Return from Holiday

I'm all for holidays. As long as I can find someone to feed the gold while I'm gone, I enjoy two weeks spent in relaxation and hotpants as much as the next giant lizard. And as long as the next giant lizard is a kind of hybrid of salamander and Kylie Minogue, that's lots. 

There are, however, a couple of things I'm not so fond of. One would be flying. Which is weird, because I actually do that all the time, and if I worked out more, I could probably have flown by myself. I don't charge as much for luggage and I get all the leg-room I want, although on the downside there are no hideously overpriced plastic cups of alcohol. But there wouldn't be the sheer panicked terror of being in a metal tube. 

See, I understand how I fly. The wings move, I go up. I find a comfortable air current and I float on it until I gently touch down in an area where people are unlikely to scream and scatter at the sight of me. Aeroplanes are metal tubes. They don't even flap their wings with sufficient force, and all the air stewards are brainwashed into smiling placidly as they explain that if it plummets to the ground, oxygen masks will fall from the sky and it's all okay because there are dinghies attached to the doors. 

Nothing wrong with airports. Sure, you hand over your belongings to a stranger who puts them on a conveyor belt before they're swallowed into who-knows-what subterranean world of suitcasing. On the way out, you're busy changing your money into money that could have been drawn by children with crayons, and on the way back, you're trying to spend the last shreds of your strange foreign coinage on souvenir piñatas. 

I honestly saw a shop in the airport selling cactuses for tourists to take home. There are no words, so I have to express this in italics. Cactuses. And it doesn't matter how much you buy, you will always end up with 3 euros and sixty cents that you'll intend to keep for the next holiday but will actually spend months trying to fool vending machines into accepting. 

But that's all fine, because that's the airport. If anyone doesn't use the airport as the last place to stock up on being-too-drunk-to-be-afraid-of-aeroplanes, then they are a braver creature than I am. And I've faced down mountain trolls, although really that whole thing was a misunderstanding. I would take angry, mildly singed mountain trolls over planes every time. 

The only other downside to holidays is the physical. 

I shed an entire layer of crinkly, sunburnt skin after I returned. I feel a kinship with my snake brethren, and also mildly flayed.