Leaving on a jet plane (again)

Flying to Geneva from Hong Kong is quite a journey: off to the airport for a late night flight to London, and then a few hours later after spending some more time in an air conditioned metal tube, I'll be spat out in Switzerland. Hopefully.

I'd been too busy to prepare, so today was strewn with tiny panics; rushing to the barber to get my hair cut, rushing to the laundrette to ensure I had more than one pair of clean underpants for the week, rushing home and trying to pack all my clothes into my suitcase without making any concessions to folding things or avoiding creases.

There's probably an iron in the hotel room, after all.

If there's a hotel room. I've still got this nagging worry that there won't be a hotel at all, and I'll arrive in Switzerland to find myself the victim of an elaborate joke, the sort of prank that requires the participation of seventy different people in the company I work for, just to leave me baffled on the wrong side of the world.

Not that I'm paranoid. Much.

My back has been painful today. Although I should be happy that I can turn my head from side to side, there's a fist sized muscle below my left shoulder that's clenched as hard as it can, and that diminishes my usual sunny mood.

What am I saying, my sunny mood? I've been grumpy for pretty much all of this week. I'm hoping when I have a working body again, my spirits will be lifted; it's hard to maintain a cheery outlook on the world when it hurts to breathe.

It's something of a shame, therefore, that I'm toting The World's Heaviest Laptop with me. Most people now use Lenovos at work, but I'm the lucky owner of a cast-iron Dell from when I worked in London, a heavyweight beast that must be four years old now. A younger man than me would be happy for the opportunity to work out: I'm just dreading picking my bag up. I harbour fantasies that the guys in Customs will demand to examine it with a hammer, but the damned thing has been so robust I fear I'll be carting it around to the end of time. Or when my job disintegrates in a cloud of backache and continuous moaning.