DUBLIN Airport was very busy. Most people were well tempered but there was a fair amount of remorse sprinkled around the cheek in queue.
"Cracked, that's what it is pure and simple cracked," said the woman whose mouth was one straight line of rage and disapproval. The man's face was a blur - it seemed to have no features at all.
The story unfolded through the staccato barks of the woman and the sad shrugs of the man. It was a sorry tale of strong drink having been taken on Christmas Day, and the man phoning his brother in England and saying it had been too long since they had talked properly, man to man, brother to brother. The bonding had been mighty. It had ended in a tearful promise that they would go to England for New Year's Eve.
"And I wouldn't mind if it only was New Year Eve, but it's nearly a whole week," the woman snapped.
"I told you, we have to spend a Saturday night, it's the system. The flight is much cheaper if you include a Saturday as part of your stay.
"And that's a cracked idea too if it's true," the woman said. "How would an airline know or care where you laid your head on a Saturday night?"
"I'm sorry," said the blurred man, "Very, very sorry.
"What are you sorry for?"
"For the ways of airlines, for loving my brother too much, for the whole damn thing," he said.
"You don't love your brother, you don't even like him but is that ever taken into consideration? No, here we are trekking over to their desperate house for a week in some desperate god forsaken place because you got drunk on Christmas Day."
"I'm sorry," cried the man with the blurred face, in a terrible wail to the rest of the queue.
SINCE the flight to Bristol goes from Gate A-11, several kilometres from the check in, I travelled by scooter. I like sitting facing backwards on it, not actually clenching onto the driver like the Wild Ones. It gives you a grand view of people.
Two men were standing blocking the way, debating the finer points of the litres of duty free they were going to buy. Politely my driver had to circumnavigate them, since they wouldn't move. Then they saw me and one of them thought he knew me.
"How are you?" he asked, his brow darkening.
"I'm fine," I said, truthfully and pleasantly.
"How did you get one of those?" he asked, as if there was a trick he had missed.
"You ask at check in," I explained. They were walking fast now to keep up with me, duty free forgotten.
"They never offered us one," he complained.
His friend tried to put him right.
"They're only for . . . you know," he said.
"I don't know we could have done with one of them and they were never mentioned - how did this pair get one?"
"They're not a pair at all," the friend explained. "The fellow driving it is an ambulance man, you eejit. She's a patient."
We had stopped now to let other people pass, so there was time for deep conversation.
The dark browed man was embarrassed.
"Oh I... Sorry, I'm very sorry. No offence."
"None at all," I said, wondering whether I should explain that my kind driver was not in fact an ambulance man. But I increasingly find it better not to explain anything - it confuses everyone further.
And these men were already over confused as, they realised they had overshot the duty free and would now have to go back to it.
"What they really need is a kind of bus we could all get on," said the heavy browed man, trying to rescue the social niceties.
"Tell me about it," I said (in what I hoped was nice, slick modernspeak).
"There was some old wan going on and on about it, in the papers and on the radio," he said.
"That was me," I said apologetically.
As my scooter turned a corner and headed forward down the long corridor ahead I could hear his voice.
"Listen. I'm sorry, I didn't mean an old wan, it's an expression . . I'm sorry."
AT Bristol Airport the girl stood waiting for her parents to come back from their skiing holiday. They had spent Christmas in Austria, first time away from home. They thought their car was in the car park. It wasn't. That's why their daughter had come to met them.
The girl and her boyfriend had a duplicate key, they had taken the car out over Christmas and... you know. Well, it would have to happen, wouldn't it? Not a total write off, but as near as made no difference.
She had to tell them. Oh God, what a thing to tell them. No, she had thought it better not to have the boyfriend there with her, he'd only start defending it or something.
They were wearing woolly hats and waving with delight at being met, the apres ski parents. Before I managed to speed myself and the trolley of luggage out of their lives I just heard her beginning: "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, honestly..."
THE snow swirled down in Glastonbury. Groups of people ran into the nice comfortable inn where I was already installed. The place had huge refectory tables and things like pews rather than little bar stools, and there was a big fire. It wasn't at all the kind of place you'd leave to go and explore the Abbey, or the many shops selling alternative lifestyles.
Only the seriously deranged would have climbed Glastonbury Tor.
The group by the window were Very Glastonbury indeed. Expensive knee boots with diagrams of the sun and moon on them, soft fringed jackets. Serious ear piercing, and a lot of heavy healing crystals worn around the neck.
They were probably smoking ordinary cigarettes, but they looked as if they were inhaling to their toes some interesting plant which they had grown and tended lovingly in the commune.
They were relaxed, happy people who looked out at the snow through the heavy Dickensian windows as if they had never seen it before.
"Man," one of them said. The others nodded as if too awed to speak, inhaled and drank their half pints of Body, the local Boddington beer.
A very flustered couple, most definitely nonGlastonbury, came in, startled by the sudden snow, confused as to where to sit, bewildered by their own parcels. The husband seemed defeated by it but the kindly group at the window moved up to make room for them.
Darling," the wife shouted. "Darling, over here!"
It was not a Darling sort of place - it was more a Man sort of place, but that was fine. There wasn't a speech code any more than a dress code. She was allowed to call him what she wanted.
"Darling, do look - this kind lady has moved up to make place for us," she twittered as the man with the long silky hair and the boots with the signs of the zodiac shifted down the pew.
You're welcome," he said in a voice which was somewhere in the register of a Paul Robeson. Her face went white at her gaffe. Oh I am sorry," she said at least 20 times. "I'm most frightfully sorry, I don't know why I thought you were. . . er. . . I don't know why I made that mistake."