I was sitting in Southampton airport twiddling my thumbs and minding my
own business when I noticed that I was being swamped by people who were
certainly double my age, if not more! Some were scraping skin off my
knees in clumsy airport style wheelchairs, others prodded my feet
blindly with a variety of walking sticks (how they got those lethal
weapons through airport security is beyond me) whilst other simply used
my body as a point from which to bounce off whilst finding a chair to
sit on!
After some grunts and groans they settled down and I
couldn't help but over hear their conversations! One jovial man told
the whole airport "I wouldn't be surprised if there is a bus outside to
take us all back to Edinburgh, just like P&O to get it wrong
again"! He even told this to a Flybe girl who was walking past, she
smiled politely, even chuckled in suitable response but I could see it
in her eyes, she hadn't a clue as to what he was talking about
An
old lady with her face scraping the floor complained about queues, a
queue for the toilet (hopefully not in her cabin), a queue for an
orange juice, a queue for this and a queue for that, two hours to get
onto the chair lift in Gibraltar! Another old caricature of wrinkles
who probably made queues form behind him whilst getting from A to B
simply said "I hate queues".
One old man, obviously not short of
a penny or two compared life to a whore house, cheap and nasty with
everybody selling something! Not sure where he was going with that one!
Not short of a penny but a couple of screws perhaps? But many wizened
jowls nodded in agreement to his words, "hairdressers; shops; pubs;
self-service crap; all money and no essence" they harmonized!
One
wise looking soul said "....and everybody I talked to told me that they
would never, ever, ever, go on a cruise again, and neither will I" she
added for good measure! Another monument to a bad diet agreed (I think
he was her husband) but then added "after the cruise I've booked from
Miami in November that is"!
These conversations and the many
others, including those about how everybody had to wash their hands and
feet ten times a day (something to do with some outbreak or other) had
me wandering about these new megalith cruise liners! Have they gone a
step to far? Have these floating towns simply shifted the hectic
lifestyle of ashore to the sea, something that maybe cruise goers don't
actually want? Certainly, to make money these cruise liners sell
everything they can and unfortunately this might have retracted from
the romance and the relaxation, the pomp and ceremony, the glitter and
the glamor that was once all that was behind taking a cruise in the
first place!`
It seems so or was this simply a group of typical old age pensioners doing what they usually do - complain!
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