Looking forward to the summer holidays, are we? writes Godfrey Fitzsimons
To the joys of struggling to the airport and then discovering the heart-warming cost of the long-term car park? To the milling throngs in a terminal bursting at the seams? Those hour-long queues at the check-in desks? The tailbacks at the security control (shoes off, please)? To the sure knowledge that, whenever it is called - even if it's called early - your flight will leave half-an-hour late, and lose more minutes on the way?
Looking forward, are we, to sitting in a metal tube for several hours, with thrombosis making eyes at our deep veins? Trying not to think of how we're adding our tuppenceworth to the pollution of the planet? Enjoy in good health. Me, now that I'm about to cease being a human resource, I've got nothing but time. You've heard of the Slow Food Movement? Meet the Slow Travel Movement, membership one. From now on I'm sticking to the surface of the Earth. Mauritius? Mexico? Melbourne? Pfui, henceforth Europe's a big enough playground for me.
I want to relive the excitement and anticipation of the travels of my adolescent nonage. I remember, all those years ago, being first off the boat at Boulogne and on continental soil for the first time. Round the corner of the dock building, and a man in bleus waits expectantly at the door of his bus.
Moi: Vous allez à la gare, monsieur?
Lui: Oui, monsieur. (He understood me! And called me monsieur!)
Or, on the way to Germany, out of Harwich. A fellow student on the deck with a guitar. Unlike me, he is surrounded by a gaggle of admiring females because he is covering James Taylor's cover of Carole King's You've Got A Friend.
Berthing at the Hook in the wee hours, the cranes silhouetted in the chill pre-dawn glimmer. If you were going to Germany, you had to change trains at the Dutch-German border. It was either Hengelo or Enschede, I don't remember which, but there was a restaurant on the platform.
At that time of the morning it's still shuttered, but at 7am the old waiter arrives, opens up and dons his black waistcoat with the shiny satin back. And that thought begins to germinate - and flourishes still - that waitering on the Continent is an honoured craft. None of the "Are youse gettin'?" from back home.
And then there comes that first taste of Abroad, something not savoured since the previous summer. Croissants! No such thing in Ireland then. Real coffee, hot, black and sweet! You could get that at home, but mostly in a restaurant far beyond a student budget. In college rooms, it was brown powder, white sugar and Hughes Brothers milk blended before the boiling water was applied to the, probably chipped, mug.
Again, I remember sitting companionably through the watches of the night with a handful of lost souls in a hut on the dark, deserted quayside at Dieppe. There had been a strike on the cross-channel ferries, which had just been settled. And the ship had to leave us there and cross to Newhaven first, before returning to take us aboard. The title of Marcel Carné's film Quai des Brumes kept coming to mind and seemed to fit the mood.
Once, by train and ferry from Berlin to Copenhagen, through the German Democratic Republic (RIP). Soviet-built tanks on flatbeds in a siding. A fat, uniformed female strutting with totalitarian self-importance on the platform at Rostock (Stasi informer, bound to be).
Grenzpolizei probing for would-be escapers clinging below the carriages or hiding in the roof-spaces. Unsmilingly ordering us from our cosy train berths in stocking feet to the vehicle deck to line up to have our travel documents inspected and handed back with ill grace. No doubt disappointed that they couldn't send us to the "Yellow Misery" prison at Bautzen.
Another day, another year, aboard the MV El-Djazair ("Algiers" in Arabic), the rust-pocked pride of the Compagnie Nationale Algérienne de Navigation fleet, we approached the white port from the Med, the sun-dazzled walls of the medina tiered above the waterfront.
Then, a couple of hours later, the Kafkaesque experience of getting through Houari Boumedienne airport for a flight to Casablanca. Credit cards are anathema. A desk clerk has to borrow my pen to make out the ticket. A gun-toting goon at the security desk keeps firing impertinent questions ("Why did you not fly direct from Marseilles to Casablanca?") A frantic dash across the tarmac as the Saudia jumbo, laying over from Jeddah, hisses impatiently for take-off.
I should have taken up the Algiers taxi-driver's offer to drive me all the way to Casablanca, "across the Rim of Africa", as the Bogart movie has it.
Sticking, like I said, to the surface of the Earth.