23 January 2009
Entry 15
Breaking my duck
It’s never happened before.
I travel a lot, really a lot, and have done all my life (viz. 35 years and counting), and I have never, ever missed a flight. Once I left my passport at home and still had time to go back and collect it and made it onto the plane. Once a friend and I dozed off in a departure lounge in Istanbul and had to be paged for final-call boarding. That one was pretty close. But I have never, ever missed a flight.
Well, so much for that.
I’m writing this on the train down from Luton Airport (you know, the one where the Amsterdam planes leave from), to head back for an unscheduled, unexpectedly free day back home in Brighton. A combination of certain confusion regarding the departure time, and also leaving later than planned, and also some roadworks, and also – and especially – a critical wrong turning off the A1, meant that we arrived at Luton three minutes after check-in closed. And that was that.
You notice I said ‘we’, because there was someone else with me, who was driving, and whose fault it was (except the roadworks, I’ll have to find someone else to blame for those). And having told him that I would now have to humiliate him on the blog, I’ve since relented and won’t reveal his identity here after all. (I think he feels bad enough already.) I’ll only say that for anyone who knows him you’ll have no trouble guessing.
Anyway. Heading home now, and not spending the afternoon with José Eduardo in Amsterdam to go through textual queries after all – we’ll have to do that by email, which is straightforward enough, if, clearly, less fun. I’m sorry not to be seeing him. But when he comes over in a few weeks (we’re doing an event together at the Bath Lit Festival) I’ll invite him to a lovely dinner somewhere nice by way of apology; my delinquent driver this morning, usefully guilt-struck, reimbursed me for my missed flight, so I have some dedicated funds now… Every cloud etc.
A post that is actually about translation will follow shortly.
D.
PS Talking about translation (oh, and why not?) it occurs to me that if the contents of this blog were ever (inexplicably) to be translated into some other language, the pained translator would find him/herself sighing particularly deeply at the title of this post. Any offers for ‘Breaking my duck’, in any other language at all? It’s a nasty one, that…
PPS Btw, if it weren’t six in the morning and I were cleverer, I’d be coming up with an opening paragraph which turned around some nice conceit about a broken duck being the reason it’s impossible to fly, but it is, and I’m not, so I shan’t. And won’t give it any more thought. I do sort of have a life, you know…
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Estação das Chuvas © José Eduardo Agualusa
English translation © Daniel Hahn
