Well, hellooo!

It’s me! I’m still here - I haven’t dropped off the planet, been abducted by aliens or disappeared up my own arse (yet).

Over the past two or three months I’ve had quite a few people  a couple of people  one person ask why I’m not keeping my blog updated. A simple answer is that I couldn’t be arsed and I’d fallen out of love with it. Another answer would be that I’ve been busy. So perhaps an abbreviated round up of what’s been occurring over the last few months is in order.

January

Eldest Daughter and Twinkle arrived from Australia for a month long visit. Gorgeous – both of them!

February

I travelled to the Armpit of Britain and stayed for three weeks in a rabbit hutch sized hotel room at night, while during the day I was being retrained in how to be a trolley dolly (touch the trolley… touch the galley… look busy…). At the end of the month I got my wings (actually it’s wing – cabin crew get one wing, pilots get a full set, pfft) and was officially allowed to be let loose on passengers once again.

March

I was temporarily based at Stansted Airport, which is where I used to work from before I left, so it was nice to catch up with some familiar faces (and try to avoid one or two unwelcome familiar faces).

I said a fond, but very sad farewell to my 4.4L V8 Beastie. It was time to let it go as it was so expensive to run and needed a lot of work doing to it – it got to the point where I was worried it was going to break down every time I drove it anywhere.

I must admit to snivelling quite a bit (and apologising out loud to it for getting rid of it – got a couple of strange looks) when I walked away from it at the car dealership. However, I then said, “Well, hellooo!” to its replacement - a much smaller, brand spanking new 1.4L car. Its official colour name is Panther Black, so I’ve christened it the Baby Panther.

April

The new base opened very local to where I live, which means I now have a fifteen minute journey to work, as opposed to an hour’s drive to Stansted – hurrah! However, I have to say I’ve noticed a big difference in the types of passenger we carry. I’m convinced there’s a massive pile of rocks somewhere that some of our passengers crawl out from under to travel on our aircraft. Oh wait – that pile of rocks could well be called Pitsea. Or Basildon. *shudder*

(While securing the cabin for landing one day after a challenging couple of hours in the air, a female passenger who was ‘slightly’ the worse for wear, stood up, removed her bra and flung it at one of her many fellow travelling companions.

Classy.

As we walked past, we retrieved it, politely asked her to sit back down and fasten her seat belt, gave the bra back and said, “We think you might be needing this.” During disembarking (“Thank yooo, buh-bye now!”), we noticed she’d put the bra back on over the top of her dress.

Delightful.)

I can also thank the French for taking my mind off the third anniversary of Significant Other’s death. More precisely, I can thank French Air Traffic Control for striking on that day and causing havoc across the network. Delays and disgruntled passengers all over the place. “Blame the French,” was heard quite often during our particular three hour delay in Barcelona.

May

May saw Twinkle’s first birthday – one already – how time flies! At the end of the month, both Eldest Daughter and Twinkle arrived for a seven and a half week stay. I thought I’d manage to baby-proof the house, preventing a crawling Twinkle from inflicting any damage to herself or anything else, but no.

Whilst babysitting her, she managed to - while looking me straight in the eye – insert a spoon into the video player (and before anyone says, “Video? You still have VIDEO??” it’s a DVD/video combo thingy). Tweezers were deployed and the offending article was removed, only for her to try and do it again.

She’s my much adored granddaughter, but…

…little bugger.

June

June saw the arrival of Captain Oz.

It was also the month of Eldest Daughter’s hen night – a great night out – and I only untagged myself in two definitely dodgy oh-my-gawd-they-wouldn’t-look-out-of-place-in-a-porn-magazine photos on Facebook.

Oh, and guess what?

I wore a leopard print dress!

Bwahahahaaaa!!

Eldest Daughter, Captain Oz and Twinkle went on a pre wedding honeymoon to Italy towards the end of the month, where, four days before they were due to fly back to the UK, Twinkle erupted in chickenpox. Apart from a very spotty Twinkle (I’m sorry, but those last two words together just sound… wrong), two things emerged:

1) They weren’t allowed to fly back due to Twinkle still being infectious, so they had to get a train from Venice to Paris, then the Eurostar to the UK

2) Captain Oz had never had chicken pox

July

Eldest Daughter and Captain Oz got married at the beginning of the month. With all credit to Eldest Daughter, who had mostly organised everything from the other side of the world, the day was brilliant and a fantastic time was had by all – even though Captain Oz started breaking out in chicken pox. Seriously, you couldn’t make it up!

So, that’s a very brief rundown of what’s been occurring over the last few months. With a bit of effort on my part, I may just start blogging again.

We’ll see!