Flyday the 13th Pt. I

I now feel more like I'm living life to the full because I missed my first flight ever the day before yesterday.

That's one step closer to the international jet-setting playboy lifestyle, the rugged, unpredictable, slightly wild quality that women often drone on about as a desirable characteristic in single men. All I need now is a body like Daniel Craig, preferable without the duckface, and it'll be simply a matter of time before paparazzi are chasing me through Paris tunnels.

Trouble is, I didn't miss it because the plane exploded. Nor was I involved in a cross-London high-speed car chase, firing twin Glock 9s out the window. I didn't have to stop to give a ten year old mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, save a cat from a tree, or create a complex algorithm that solves the global economic crisis created by George W. Bush and the planet’s retail banks chucking cash around like confetti.

Really, I was just a pawn of fate's annual xmas comedy of errors. One can’t lay blame at any individuals’ door when it took so much organisation, so much co-operation in order to bring about the smorgasbord of disasters that day.

Even getting to the airport proved to be a slight palaver. I’d had to alter my flight once already and, in the absence of either better options or common sense, I’d picked the red eye. Red eye flights aren’t all that bad and, in fact, one of my best transatlantic flights ever was a red eye. I did cheat though. Shortly before jumping in the taxi to the airport late one evening I consumed a rather large joint, thereby almost incapacitating myself beforehand. A quick top-up of rye & ginger in the airport bar and, "Hey presto!" - instant coma. I’m sure the babies screamed, the warning lights bonged, and the other passengers coughed, sneezed, and farted their way 3,500 miles from London to Toronto but I didn’t sense a thing. Bliss. With my trusty iPod and bullshit-cancelling headphones I may as well have been plugged into the Matrix.

So, having the benefit of this experience but being persona-non-marijuana I elected to pop into an understanding and charitable friend’s place en route to the airport. With case packed, nicotine patch applied, and clothing selected to maximise the quantity of travel document-sized pockets about my person I TTC’d my way Westwards into Toronto from the East, pausing at Bay to run to the Indigo book store there at Bay & Bloor. I had one last book to add to my portfolio of xmas pressies that I thought I would, "Just pop in and grab" on the way.

Oh dear. I’d forgotten about the whole xmas thing, and that one doesn’t "pop" anywhere at this time of year.

Now, nicotine patches are great. I’d strongly recommend them. I’ve used them many times in the past when I’ve given up smoking. However, even the strongest one at 21mg isn’t quite enough for a phlegm-ridden yellow-fingered mobile chimney like me. So, I already had that green glow in the eyeballs that indicates an imminent Incredible Hulk-esque episode. Then there’s my suitcase. I’m not one of those people who insists on dragging their toiletries around with them. In fact, unless its something life-saving then I’ll probably pack it into my case so I don’t have to drag it around the airport. At hip-height and two feet wide, with super zip-expansion mode engaged, it wasn’t the lightest of suitcases. Resembling a giant upended housebrick with a handle, it had the potential to twist ankles, crush household pets, and carve grooves into everything but the hardiest of concrete floors. Even so, it did have wheels at least so thanks to prior reconnaissance missions I was able to navigate the elevators sufficiently as to make the journey downtown as stress-free as possible.

Bloor Street was like Bosnia as usual. Store windows that countless retail minions had gone to such trouble to merchandise to the hilt were masked beneath wooden planks and scaffolding poles, and traffic seemed to breed like rabbits that evening as the inevitable construction made Toronto’s busiest intersection look like a swarming anthill from above. And, despite having lived in Canada for three years now, I still have trouble reorienting my compass when I emerge from a subway station I haven’t used in a while so the first task was to figure out which way I was facing. I desperately tried to look like I knew what I was doing as I passed the same Starbucks for the third time, no doubt to the amusement of those who’d completed their shopping and now viewed the carnage outside with smugness as the steam from their coffee clouded the glass in front of them. Still, at least I wasn’t lost for days in the underground warren of ‘Path’ corridors. The absence of a magic ball of string or ten-pound bag of breadcrumbs about my person had caused me to refuse that option in favour of the cold at street level. But, as Billy Connolly says, "There’s no such thing as bad weather, just the wrong clothes," and I had dressed accordingly.

Finally the familiar purple signage came into view. This was to be a quick mission, an extraction of specific items from an establishment I knew would have them. Once in the doors I immediately sought a map that would lead me to non-fiction amongst the "new", "hot picks" and "top ten" signage festooned at eye level. No such map existed, and not wanting to navigate a staircase with my oversize baggage unless I had to, I had to ask where non-fiction was before I could proceed.

