Travel Bugs
Tim Roxborogh on the joys of moaning about your holiday
Tim Roxborogh’s can’t get his head around neck cushions. “Maybe my neck is the wrong shape, but wearing a neck cushion on a plane generally feels about as relaxing as being gently strangled,” he writes.
The neck-cushion myth
Last time I moved house I found three dust-covered neck cushions under my bed. Somehow, on three separate occasions over the years, I’d been at an airport and thought, “I guess I’d better buy a neck cushion”. And then on three separate other occasions, I decided to store said neck cushion under the bed. It was liberating to finally throw them out.
As in, not only should I have never kept — and forgotten I was keeping — them under the bed, I never should have bought them in the first place. It took three rounds to figure it out, but eventually I learned what I now know to be true: neck cushions (as sold in countless airports around the world) hug your neck like a mutant itchy wheat pack, while positioning your head and torso as if you’re recovering from a horse-riding accident. All this in the apparent aid of sleep while flying.
I hate them. I think I must have always hated them, but the neck cushion’s ubiquity as a traveller’s essential had convinced me they must be just that: essential. Maybe my neck is the wrong shape, but wearing a neck cushion on a plane generally feels about as relaxing as being gently strangled. Blame may also be laid at my somewhat larger than average Adam’s apple; nothing to brag about I might add, but who knows?
I’ve tried every angle, from the conventional gap-in-the-front method, to the gap-in-the-back to prevent your head falling forward, to the rambunctious side-on position. One of my now thrown-out neck cushions was even a Star Wars-themed one, presumably bought in the hope that my fan-ship of George Lucas would be passed through to the comfort level of the cushion. This oddly proved not to be the case.
The airport pick-up that wasn’t
It’s weird the dates from childhood that are tattooed in your mind. Like December 15, 1990: the day my family left Malaysia after seven years in Kuala Lumpur and returned home to New Zealand. Which means that chances are, we touched down at Auckland Airport — Mum, Dad and me with two of my sisters — on December 16. I was 9 years old.
The first thing I remember about arriving back in the country of my birth was that a friend of my dad’s had been asked to come and meet us at the airport. Hilariously, he took this literally in the sense that there to welcome home five jet-lagged Kiwis was a man with nothing more than a motorbike.
The dear soul thought he was just meant to come and say howdy, not to take us to where we were staying. “Can you meet the Roxboroghs at the airport?” to him meant, “I sure can!” So we came through Customs, saw a man with a motorbike helmet in his hand and quickly realised we didn’t have any transport.
For all these years, I thought that was where the story ended and that we must’ve forked out for a taxi. I’ve even dined out on the yarn. But it turns out my childhood memories aren’t quite as magnificent as I have allowed myself to believe! Yes indeed, I owe my dad’s friend an apology. I’ve recently been informed that though he did come to pick up a family of five with nothing more than two wheels, he then rode all the way home, swapped the bike for his van and thought nothing of driving back to the airport again.
Nearly 29 years on, thanks for the pickup!
Tim Roxborogh hosts Newstalk ZB’s Weekend Collective and blogs at RoxboroghReport.com.