UK, September 2024
pwall.net – UK, September 2024
False Start
My flight was originally scheduled for a Sunday afternoon in August, and as usual, 24 hours before departure time I received a message on my phone from Qantas inviting me to check in. This I did, and then went back to preparing for the trip, but as the evening wore on I began to feel unwell.
At first I thought it was a stomach upset, but it didn’t respond to antacids or painkillers, and got rapidly worse over the next hour or two. I started to suspect appendicitis (the pain was on the right side of the abdomen) or kidney stones, but never having experienced either previously, I had no way of knowing. Either way, it seemed like I needed to get to hospital.
Fortunately, I live close to a major hospital, and also fortunately, a friend was able to drive me there at short notice (the ambulance service was quoting a wait time of two hours or more). Lots of morphine and a CT scan later, I was told I had a kidney stone, and admitted overnight. The scan showed that the stone was about 95% of the way down the ureter (the tube from the kidney to the bladder), so there was a good chance it would complete the journey of its own accord.
I was feeling a lot better by mid-afternoon the next day, and on the assumption that that is what had happened – the stone had reached the bladder – I was discharged. I had already rung Qantas to cancel my check-in, and on the doctors’ advice that I should be OK to fly in a few days, I rescheduled the flight for Wednesday of the same week.
And just as before, I got a phone invitation to check in 24 hours before departure time, which I did, and went to bed thinking this time everything would be fine. But I was woken in the middle of the night by a now-familiar pain, and this time I didn’t waste time – I got myself straight to the hospital.
Another CT scan, and the stone was exactly where it had been previously. Why the pain had gone away for a while was a mystery, but now it was back with a vengeance. I was admitted to hospital again, and this time, rather than merely postponing the flight, I cancelled it altogether. Qantas gave me a full flight credit to use later, but I didn’t know at that stage when I would be able to use it.
Kidney stone, August 2024
The stone eventually came through on the Saturday evening – exactly seven days after it had first made its presence known.
The only good aspect to all this – imagine what it would have been like if the first symptoms had started 24 hours later. I would have been in mid-flight, and the plane crew would be deciding whether to make an emergency landing somewhere in north-west Australia, or to carry on to Singapore and send me to hospital there.
Second Attempt
I generally schedule my trips to England for August – some of my relatives there are young children, and it’s easier to organise time with them when they’re not in school. And I often arrange to meet a group of friends from my time in New York – we decide ahead of time on a city or country we’d all like to visit, they fly in from America and I make a side-trip from my trip to England to meet them there. This time we were going to meet in Marseille and visit a couple of other locations in the south of France, but when I cancelled my original flights I had to cancel this part of my vacation as well. (And whilst I had got a full flight credit from Qantas for my flights to and from London, I got nothing from British Airways for the cancelled flights between England and France. I’ll remember that.)
So now, in a break with tradition, I booked flights to England (and only England) in September. I didn't want to leave it any later in the year because of the colder weather (and the lack of sunlight), and in any case, I needed to get a certain number of flight credits with Qantas before the end of September to renew my frequent flyer status. And, having checked in online for the third time, I was relieved to find that this flight went off without a hitch.
Family and Friends
But now, another problem arose. A number of the family and friends I had planned to meet had COVID-19, or had been in close contact with someone who had the virus. That meant that much of my schedule had to be re-worked at short notice, pushing some visits to later in my stay and bringing others forward.
I did eventually get to enjoy time with most (but not quite all) of the people I had planned to see, but I have mentioned elsewhere that for privacy reasons I will no longer be putting personal details or photos on publicly accessible web pages.
Please get in touch with me privately for copies of photos taken during these visits.
The Lake District
I stayed mostly in the North-East, to be close to my friends and relatives there, but at one point I rented a car and drove over to the Lake District. I was surprised to find how much I enjoyed the journey – the weather was fine and the roads were mostly clear, and even though the route was entirely familiar to me I enjoyed the sightseeing. Perhaps the North American trip from earlier in the year had given me a taste for long drives.
Wastwater
My favourite sightseeing spot in the Lake District (and therefore in the entire country) is Wastwater. Maybe it’s the fact that there are few trees to obscure the view, and even fewer signs of civilisation.
The difficult road access means it gets relatively few visitors, but when I parked my rental car to take these photos, I was staggered to find that parked right alongside me was my niece from Manchester, around 150km away. I had seen her just a couple of days previously, but neither of us had told each other that we were planning to go to Wastwater, or even to the Lake District. She obviously has the same affection for the location as me, so if she was anywhere in the vicinity she would be likely to go to that spot, but it still seemed a bizarre coincidence.
The above photo was taken in the early evening, with the sun lighting up the screes on the opposite side of the lake at a particular angle, and it occurred to me that almost all my photos of Wastwater were from this time of day. I resolved to go back the following morning to see what the same scene looked like in different light.
Wastwater in morning light
The difference was astonishing. The screes to the right were almost completely in shadow, but the peaks at the head of the lake created reflections like I had never seen before.
Wastwater in morning light
I must go back more often at different times of day (but I do still like that evening light on the screes).
Leeds
I like to take my nieces and nephews for individual days out, and I took one nephew for a trip to Leeds. I had visited the city briefly on a previous trip to England, and I thought it seemed worth a follow-up visit.
