The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
‘I’ll savour the rain as Californians do sun’
Writer Simon Stephenson and his beloved Scotland have been separated by the pandemic for a year. But one day soon he hopes his LA lockdown will finally end
Ayear into this pandemic, I miss travel more with each day that passes. I miss seeing new places and meeting new people, and I even now catch myself reminiscing about the worst parts: the security lines, the aeroplane food, the jet lag. But more than any of those things, I miss a very particular kind of travel: I miss going home.
Until the pandemic arrived, I never saw much of a downside to living abroad. I am Scottish, and a desire to seek our fortunes elsewhere is so rooted in our DNA that none of us are ever alone in the world for long; almost any time I have found myself far away and thinking of home, an inebriated countryman in a Celtic shirt has soon appeared to cure my nostalgia.
Moreover, I now live in Los Angeles, a city so colonised by Britons that my local convenience store even has a special section for us. It is hard to get too homesick when there are overpriced Hobnobs and out-of-date Penguin biscuits a mere block away.
I moved here in 2014, mostly fortune-seeking in my work as a screenwriter, and partly because a decade in London had worn me out. As a naturally pessimistic Scot, I quickly found the endless Californian optimism the perfect tonic. It is entirely possible that none of them do actually want me to have a nice day, but I appreciate how often they pretend they do. At my local vegan restaurant, Café Gratitude, the menu items are even named as upbeat abstract nouns, and you must give your order as an affirmation: “I Am Wholesome” will earn you a veggie burger, whereas “I Am Enchanting” will summon a broccolini salad. I always take visiting British friends there so they can witness these horrors for themselves, but midway through our lunch, they invariably go quiet and sheepishly admit that they do actually feel wholesome and enchanting.
It infects you, the earnestness. This time last year, I attended a Scottish festival in the cruise ship terminal hellhole of Long Beach. I went intending to research a hilariously cynical piece about Americans’ bizarre obsession with appropriating a Braveheart version of our culture. Instead, I found myself weeping at a high school pipe band of American teenagers playing “Ye Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond”. Still, maybe this softening up is no bad thing, as perhaps even a pandemic is made a little more tolerable by a positive attitude. I Am Empowered.
So, I like it here, and the only downside is that the continent and ocean separating me from my friends and family means I don’t get to see them as much as I would like. But then, who does? When I lived in London, I saw my south-of-the-river friends little more than I do now that I live 5,000 miles from them. And when I do get to see my family now, it is not for a meal or a night but for a week or two at a time.
There is Skype, too, and FaceTime, and even the telephone that Alexander Graham Bell presumably invented so his fellow fortune-seeking Scots could keep in touch with news from home.
But then came the virus. Not being able to travel during a global pandemic might be the very definition of a First World problem, but it is still a problem. Our call-and-response lockdowns mean that I have not been home to Scotland in a year. It has been 12 long months since I have seen my beloved football team grind out another muddy nil-nil victory, trudged the coast along the remote peninsula where my mum lives, or considered rain any kind of mundane inconvenience. And it has been 12 especially long months since I have tasted real fish and chips. (If ever you have tasted American fish and chips, you will know this part is not a First World problem, for American fish and chips are classified as a war crime, or at least should be.)
As with so many things, it is only now we cannot travel that I realise how good we once had it. What exquisite black magic it was that for so many years I could leave Los Angeles in the late afternoon, and be at home in Scotland in time for dinner the next day. And will that age of being able to travel so easily ever fully return? I don’t know, and deep down I also know that it probably should not. Our planet is on fire, and every year here in California the evidence gets more irrefutable. Maybe somebody has used their lockdown to invent a plane that runs entirely on wind and solar power. I Am Hopeful.
But even with the planes grounded, there are still ways of visiting the places we once knew. My mum and I chat on WhatsApp, and again and again we find
h On a visit to Las Vegas, his mother and stepfather gambled so much that he feared for his inheritance ourselves reminiscing about trips we have taken. Yes, my journeys home to Scotland, and our adventures up the west coast in pursuit of ever more seafood, but also trips she has made here.
In the years that I have lived in California, my mum and stepdad have become ardent explorers of the Great American West. They, too, love the optimism but also the size of the portions and, more than anything, the wine. So, for the meantime, we sustain ourselves by planning all the trips we hope to take together when this damn thing is over.
We will go back to Las Vegas, of course, a place they loved so much that I started to fear for my inheritance. I will veto the Joshua Tree desert on the grounds that they once got themselves lost on a circular trail there; I was still trying to convince the park ranger this was even possible when they eventually emerged, dehydrated but relieved to be alive. Lake Tahoe, where we paddled in cold emerald waters and toasted s’mores over a fire is certainly on the agenda. And so, too, is Jeff Goldblum’s jazz show here in Los Angeles, not least because the Jurassic Park star was kind enough to have his picture taken with my mum. Life finds a way.
