Rescue & Recovery

I peer uncomprehendingly at my screen. Who are we talking about here, Pishka or me? I feel in dire need of both, so I click Yes. I have no idea what I’ve been rescued from, except perhaps a potential face scrub for the third time. It is a sad commentary to find yourself rinsing conditioner out of your hair wondering if you’ve already washed your face, but acutely unable to remember if indeed you actually have. Exploratory fingers on your face don’t send Eureka! screaming down your spine, so you shrug and figure prevention is better than cure and give it a/nother go. Sigh. It’s only been a little over a month since I so momentously hit this decade. Every morning is a curse ridden, panic stricken, clueless poultry imitation through the flat looking for the damn house keys and then the mobile phone, followed by an enthusiastic encore before I am able to crawl into bed. I’d like to think it’s because my mind is overflowing with critically important world altering ideas that don’t include fashioning an excessively eclectic and salty combination of leftover mashed potatoes, sliced beef, tomatoes and Chinese broccoli that has seen better days. Auto recovery prompts me to save this, naturally, under yesterday’s date. Maybe that’s the recovery they were talking about. Either that or the strange manifestation of ‘what a fucking idiot’ that seems to assail all my travel plans.

Aaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrggggggghhhhhhh! My outraged shriek prompts the Hungarian to fumble the phone while yelping back in self defence. I have somehow managed to book myself on a return flight on the Tuesday after the bank holiday! Easy Jet shows no mercy and charges me a extortionate £25 to take it back to Monday. No sooner than my debit card has been charged the offending amount, I call out the dates to my hapless and travel companion and let out another blood curdling scream. I’m booked going out on a Thursday night instead of the friggin’ Friday night! I’m choking with outrage, positive that it’s these slimy low budget carriers than sneak in block dates trapping you into incorrect bookings at throwaway prices and then charging you to change them. Except, I go back to my original booking and instead of a Friday to Monday, it’s blinking back a Thursday to Tuesday. Why? Why on earth would I have booked something like that? I contemplate wrangling a business trip, but the thought of actually having to plan another trip brings me to my knees, and I pull out my debit card with a resigned air. My low cost bank holiday weekend has now turned into a regular ‘oh let’s spend lots of money and go somewhere’ endeavour.

My capitulation comes not from a callous indifference to the state of my bank account, but rather a forlorn acceptance that I now seem to be afflicted by the Sonia syndrome. Before I started booking holidays with her, I never suffered from it, but our woman has on a regular basis booked the same holiday more than once and then had to pay to cancel. I’ve had to rebook my Vegas hotels twice because I didn’t realise that I’d managed to pick the wrong return date for my flight. Naturally, I would only do such a thing if it involved the exchange of legal tender to rectify my fuck up. For people who travel as much as we both seem to, it’s a tad inexplicable how incompetent we are when making these bookings. Dimple romantically booked lover boy and herself from Moscow to St. Petersburg by train, only to give a uh oh start at the simple question, “Did you book us on the Blue Train?” Naturally, she’d booked them on the bullet train, an utterly characterless journey of 3 ½ hours. Wonder if they’ll give her a refund. My holiday budget for the year now needs to incorporate a hefty contingency figure to accommodate these seemingly senile lapses. Clearly, an early retirement is not on the cards.