Why at a Ryanair check-in is there always somebody weeping? In this case, at Girona airport in Catalonia last week, she was a respectable, grandma-aged German lady in a white cotton-and-lace blouse. She was standing by the counter where you have to pay extra (only cash accepted) if you didn’t tick the right box for a checked-in suitcase when completing your online ticket purchase; or buy another flight at maximum price if you turned up one minute late for the flight you were supposed to be on.
I was in the first category: I had hold luggage, and was stung for E20 extra, which was bearable. Whatever the weeping lady had been stung for, however, was not. She was sobbing uncontrollably while other passengers (including me) shuffled past, helpless and embarrassed.
The Spanish Ryanair staff looked mortified. British or French minor functionaries positively enjoy being insolent by proxy in the service of a higher command, but it is not in the Spanish temperament to cold-shoulder a weeping old lady who might be your mother, unless you are slaughtering her in a civil war. The lady in question appeared to speak only German and nobody else (including me) was able to. It did briefly strike me that Michael O’Leary, the Ryanair boss who cultivates and burnishes his airline’s reputation for a thrilling disregard of customers’ feelings, may actually be hiring actors to stand weeping by his check-ins all across Europe, pour encourager les autres, and to give passengers the appropriate sense of subordination before a heartless corporate structure.
I left the scene with the guilty feeling that there must have been something I could have done, but with no idea what. My suitcase checked in, I joined my flight.
Which was full, and tolerable, and arrived ahead of schedule at Gatwick. But the baggage stuck to the schedule, and we had a long wait by carousel number 2. I placed myself (as always) by those mysterious curtains, like some ghastly rubber vulva, from which the moving tread emerges. From here I could see arriving luggage first, and survey the whole trajectory of the carousel, lined with expectant passengers, eagle-eyed and ready to swoop.
A good fiction writer could pen a whole short story about an airport baggage carousel. I had reality alone to observe. The reality became wholly absorbing.
As bags and suitcases came bobbing through the curtains, I tried guessing which of the passengers they were bound for. A pink suitcase in shiny plastic decorated with butterflies slid by, and a little girl, part of a family waiting some way down the carousel, pulled it off, with her brother’s help. Moments later a blue suitcase in shiny plastic, decorated with brightly painted sports cars, emerged. I made my guess. I was right: the brother’s. It took some time for a much bigger suitcase, in shiny plastic, decorated with fantasy aeroplanes, to appear. Right again. The family made off happily towards the wrong customs channel, Nothing to Declare (they should have chosen Arrivals from the European Union) — but it didn’t matter: I later discovered that these two merge into a single channel.
The fellow standing just a few paces further along the carousel was covered in tattoos. Cobwebs went up his arms, there were spiders round his neck, and his shorts revealed barbed wire around his knees, calves festooned with bats, a scorpion on one ankle and a small snake on the other. ‘Dad!’ came a shout, and I looked over. An exceptionally clean-cut youth with bare milky limbs and a neck and shoulders entirely devoid of etchings was trying to attract his tattooed dad’s attention. The young of today so often rebel against the older generation.
My attention switched back to the carousel as a ladybird came out from the rubber curtains. Or at first I thought so: a giant ladybird, about three feet across. In fact it was a suitcase designed to look like a ladybird, red, with big black spots, complete with false wings. A middle-aged lady not far from me reached at once towards it in apparent recognition and pulled it to the side, where she inspected it, as we have all done when we’re not quite sure if a suitcase is ours. She decided it wasn’t, and put it back on the carousel. No other ladybird-style, or indeed insect-style suitcase emerged after that, and after a while the lady identified her own suitcase, which was indeed reddish, but in other respects bore no resemblance to a ladybird at all.
Then a shock. The first sign was just a chilling indication, like the finding on the beach of a child’s water-wings. Drifting forlornly around the carousel came a single, detached suitcase-handle. It was greeted by worried frowns from passengers, and a buzz of conversation.
Minutes later, a wheel, wrenched from its socket. Then the socket. What awful mishap on the luggage trolley could have caused this? It looked for all the world as if an airport ground-staff operative, crazed by the August heat, perhaps, or driven beyond endurance by some tragedy in his personal life, had flipped, and taken it out on an item of luggage.
There was still no way of linking these body-parts to any known carcass. The arrival some time after this of the whole handle-mechanism — telescoping steel poles and all — was met with shudders, as passengers tried to guess from its look whether it might formerly have been attached to their own wheelie-suitcase. One was put in mind of earthquake victims’ families waiting anxiously by the rubble as bits and pieces of their acquaintances are borne past them, studying each new scarf, or foot, or limb with fearful intensity, hoping not to recognise what or whom it had been part of.
But my own bag came through. I left, before the carcass arrived, passing, en route to the EU Customs Channel, a range of desks, one of them beneath a sign: Airport Baggage Solutions. In my mind I designed a Spectator cartoon, and debated whether we would risk publishing it. In my cartoon a row of desks — Airport Baggage Solutions, In-flight Catering Solutions, Transcontinental Pet-transfer Solutions, etc, included another desk, staffed by a small clerk with a Hitler moustache: Final Solutions.
On balance, no: not, I think, for this magazine. Private Eye might risk it, though.
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