"Just down those stairs and to the left," said the clown-like woman caked in cosmetics.

And so it began. What was a deserted staircase seemed to attract people like flies to shit, and before I’d reached the basement my mood was already beginning to follow the curvature of my spine downwards. The zigzagging continued as I manoeuvred the overgrown housebrick around tacky cardboard seasonalities positioned like landmines with the intention of trapping the unwary shopper in as many cul-de-sacs as possible. I find the book I need and head towards the calendars section.

So, having worked in retail for five years I’m well aware that shops take the majority of their annual receipts in the last few weeks before Christmas. At my particular branch of W.H. Smith in the UK, circa 1993, we’d take around 30 per cent of our annual sales in the last 10 or so days up to Christmas. It was pandemonium, and there was only enough time to sell rather than any of the many other routine duties. It takes a lot more people than usual to spend that much money, so one can expect the quantity of store traffic to increase by MORE than 30 per cent because Christmas draws some people into the store who wouldn’t normally go there.

Why, oh why then, does Indigo believe that stuffing the store with more stock, more shelves, more fixtures and fittings, carousels, shelf-edge-strips, free-standing merchandisers and staff will give them the best Christmas possible? Why? Because it’s all about money. This obviously isn’t a brand that tries to differentiate itself on customer service or a pleasurable shopping experience. Like the cause of the subprime crisis, the mortgage defaulting, the foreclosures, and the economic slump spreading round the planet as freely as a weather system, it’s because somewhere there’s a bunch of impatient, greedy shareholders who want their slice of the pie NOW. Who cares if the shoppers themselves are stacked almost as neatly as the books? Who cares if there’s arguments, fights, heart attacks, and stress just as long as each and every pleb buys their target average of $25.16 in books before they keel over and die? Who cares what the human cost is as long as in the glossy Q4 financial results booklet resting on a Jasper Conran coffee table in a Wall Street office somewhere, it has the words, "we achieved our budgeted sales targets" in the first paragraph of a smug CEO’s executive summary.

A sudden jolt that almost dislocates my shoulder disrupts my train of thought. I turn my now beetroot-coloured head around to look over my shoulder and realise one of my suitcase wheels is wedged under a crappy-looking book bin dressed with tinsel. "Fuck, I wish I had some cigarettes with me."

At the calendars the self-centred rampant consumerism is just as evident in the shoppers themselves. I’m red, I’m panting, the sweat is practically running into my eyes and I have a facial expression that could cause instant explosive diarrhoea in a total stranger at 50 yards. It’s bloody obvious that I’m not having much fun and want to get out of there, but the couple in front of me, completely blocking the already merchandise-narrowed aisle haven’t even noticed me because they’re obsessed with the critical decision of whether a puppy or kitten calendar would be best.

"Excuse me, can I just squeeze through here please?" gets me an indignant look from her and a grunt from him. I try my best to run his foot over with the suitcase as I struggle past but miss, pissing me off even more. There’s so little room to manoeuvre down there in the ninth circle of hell sundries section that it takes me two laps to find a wide enough space at the end of one of the shelves where I can park my suitcase and head back to the display.

The week before I won a ‘Maxim’ 2009 semi-pornographic girlie calendar in an impromptu game of pub bingo. I’d already decided that it was going into my Dad’s xmas stocking but I wanted something similar for Mum. Ideally, something with 12-pages of baby-oiled, stripped-to-the-waist firefighters. However, when I get to the appropriately raunchy part of the calendar display it becomes evident that the brand manager of that section at Indigo’s head office is a straight guy. "What calendars do all the gay men buy?" I wonder as my eyes dart across more tits and ass than the R.S.P.B. and a donkey sanctuary combined. I start to feel gradually self-conscious as more and more people notice the intense-looking, sweaty man meticulously rifling through the soft porn shelf by shelf. In the end I give up, go for my back-up calendar, and follow a circuitous route to the cash desk akin to the trail left by an inebriated spider who stumbled through wet ink.

The teenage twat in the queue did his best to sidle in front of me with the stereotypical hunched shoulders and dragging feet, but must have been able to feel my gaze burning holes in the back of his cranium. Once the stench of burning hair had got to be too much he stopped and offered me back in front of him as we heard the angelic "next please" from the pearly gates that lead to the real world outside. I did say "thank you", but in a tone of voice that really said, "Good, that means I don’t have to suck your eyes out and skull fuck you after all, you lanky shit".

I threw my cash at the cashier and made a break for freedom, only to have my suitcase snared again, this time between the counter and a temporary display of, "The Little Book of Calm" books.

To be continued...