Corn Exchange, Leeds
This is the Corn Exchange – clearly this was once a very wealthy city, to be able to commission a very beautiful oval-shaped building for the trading of commodities like grain.
Interior of Corn Exchange, Leeds
It has been preserved as a set of of shops and cafés. It didn’t appear to be flourishing in its current incarnation, but then again, not much in the UK did.
Coventry
I spent the last few days of my trip staying with friends in Birmingham, and we paid a visit to the nearby town of Coventry.
The old Coventry Cathedral was largely destroyed in a bombing raid in World War II, with only the spire and some exterior walls left standing, and what remains of that building have been preserved alongside its replacement, an entirely new modern cathedral.
Coventry Cathedral
The new cathedral includes a modern take on stained glass.
Stained glass at Coventry Cathedral
And a tapestry by Graham Sutherland.
Tapestry at Coventry Cathedral
The Journey Home
Strap yourself in; we’re in for a bumpy ride.
I mentioned above that I was staying in Birmingham for the last few days of the trip. This was a deliberate choice – the flight home was to leave from London Heathrow, and of all the places I was planning to visit, Birmingham was closest to London. I planned the journey from Birmingham to London carefully, adding several hours to allow for possible delays, and I arrived at Birmingham New Street station shortly after 3 pm, thinking that would give me plenty of time to get to London to catch my flight.
The first problem was immediately apparent when I looked at the departures board. Flashing signs said that all services into London Euston were delayed or cancelled due to an incident involving a fatality on the line north of Watford – this must have only just happened because there were no issues mentioned on the National Rail website when I checked about half an hour earlier. OK, this was a problem, but I had a Plan B. There are two routes from Birmingham to London, and I quickly found a train on the other line which would get me there in time.
The other train left from a different station. Moor St station is about 300 metres from New St, and the rain had been getting steadily worse for the previous few hours. I was carrying all my luggage for the journey home, and I had no free hand to hold an umbrella. I dashed through the rain to Moor St Station, found the train, found a seat and watched the train fill up with others who had apparently had the same idea.
And then … nothing. After waiting past the scheduled departure time, an announcement came over the train PA – the train would not be moving because of flooding on the line ahead. The railway staff could offer no information on when – or whether – the train would leave.
OK, I had planned a second option, but I didn’t think I would need a third. I checked online, and read that some train services were starting to operate on the main line. I sprinted back to New St station, through the still pouring rain, and found that there was a train arriving shortly that would – just – get me to London in time. And sure enough, a couple of minutes later than promised, that train arrived, I got on, and we started moving.
British trains are fast (by Australian standards) – over 200 km/h. As we headed south I could start to believe that I was going to get to London in time for my flight. I would need everything to go right from here, but I could just make it. And then the train stopped.
After a short while an announcement came over the PA – due to the earlier problems, all of the platforms at Euston station were currently occupied. We would have to wait until a platform became free, and that delay ended up being 25 minutes.
I carried on, sprinting across London to the Heathrow Express, but I knew by this stage that barring a miracle, I had missed the flight. And a miracle wasn't forthcoming. I arrived at the check-in counter to be told that it had closed 15 minutes earlier – there weren’t even any Qantas staff to be seen. I got someone from another airline to ring the gate, but I was told no, there was no possibility of getting on that flight. I would have to ring the Qantas reservation service to re-book on another flight.
Qantas staff are almost always very pleasant and helpful to deal with face-to-face. On the phone, not so much. I spent about an hour on the phone getting nowhere, but then I realised I needed to focus on another problem. It was now late on a Thursday evening and I had nowhere to stay for the night.
I checked the cheap hotel chains, but they had no vacancies. I tried booking.com, and it was showing nothing under £300, except for a strange listing for a room at an unbelievably low £58 a night. This ended up being a long story (for another time), but it did provide me with a clean bed, a clean shower and good wi-fi to plan my next move.
Qantas have two flights a day from London – the evening flight to Sydney via Singapore that I had been booked on, and a morning flight direct to Perth. I figured that if I showed up very early for the morning flight the next day, I could talk to someone face-to-face and I would be more likely to get real assistance. And I was right – the person I spoke to the next morning was wonderfully helpful. He booked me on the Perth flight (initially on standby), and on a connecting flight from Perth to Sydney. It wasn’t the lie-flat bed I had originally booked, but at least I’d be home.
Afterwards
I always tell people I’ll let them know when I get home, and I’m usually a bit slow in doing so, but this time was different. I found the whole experience so stressful – the physical stress of dashing around with a lot of heavy luggage, as well as the mental stress of trying to decide the best course of action in an apparently hopeless situation – that I just couldn’t face the thought of explaining what had happened. And I certainly did’t want to have to repeat it to each person individually, which is in large part why I’m setting it all out here.
Yes, I know there are worse things in this world than missing a flight, even when taking into account the financial and other effects that flow from that, and for everyone involved in the fatality that triggered this entire chain of events my concerns must seem trivial, but I found this whole episode to be particularly stress-inducing. Even telling the story here, after several months, has been difficult.
So I couldn’t contact people in England to tell them I was home, and I couldn’t explain to people here about my trip, because that would mean re-living the whole unpleasant experience.
If you were expecting to hear from me, I’m sorry. I hope you understand.