.. I forgot about the seven hours or so in Minneapolis Airport on the way back.

In Minneapolis Airport, on the balcony which is reserved for quietness [and quietness can indeed be achieved, apart from the fact that it's open to the main concourse, so the sounds of people and piped music make their way up quite easily] there are deep, wide, armchair-like leather seats, which, if placed facing each other, can be made into a little boat-shaped nest to sleep in. I did this for quite a long time, alternating between sleeping and reading a book, with occasional breaks to wander about and buy more food to relieve the monotony of Still Being In an Airport.

In the middle of bout of book-reading, I saw, out of the edge of my eye, what I perceived to be a very fast moving small brown thing come flying out of the adjacent corridor along the ground, and disappear under my seat. I jumped up to see what it was, partly due to the notion that I might be so tired that I was now hallucinating, and wanted to prove to myself that there really was a Brown Thing. I couldn’t find it, but a man several metres away looked over at me scrabbling frantically and said, ‘I saw it too – a little mouse. It’s gone under my seat.’

So a) I wasn’t hallucinating, and b) it wasn’t a bomb or anything – just a mouse. Good. Settled back down, but we observed the same mouse (well, either that or one that looked very much like it, anyway – don’t know how many lived there and whether they had some sort of relay system in place) descend from a hole in the seat of the man’s chair and run backwards and forwards between chair and corridor several more times. It must have been the official Airport Mouse – seemed quite well-established, anyway.

I can’t remember much else, apart from that we ate Mexican food, and one of the airport shops was full of merchandise covered in Uplifting Slogans™, which made me feel quite miserable.

Anyway, that’s the end of my writing about the trip [except for passing references that will possibly occur in future], because it was several months ago now and I’m starting to feel my age.

Normal complaining will be resumed in due course.

In time-zone limbo, time-related eating and drinking conventions can be abandoned; so while I was obtaining my gin and tonic, Tom went to get a cup of coffee, and a man at the next table to me ordered a quite delicious-looking Greek salad. I think we were there for three hours, at least. Every half hour, there was a time announcement over the tannoy, which I originally misheard and found somewhat overly amusing: ‘The time is now 7.30. The end.’ This led to me childishly giggling at this assumed absurdity every half hour, before realising it was actually ‘The time is now 7.30 PM’ which makes a lot more sense and is not funny at all.

I decided that in order to combat travel-induced feelings of awfulness, I was going to eat as much as possible, just to be on the safe side. After lying down for a rest on a nice, quiet, deserted upstairs balcony for a while [the sort of place I'd seek out as a teenager during youth orchestra concert trips between rehearsals, in order to a) read a book on my own because I didn't know anyone, b) avoid being seen reading a book on my own and thus advertising my loner-like status and c) inadvertently perpetuate the need to do this by avoiding any social interaction with other orchestra members which might eventually lead to knowing people in the orchestra] we went to a Chinese canteen place. I obtained and consumed a large vat of noodle soup [and Tom got more coffee] while the sun set, very redly, and my body clock screamed at me a little bit.

Flight no. 2 was shorter – Minneapolis to Portland – but had the concentrated annoyance factor of the seat in front of me being occupied by a five-year-old girl whose idea of an amusing game [she wasn't upset or scared, merely excitable] was to scream in that loud, shrill, Hollywood-small-child-being-nearly-eaten-by-dinosaurs kind of way, despite her Responsible Adult repeatedly and emphatically telling her not to do it. Fortunately she did stop after about ten minutes after we’d got on the plane, and while we still on the ground. If she hadn’t, I was considering breaking the Telling Other People’s Children Off taboo, which is quite a terrifying thought [although it does seem to scare children more to be told off by strangers than familiar admonishers, so is usually effective..]. To be honest, I can’t work out which would’ve been worse: putting up with the child screaming all the way, or putting up with the anxious uncomfortableness of having overridden another adult’s authority by telling off their child and then knowing they were seething at me for being an interfering cow for the rest of the journey. So it’s really quite convenient that neither happened.

I think we got orange juice on this one. Did we get Pretzels? I don’t remember. The orange juice on US airlines is really very nice though. My memory of the whole journey, and the journey back, is punctuated by brilliant orange-juice-receiving-moments.