A giants life: Back to what I am good at.

Today I am going to get back to basics. Today I am going to be awesome in my grumpiness. I have just come back from holiday and the holiday blues have settled in therefore I feel that you all should suffer.

I am going to hark back to an earlier blog about children and parents. Why do parents insist on taking babies and young children on planes to hot places and then wonder why those children get bad tempered and cry a lot? There always seem to be babies on planes, and they cry. They are uncomfortable, their ears hurt…

Toddlers start to understand the excitement of going on holiday. It is an adventure. But then their ears hurt. ‘if you swallow yours ears will stop hurting’ is heard around the plane. No they won’t. Small kids do not understand this. I am 48 years old and swallowing does not ease the pressure in my ears, I have to yawn. So the children, in pain and discomfort, will cry. The noise level rises. Now we are not just sitting in a metal tube full of other peoples farts, we are sitting in a metal tube full of other peoples children crying. Good start to anyone's holiday. parents then start to get annoyed, start to tell the kids off, ‘If you don’t shut up I will give you something to cry about’, yeah, that’ll work.

OK, so now we have arrived at our destination. The resorts are full of kids who just want to spend time in the pool or on the beach but are dragged round the sights. It is hot and sweaty and tempers are getting frayed. It seems to me that these parents are selfish. They want their foreign holiday, they want to see the Pyramids, the Sphinx, the clock tower where ‘Mamma Mia’ was filmed. Kids want an ice-cream and swimming pools and sea and entertainment. But they will have their holiday and they will see the Pyramids in all their glory. They will see them while they are bad tempered because the kids are playing up again, but at least they have seen them.

What didn’t help my own mood was the fact that airlines are taxing my height. If i want to sit comfortably on a plane I have to pay for the privilege. I have bought my ticket, which gives me a seat on the plane. It doesn’t give me a seat I can actually sit though, as I am 6’8” I cannot get my legs in unless I place my knees just under my chin. For some years the airlines would hold back the seats by the emergency exits. They would not be given out until the last minute, partly due to people like me and partly due to the fact that the person sitting there must be fit enough to open the door, if needed. Therefore the passenger had to be seen before they could be deemed suitable to sit there. Not anymore it seems. With the advent of online check in it seems that anyone can sit there. Unless i was willing to pay £75 per person, per trip for the chance to be able to sit comfortably for the entire trip. There is a local airline that we have used to travel to Spain that plenty of legroom between the normal seats, and I didn’t have to worry. I imagine that this was due to the number of flights to that destination everyday. This meant that they could afford to remove a couple of rows of seats and spread the remainder out. On the way to Skiathos I took the chance that I would fit. In the end it was a case of grease me up and shoehorn me in. Not particularly comfortable. On the way back I gave in and paid the money. Once i got on the plane i found that the first 10 rows had modified seats that gave everyone extra legroom. all me cynical, but i do not believe that everyone paid the extra money for those seats.

If I was vastly obese I could be made to pay for 2 seats. If I was vastly obese I would have the choice to lose weight so that I could fit into one seat. I am tall. II have no option to lose height. I feel that, in a way, the airlines are discriminating against me and all the others that are as tall, or taller, than me.

I have returned from Skiathos. Lovely little Greek island in the Sporades. But it seems to have been taken over by people who understand little of personal space or, indeed, manners. I can forgive the people of Skiathos for cashing in on Mamma Mia. There are tours to all the sites where 30 seconds worth of the film was made. On the whole these places are rather picturesque. And, let’s face it, we would all do the same. The Greeks are a wonderful people, in general they are polite and friendly and smile a lot. But there are other nations there that are different. Money is king and they are cashing in the state of the Greek economy. The beaches are full of them, the roads are packed with their cars, Porsches, Audis, and Big Merc MLs.

But on a lighter note, the runway at Skiathos, if you look at it on Google Earth, looks like a penis. And I did see a rather good T-shirt slogan while we were there: Angela Merkell thinks I am at work.Brilliant.