Travelling for business is a curious activity. Not only do you do a full week’s work, but it must be carried out in 15 different places: trains, airports, taxis, hotel rooms, aircraft and conference hall lobbies. Last week it was Spain. This week it was Germany and Norway. Next week it’s England.
Somewhere along the line, summer has turned to autumn, European daylight saving has ended, and some Chilean miners have been rescued, but this is all just low-level background noise compared to the constant paranoia of missing flights or leaving your passport on the back seat of a taxi.
The paranoia doesn’t quite stop when you get home either… on Saturday morning, I woke up wondering what time my flight was, and asking myself why there were people speaking French in the street outside my window. It took me fully ten seconds for my half-asleep brain to realise I was in my apartment in Paris, and I the furthest I would have to travel that day was down the street to the supermarket.
There are compensations, however. Even travelling within Europe, one does get to see an inordinate number of sunrises and sunsets from plane windows.
Sunrise over Norway, this week.
The camaraderie of the office is replaced by endless games of “phone tag” as colleagues chase your voicemail messages across the continent, always returning your messages while you’re in the air or in a meeting. Finding internet access and synchronising email becomes an almost monastic ritual.
The more I travel, the fussier I get. On planes, I prefer window seats: people won’t be pushing past me to go to the bathroom, and that aisle seat only offers marginally faster exit times at the end of the flight. And besides, the view out the window offers at least some kind of distraction if the document I’m reviewing becomes too boring.
Hotel rooms too, become objects of obsession: for me, ease of internet connection and the availability of an ironing board in the room are current criteria for judging the excellence of a hotel. I’m sure in a few months time, this will change: perhaps breakfast will be my next bugbear: German and Norwegian hotels do well, but Spanish and Greek hotel breakfasts are just weird. I mean, ice cream and chocolate cake? For breakfast?
Sunset over Barcelona, last week.
So if my blog posts seem few and far between at the moment, be assured it’s not for lack of will, but simply lack of time. For the next few months at least, I’m more likely to be 30,000 feet over the North Sea, munching on a Lufthansa cheese sandwich, or dialling in to conference calls from a hotel in Birmingham, or mangling my limited Spanish into a phrase to ask a Barcelona taxi driver for a receipt.
