun because of this so-called ‘air disaster’, the worst aspect of which had so far been us having to sit on settees with free drinks and crisps. It was blatantly obvious that it wasn’t their fault but it was suggested by some that they should have forewarned us when we booked our tickets months beforehand. The Russians (for being the people most likely to have sent the offending drone to Gatwick), Argos (for being the people most likely to have sold the offending drone to the Russians), and the British prime minister Theresa May also came in for a lot of stick, obviously!

Meanwhile, passengers travelling in gaudy Christmas jumpers and Santa hats on the EasyJet flight to drone-free Manchester congregated around us for an hour or so, joined a queue at the boarding gate far sooner than was necessary, hopped aboard the trans-tarmac bus and flew off to Manchester. Watching them joyfully depart, I asked myself why, oh why, had I chosen Gatwick? I knew the answer but I was so annoyed with myself that I refused to talk to myself.

Image: My own photograph of the vehicle I wished I’d travelled by to Sofia airport instead of a taxi.

Part Two:

The Day of the Drone - Luton to the Rescue

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