I had a catch-up with one of my friends on Sunday. We met for a long, lazy 2.5-hour conversation about stuff that we work together on (outside of work), health, looking after ourselves, various other things.
We had a long discussion about emotional attachment to food and how, when the going gets tough, we turn to the fridge, chocolate, or the biscuit cupboard. We have a moment where that makes us feel better, and then another moment where it makes us feel worse.
For whatever reason, whether it's due to my genetics, upbringing, or inherent lack of willpower (which I don't exhibit in other areas of my life), this has affected me forever. And so I have what my brother called in his best man speech at my wedding, ‘a fluctuating weight problem’.
And so, I was travelling to Switzerland on Sunday evening. The last few weeks have been absolutely crazy mental. In fact, let's be clear, this year has been absolutely crazy mental, and so while from a distance, I really look forward to a trip to Switzerland, which is lovely with wonderful people in a fabulous place, the actual trip itself is fraught with difficulty and danger.
On my calendar, I decided I was going to go to the gym at the hotel in Basel on Monday morning, but in truth, that's never going to happen because, first of all, I have to get a flight from Birmingham Airport.
So I travelled there by car, parked up. It's all pretty simple. Go through priority security. It's almost simple, but not quite, because whatever Birmingham does, they managed to f*ck up anything that should be straightforward. I go through the priority security lane, only to get to the metal detectors and find out there's nobody there for priority security, so I have to be herded like cattle into the group of people who are not priority and try to find my way through people who are p*ss*d off because I've just joined the queue. This then leads me to the duty-free area, and on this occasion, I'm buying some duty-free as a gift. I hardly ever do that.
The duty-free is designed to extract as much money out of you as is possible for the least amount of value. I just want an ok bottle of whiskey for someone, not a £150 bottle of whiskey that tells me that it's got a 30% discount. This is not a place to not spend money.
I also have to go to the chemist because I've forgotten my toothpaste, and then spend £2 on a tube of toothpaste that I can pick up for free at my practice because I've forgotten - ridiculous.
It's impossible to go into the shops at Birmingham Airport and spend less than £10, and I know I sound like a miser, but it's annoying how ridiculous it is.
And so, because I'm tired, I'm travelling, and I'm going to miss my family, or for whatever other reason, I buy a £5 bar of Tony's chocolate to have in my bag.
Then I walk out and realise that what I do next is go to the toilet, but I've kind of got a sense of dread of going to the toilet at Birmingham Airport because they are generally so terrible. To confirm my fears, I get there, and there's toilet roll all over the floor and everywhere, and they stink of p*ss. There is a screen that says rate the toilets and how clean they are. There isn't a star low enough to rate these toilets; they're awful.
When you factor that in against the fact that pretty much everything in Birmingham Airport now sells food and the worst type of food, apart from one shop selling electrical gadgets for too much money, and a few books in the corner of another shop, you realise why we're all f*ck*d.
I have an emotional attachment to food, and everywhere I go, they're trying to peddle me stuff to feed my emotional attachment or my addiction.
You would have thought that all of this rent squeezed into such a small place would allow Birmingham airport to invest a little bit into improving the toilets, exactly like the ones they have at Zurich Airport, when I arrived there 2 hours later. But in the United Kingdom now, we don't. Nice toilets are luxury, a rarity, even though the toilet kind of defines the organisation that looks after it.
Travelling in the UK now is like scraping the bottom of the barrel after lots of other people have scraped it.
Why did we get it so wrong?
Why did we move to a situation where all that's important is that we consume the maximum amount of the worst possible thing in the worst possible facilities?
Mmmmm, maybe the travel shine is wearing off.
Maybe I'm better off just going to my own toilet.
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