After a year of lockdowns, even the small snafus we encountered along the way seem joyous now: the Airbnb I booked which was so covered in pet hair that the previous guests could only have been a vacationing family of alsatians; the Christmas when we spent two days driving back and forth to the Grand Canyon, only to find the whole thing entirely obscured by fog; the time my mum almost got herself deported at the US border, owing to an unfortunate mix-up with the fingerprint machine.
This Christmas, my mum and stepdad acquired a new toy to make their lockdowns go faster: an Oculus virtual reality headset. It somehow works with Google Maps, and yesterday Mum informed me that she came to visit, strolled around my neighbourhood and down to the 101 Coffee Shop on Franklin, where we would once have gone for breakfast. With LA in strict lockdown, it is more than I have seen of the neighbourhood in weeks, although even if we could go out, the 101 Coffee Shop has recently joined the ranks of the permanently shuttered.
Still, nothing lasts forever: not beloved breakfast places, and not pandemics either. So perhaps one day, not so far in the future now, I will get to make my way through stop-start traffic to the airport again. I will spend 15 minutes attempting to check in on a machine that will then inform me I have to line up for the counter anyway.
Upstairs, I will wait forever in an interminable line, mentally cursing the people who lack the foresight to take their toiletries out ahead of time. When I inexplicably reach the front of the queue without having done this myself, I will frantically scramble to decant my toiletries into a plastic bag. My actual bag will be searched anyway, because some long-forgotten tube of toothpaste is lingering at the bottom.
Finally, I will board the plane, wrestle my bag into an already-full overhead locker, and realise I forgot to order a vegetarian meal. I will sit down and try not to get my hopes up that the seat next to me will remain unoccupied, but when the pilot announces the doors are now closed, it will seem that I have finally got lucky. At that point, a stewardess will seat what seems to be an unaccompanied baby there. This baby will scream all the way to London.
But I will not mind, because I will be heading home once more. It will be afternoon when I get to London, and dark by the time I reach Scotland. Outside the terminal, I will savour the rain the way visitors to California do sunshine. The taxi driver will ask me which route I want to take and then rightfully ignore it as we talk about the implications of our football team’s latest hard-fought nil-nil win. It will be as if there never was a pandemic at all. I Am Optimistic.
QOn Jan 30 2020, I booked two return flights from Gatwick to Toronto with Air Transat departing on April 23. Because of the pandemic, the airline cancelled the flights on April 3 by email and attached two vouchers, each showing a travel credit of £447.22.
The terms of the vouchers say they must be used within 24 months and can only be used by the person in whose name they are issued.
A few months later I received another email from Air Transat saying that it would refund the cost of the outbound flights but only give a credit for the return flight. I have written to Air Transat several times asking for a full refund but its agents claim they have no authority to process one. Is this a common practice among airlines?
– Neil Kerrison
A
We are fortunate in the UK to have consumer protection laws – in the form of Regulation (EC) 261/2004 – which require airlines to refund cancelled flights in cash.
However, the regulation’s refund policy only applies to flights leaving the UK. It does not apply to flights arriving in the UK from outside Europe – even if you have bought a return ticket in the UK.
Flights operated by American, Middle Eastern or Asian airlines operate under the consumer laws of the country in which they are based.
This means that, under UK law, Canadian-owned Air Transat has to refund you for the outbound flight but not for the return. Its Conditions of Carriage have a legally binding catch-all that says that the airline is not liable “for failure in the performance of its obligations due to force majeure”.
It is one of many foreign-owned airlines – notably low-cost carriers – that have taken the decision to issue vouchers for future travel for flights cancelled due to the pandemic. Even the CEO of the International Air Transport Association, which represents most of the world’s scheduled airlines, has been championing vouchers as a way “to buy the industry vital time to breathe… and survive the crisis”.
I asked Air Transat to clarify its position. Its spokesman says that you can still apply for a refund of your outbound flight but you will have to accept a voucher for the return. The good news is that the terms of use have been relaxed: the vouchers can be used by anyone and there is no expiry date.
We have received many complaints from readers who are still waiting for refunds or vouchers especially for flights cancelled in the first few months of the pandemic.
If the airline is not engaging, contact its Alternative Dispute Resolution company. Details can be found on the Civil Aviation Authority’s website: caa.co.uk/ passengers/resolving-travel-problems. If the airline has not appointed an ADR, the CAA’s Passenger Advice and Complaint Team will take up your case with the airline. Due to the demand for this service, it will take two to three months to resolve the complaint.
If you have had a problem with your holiday or travel arrangements, contact our troubleshooter, Gill Charlton, or our consumer expert, Nick Trend, at the email address below. We also have more than 150 destination experts all over the world who can help with suggestions for great places to stay, to eat and to visit. Please email asktheexperts @telegraph.co.uk, giving your full name and, if your query is about a dispute with a travel company, your address, telephone number and any booking reference. We regret that we cannot personally answer all queries, but your email will be acknowledged.