The Courier & Advertiser (Perth and Perthshire Edition)
Poor Michael is in need of your fiver
I’ve been thinking a bit about holiday packing recently, partly because I’ve had to do some. Now, I’m not actually complaining about this. That would be rather churlish given that I am getting the chance to take a break somewhere warm/ interesting/different/cheap and sunny and am being more than a bit ungrateful, whining about having to throw a few pairs of pants and a flagon of Factor 50 in a bag. And the fact that it now costs £299.94 to buy 300 euros but let’s not go there. Which fewer of us, obviously, will be doing once Brexit bites us further on the bum.
Re the holiday wardrobe, if it isn’t black and white and foldable into an A4-sized shape, it doesn’t go. I blame backpack and Inter-rail holidays back in the day when you had to carry everything and got short shrift when you asked the boyfriend to shoulder a couple of pairs of those rather ill-advised shoes it seemed wholly necessary to pack back in good old Blighty. So travel light is my mantra, which makes me fascinated to read about the latest “innovation” perpetrated by Ryanair in its unending determination to make air travel a penance for all except Michael O’Leary’s bank manager.
The company – this week hit by staffing problems that have forced mass flight cancellations – is planning to charge a fiver for carrying a wheelie bag or case on to the plane. Now, this should come as a surprise to no one who has ever travelled cattle class and put up with it because it gets you where you want to go for a few days’ blessed release from the Scottish winter. It’s a logical extension of a policy that advertises much cheapness then adds extra costs for everything you actually need to do or take when you’re on holiday.
For a concise, hilarious and deeply sweary summation of this procedure, I can only recommend that you listen to Fascinating Aida’s Cheap Flights. It will cheer you up no end next time you’re standing in an airport stairwell watching people who have paid extra for priority boarding swan on to the plane, safe in the knowledge that they get to sit down about five minutes before you do. Worth every penny, what?
At first glance, this bag charge might seem as if Ryanair is, for once, weighing in on the side of the beleaguered passenger (eg. me) who knows her luggage limits and sticks to them, as opposed to that monstrous regiment of travellers who can’t seem to go abroad without packing everything they possess. I always thought the point of a holiday was to get away from it all, not take it all with you.
Overhead locker
Of course, it isn’t that at all. It’s another money-making scheme, pure and simple, and will make life more difficult and/or more expensive for those already obeying the rules. Mr O’Leary & Co hitherto, while perfectly prepared to make you pay for air, toilet facilities and the right to sit next to the person you’re actually going on holiday with, have not up to this point managed to bring themselves to apply their own existing rules and stop people bringing on several huge, unwieldy pieces of alleged hand baggage. Which makes me sound like a Lady Bracknell for the mass travel age but I don’t care.
I don’t mean those who have one piece of the requisite size, shape and weight, like my anally-retentive self who carefully weighs and measures. I even bought one of those handy, hanging scale doo-dahs because I don’t trust the accuracy of my bathroom scales. With good reason, given my current physical condition, but that’s another matter.
It amazes me, the sheer amount of stuff some people try to (aptly) stuff into an overhead locker, like attempting to squeeze a king-sized duvet into a pillow case into which someone has already inserted a laptop, three fleece jackets and an assortment of hats. Added to which, there are those incredibly annoying people who come on wearing a back pack, inevitably forget they have it on and cut a swathe through the ranks of their otherwise blameless fellow passengers every time they turn round.
No Pasaran
I have previous on this, I will admit. As we tend to travel with hand luggage only – the point being that we thus do not have to hang around and wait in baggage reclaim – I do not want to be told that, after all, my paltry belongings will have to go into the hold. At one airport in the south of Spain, I took speech in hand and there was a mild altercation with the airline staff, advancing menacingly to ring my bag and cart it off to the bowels of the aircraft. I like to think I was polite but firm, rather than aggressive but it did feel like a kind of watered-down version of La Pasionaria, standing firm in the face of dictatorship and declaiming “No Pasaran”. Now, of course, I will just have to put up, pay up and shut up.
Although it is the perfect excuse, if one were needed, never, ever again to use Ryanair.