Richard Baum

I am back, bronzed and magnificent, from five days in Tenerife. The only thing separating my current physical condition from that of a marble sculpture is that marble doesn’t wobble alarmingly when you poke it in the belly.

This year I decided to forego any semblance of culture or intellectual development on my summer break, and instead laze by a pool reading books about musicians and comedians. I achieved this goal with aplomb, and now know more about the bass guitarist from Blur than I did a week ago, as well as having developed a tan to be proud of. The last couple of years I have let my unwillingness to fly get the better of me, and holidayed in the UK. This year I was finally dragged onto a metal tube to breath-in swine-flu infested air whilst hurtling through the atmosphere at 500mph, but at least I picked up a tan.

I do have some issue with the hotel I stayed at describing itself as “4 star.” At least two of those stars appear to have been garnered through serving anaemic chips with every meal. Still, I was staying “all inclusive,” which meant I could forget about the horrors of life in a blaze of obscure cocktails and gluttony-induced hallucinations. It’s remarkable how good Tenerefian house wine tastes after twelve glasses.

Food and drink weren’t all that was inclusive either. Guests also got near-death experiences added to the list, as I found out when a heavy glass ashtray fell to the ground from a balcony above my sun-lounger, crashing to earth millimetres from my head. Some would argue that it was an accident caused by the wind, but as a gigantically high profile local politician and probably one of prestwich’s top 500 most well-known residents, I don’t think political assassination can be ruled out. I notice that the CIA haven’t denied it… 

A few stray shards found their way into my discarded flip-flops, but it was a lucky escape both for me and the unfortunate voters of St Mary’s who really don’t need to go out of their way for a by-election any time soon I’m sure…

I had my vengeance on my would-be assassins though by breaking Tenerife Airport on my return journey.

Most airports are, in my experience, the types of fairly solid constructions you would expect from buildings designed to house thousands of people and dozens of inter-continental flying machines. Unfortunately “Tenerife Sur” appears to have a small weakness in that it can be brought to a grinding halt by a sun-guzzled tourist (me).

The check-in process was proceeding as normal. I noticed that the Spanish-speaking check-in operative had written down the English versions of triflingly-unimportant queries like “Did you pack this bag yourself, or did that strange man you met in Afghanistan do it for you?” and was reading them out phonetically. I gave a response using ludicrously flowery english which clearly went completely beyond her, and I thought my fun was over. Sadly, it had only just begun, because when I plonked my suitcase on the conveyor belt, I immediately regretted doing it with quite so much gusto… A strange whirring noise was heard, and then the type of sound normally associated with when power stations close down - a kind of whine, the pitch of which grew menacingly low.

“System broken,” she said, looking at me as if I’d burned the Tenerifian flag in front of her face. I’m not quite sure how she deduced that my action caused the problem, and to be honest I’m not entirely sure that it did… But after the assassination attempt I wasn’t taking anything at face value.

Whatever the actual cause, the facts couldn’t be denied. At the exact moment that my over-exuberance with luggage had seen my suitcase land with an undue thump, the check-in system had frozen. And not just the system on that particular desk. All the systems. Check-in at the airport had been suspended outright. My suitcase’s weighty fall onto the conveyor belt had plunged the airport into meltdown. Like the kid in school who’s naughty and makes everyone miss playtime, I was now the guy who’d done the same thing on an international scale. No-one leaves Tenerife until this gets sorted.

Cue some anxious looking Easyjet-uniformed technical types, who tinkered and prodded and looked at me angrily. And there was quite a lot of tutting from the people behind.

I was rescued by a strange mixture of competence and incompetence. The people who run Tenerife Airport are clearly no match for a suitcase-wielding idiot in the short-term, but after 40 minutes of phone-calls and re-booting things, the system started to work again. At the same time, the plane meant to be taking us home was actually nowhere near Tenerife, since Easyjet still haven’t learned that you can’t squeeze six five-hour flights using the same aircraft into an 18 hour period. So we were all going to be delayed anyway. All I’d done was transfer the enduring of that delay from the duty free shop to the check-in queue.

We got away in the end, and so, assassinations and international incidents behind me, I am back here in sunny Prestwich. I say “sunny,” but of course I mean “rainy.” And it’s not even sunny in my heart unfortunately, because I’ve just seen the Prestwich and Whitefield Guide. Not only does this normally-excellent newspaper this week disgrace itself by not having a single article about me in it, but the letters page is strewn with anti-Lib Dem things. So I’d better stop writing this, and start writing to them.

Rick