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Featuring : Nick the hapless protagonist, Nigel the hapless sidekick, a SEAT Ibiza, the Isle of Skye, bucket loads of bad luck and lashings of Scottish weather.

Skye - A comedy in three parts

Nickjenkins
2003-11-20 14:52:47

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Featuring : Nick the hapless protagonist, Nigel the hapless sidekick, a SEAT Ibiza, the Isle of Skye, bucket loads of bad luck and lashings of Scottish weather.

I am no longer a atheist ! I had the kind of weekend which makes me believe God exists, he knows where I live and he hates me. I have proof too.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Take the last long weekend in May and fly up to Skye to do some climbing in the much vaunted Cuilin hills. Good plan so far. The execution left a little to be desired however.

We flew out of Stanstead at 8.30am on Saturday morning, or we were supposed to. Stanstead is about an hour-and-a-half from my place in Stockwell by various forms of tube and train. At least it's supposed to be an hour-and-a-half but if you miss a tube by a minute, have to wait ten minutes for the next tube and then half an hour for a train it turns out to be more like two hours and fifteen minutes. This meant that we missed the plane by about ten minutes.

Resigning ourselves to the inevitable we put ourselves on standby for the next flight and got a message out to the people we were to meet in Glasgow. We hung around the airport for some two hours and at around 11.30am we boarded our new flight.

Settling back in our seats we looked forward to the short flight up to Glasgow and a days climbing in the peaks of Skye. It was not to be. After a brief pause the captain came on the intercom and announced in dulcet tones that there was a "small technical problem" and that we would be delayed by about 25 minutes. It appeared that one of the tires on our trusty plane was a bit flat and they had decided to change it. Fair enough, I thought, twenty-five minutes isn't so bad.

Twenty-five minutes later the captain again came on the intercom and announced that the maintenance crew had in fact elected to change the other ...