Slightly troubled travelling

Although the flight to Japan was uneventful (if you exclude the inevitable unpleasantness of sobering up midway through the journey), leaving was more difficult. It was raining hard at Narita and there were lots of planes queued up to leave, which mean that our aircraft burned up too much fuel on the ground and had to return to the terminal to have more fuel added. This has never happened to me before in 15 years of being squashed into aircraft, and paranoid ideas began to flow from the back of my brain.

The back of my brain isn't very imaginative: but then I didn't say the paranoid ideas were well-thought-out, creative ideas, did I?

Eventually we took off, and I spent another 8 hours sleeping in fits and starts abd reading New Cthulhu, a compendium of modern Lovecraftian material with occasional implausible happy endings.

Well, a happy ending as far as not everyone has their brain eaten. Nothing to do with mysterious Thai rub-a-tug joints beaming down from space, honest.

I read all of that plus Jon Ronson's latest on psychopaths, then arrived at Seattle. Seattle is apparently designed to put me in a bad mood. Whether it's the shortage of Customs officers, or the crowds of people who've never travelled by air in their lives, or just the drastically rude staff, whoe only idea is to yell as loud as possible at us, the whole thing makes me grind my teeth to powder. And that's before the manadatory yoube just received your bags now put them on another carousel so you can retrieve them again Later.

Singapore and Hong Kong have make-work projects, but they do at least employ people. This seems more like a chance to waste time or charge us to do what wekve paid the airline ticket for. Clearly I was in a rage.

I got to Bellevue, which is incredbly sleepy at the weekend. I bought some dental supples in Safewats, ummed and ahed about the laptop I need to buy, and ate an unfeasibly large sandwich before going home. Inadvertently I purchased some barefoot running shoes, which I blame on exhaustion and a 16oz cup of hot chocolate and whipped cream. Passed out for an hour, did a nice little run and now can't see what I'm typing. Time for bed, Zebedee...