(or: 36 hours in the middle east)

• When the cab picked me up from home at 5am, he (naturally) was a customer of my company, and wanted to ask technical questions about his setup. I, with little sleep and no caffiene in my system, did my best.
• Thank goodness for colleagues who can play scrabble (and have a travel set)
• Got upgraded on the flight out. A rarity with BA, but much appreciated.
• Due to having two copies of the Guardian, we had a crossword competition, but both ended up stuck on the same 2 clues. A friendly flight attendant asked what we were stuck on, and then took the paper to check with his colleagues. When he returned, we were glad to hear that the captain and the first officer had managed to get 5 down for us, but were equally stumped by 9 across.
• Watched CONfidence, which CONtrary to the review in the in-flight magazine was CONsiderably CONtrived and CONfusing, and CONtained a lot of stilted and overacted CONversations and CONceptual tricks which couldn’t CONceal the poor acting of Rachel Weisz, all of which CONtributed to my CONfessed CONclusion that the film had been hastily CONfigured and CONcocted and must have been green-lit by a studio exec suffering from CONcussion. Chris CONcurred.
• Despite everyone warning us that Ben Guiron airport was subject to multiple delays, it took us an incredible and surely record-breaking 13 minutes to go from the door of the plane to the door of the cab, including passport control, luggage collection and customs. Astoundingly quick.
• You know how before I went I said it was going to be 31°C? Hah! More like 39°C, and bloody humid with it. My hair went mad. It was like trying to inhale a hot wet towel.
• I am wildly impressed with anyone who can read Hebrew (or arabic for that matter). It felt very weird to be in a place where I couldn’t understand anything on the radio (beyond recognising the plural suffix -im, and picking out the words Rosh Hashanah every now and again, as people referred to the events this coming weekend), or even read (as with Greek) the names of places.
• The hotel we were staying at had a sign that said something like “A reputation for luxury. Unchanged for fifty years.” Unfortunately, they didn’t mean the reputation - they were referring to the decor (especially in the lobby), which can only be described as “early seventies international jetset gloom”
• Still, we got upgraded rooms in the hotel, too, so I had a view over the beach.
• Ooh! Beach! After check-in, I went for a very long walk along the beach, towards Jaffa. I read my book, paddled in the sea, took photos and got a chunk of glass embedded in my sole. Hmm. And then, after I dug it out, I watched the sunset. Gorgeous.
• My travelling companion had a choking fit and nearly died while we had a drink in the bar. When I went to get help, there was *no-one* to be found. No-one. At all. Anywhere. Bizarre. He’s OK, though.
• Later on, we went out for a quick bite to eat while we prepped for the meeting the next day, and picked a random restaurant/diner on the seafront for a light snack. The name sounded vaguely familiar for some reason. We later discovered that we’d heard of it previously, in the news, as the location of a suicide bomb attack a couple of years ago. Erk.
• Still, the uniformed teenagers with spots and automatic weapons made us feel much safer. Not.
• On the way home, Ben Guiron airport suddenly lived up to its reputation. We were taken aside, split up, and questioned by security profilers for 50 minutes solidly before we could even check in for the flight. The questions were ceaseless, invasive, direct, worded in a way to make you feel defensive and at times bordered on industrial espionage and deeply psychologically probing. Most unsettling experience, and sadly one which kind of put me off returning to Israel in a hurry.
• Unfeasibly, we managed to get upgraded again, possibly because we were flying out with the same crew we’d seen the day before on the way in. Thank you BA.
• Watched Mission Impossible: 3, in which Tom Cruise was acted off the screen by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Then watched the first 5 and the last 5 minutes of hideous Demi Moore vehicle Half Light. The middle was emintently skippable, apparently, as I managed to pick up the full context from those two bits.
• When I got in the cab at heathrow, the driver had a benny at me for telling the dispatcher that I wanted to go to Mortlake. he asked me to tell the dispatcher that I’d changed my mind and wanted to go to Brentford instead. Tired and headachey, I did as he asked, when he dragged the dispatch bloke back to the window of the cab. but when the latter asked me if I was going to carry on to Mortlake after that, I took the mad background winking of the cabbie to mean “yes”, so I said “Yes, I’ll be going on to Mortlake”. This was, apparently, the WRONG thing to say, and the cabbie then proceeded to whinge endlessly about it the entire journey back, telling me how I’d cost him an extra four quid in parking at the airport and he’d have to get back in line and that could take hours. He went on to explain that the whole system was a rip-off, and that he’d asked me to say Brentford instead, because that way it counted as a local journey and he’d be able to go straight back to the front of the queue, only he had to make sure the dispatcher wrote down Brentford, because his job was to stop people cheating. LIKE YOU, I thought. Though naturally, I didn’t say anything like it. I just said I was happy to have got a cab at all, and I’d had a long journey, and I wanted to go to Mortlake because THAT’S WHERE I LIVE, FFS, rather than getting caught up in some elaborate ruse about locations and distances and regulations and the like. Should care, didn’t care last night. For future reference: tell the cab dispatcher Brentford, then tell the cab driver wherever you really want to go: he’ll thank you for it, apparently. Even though it’s CHEATING.

That’s it for the moment. The suitcase won’t stay unpacked for too long, though: I’m off to the US again on Sunday….